The Russian Fishery Company (RFC) has won a huge share of new catch quotas auctioned off on 1 July by Russia’s Federal Agency for Fisheries.
The company said in a press release it had obtained 80,000 metric tons of additional pollock and herring quota, and 1,000 metric tons of new cod and haddock quota.
Under the terms of the auction, RFC must build new fishing vessels and new processing plants in order to qualify for the additional quota. As a result, RFC will construct four fishing vessels for the Far Eastern Fishery Basin and a coastal plant in the Northern Fisheries Basin.
“The results of the auction open up opportunities for expanding the RFC investment program, which is being actively implemented today,” RFC CEO Fedor Kirsanov said. “We have already made significant progress in the construction of a series of six super trawlers, as well as two fish processing plants, quotas for which were fixed in the previous rounds of the investment quota program. Today we can confidently talk about the effectiveness of the mechanism of investment quotas, thanks to which domestic shipbuilding is being revived, the construction of onshore processing facilities is being updated, the fishing fleet that has been waiting for this for several decades is being updated.”
The quotas were introduced by the Russian government in 2016 to spur domestic investment, with the specific objective of pushing companies to upgrade their fleets and build enough processing capacities to reduce dependence on imports and produce more value-added seafood products in the country. The program reserves 20 percent of a quota for species over a 10- to 15-year period for companies that have new ships built at Russian shipyards or that build seafood processing plants domestically in Russia.
RFC participated in two earlier phases of the program, during which it committed to building six 108-meter super-trawlers equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, allowing for processing fish at sea into value-added products (primarily fillet and surimi). Those vessels, along with the newly planned ships, will be built at the Admiralty Shipyards in St. Petersburg, Russia. Each of the vessels is designed to catch and process more than 50,000 tons of fish per year, and the first of the vessels will be commissioned in 2021.
The new plant will be built in Murmansk and will have a capacity of processing 25 tons of cod and haddock per day. It will be a companion plant to the “Russian Cod” plant currently under construction in the Murmansk region, which is scheduled to be completed in September and will have a daily processing capacity of 50 MT of cod and haddock.
Photo courtesy of Russian Fishery Company
