The Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries and Russian Fishery Company (RFC) signed agreements on investments quotas allocated to the company for building new fishing vessels and an onshore plant.
The documents were signed by Ilya Shestakov, head of the Fishery Agency, and Fedor Kirsanov, CEO of RFC, during the Eastern Economic Forum held in a city of Vladivostok.
Investment quotas is an incentive mechanism introduced by Russian government in 2017 to spur national fisheries to upgrade their aging fleets and have their new ships built at Russian shipyards instead of foreign shipyards – primarily in Asian countries – which has been a widely accepted practice in the past. An additional quota is given to the company in exchange for an obligation by a fishery to order new vessels of specified parameters within specified terms.
Three application campaigns held in 2018 and 2019 have brought projects that will build more than 40 ships and more than 20 coastal factories. The new projects will effectively renovate 65 percent of the fishing capability in the Northern fishery basin and 25 to 30 percent in the Far Eastern fishery basin – two main Russian basins yielding nearly 80 percent of the national catch.
RFC has been actively involved in using this new mechanism, and is planning to construct 10 super trawlers and three processing plants under the program. The first super trawlers have been reported to be commissioned in 2021 and the first plant was put into operation at the end of August this year in the Murmansk region. Another plant is under construction in Vladivostok, the Russian Far East.
The agreement, which covers the quotas gained by RFC within the third application campaign, envisages that RFC will build four fishing vessels and a cod and haddock processing plant in cooperation with the Agama Group, as SeafoodSource previously reported. Agama Group is a major wholesale and retail player in Russia that’s going to bring its expertise into the alliance, while RFC is good at harvest and processing. The vessels will be super-trawlers needed to significantly increase company’s productivity. Each of the vessels will have the capability to catch and process more than 50,000 metric tons of fish a year.
“The mechanism of the investment quotas program has become an effective incentive for the industry development,” commented RFC’s CEO Fedor Kirsanov. “We already see the first real results. In general, the company will build the longest series of ships of this type in Russia and the industry will have at its disposal the most modern fleet in the world today. ”
NOREBO Group, another Russian major fishery, also used the Eastern Economic forum as a stage for signing their agreements on investment quotas also gained within the third application program as RFC’s. In exchange for additional quotas for herring and pollock, NOREBO will have new trawler-processors built for operating in the Sea of Okhotks and in the Sea of Bering. Totally, NOREBO will order 10 new fishing vessels under the program to be put into operation in 2022 and 2023.
Photo courtesy of Russian Fishery Company
