Impatient with the process to have the new fisheries legislation passed, environmentalists have come out against the authorities who they insist must ramp up their efforts to dispense with the existing law.
It is going on two decades since the move to have the new legislation in place was announced and more than three years since the bill was drafted.
“It is not in any way a conservation act; it is an act to promote fishing,” said Diana McCaulay, chief executive officer for the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), referencing the Fishing Industry Act of 1976, which the proposed new legislation is to repeal. “What we need is the new law; they must pass the new law [which] we have been waiting for since the mid-1990s.”
