MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Fishing and South America News.

Redundancy payments

The Fishing and Maritime Council of Galicia has announced a restructuring of the fishing fleet and compensatory payments for crewmembers affected by the collapse of the fisheries agreement between Spain and Morocco. Andrés Hermida from the Council's Fisheries Structure and Markets Department said that all crewmembers who where working until December 99 are entitled to extraordinary compensation, besides the six months immobilisation payment they have been receiving. Fishermen have three options: early retirement for those over 55 years of age with a 950 Euro monthly pension; redundancy payment in a lump sum of 12,000 Euro and those who turn up with an alternative project, individual or collective, will be entitled to a starting 60,000 Euro. In related news Galicia's efforts to contribute to a Common Fisheries Poliy (CPF), for Europe, including the idea of "Individual Transferable Quotas", was not included in the final draft. The Galician proposal also included the concept of an "only flag" and an "only body of inspectors", plus a "relative stability" mechanism for a fair distribution of quotas and fishing grounds. The Individual Transferable Quotas system was considered "revolutionary and most interesting" by Europe's Fisheries Commissioner, Franz Fischler, but did not have sufficient support.

Chile's fish meal production down

Fisheries landings for the industrialization of fish meal and fish oil in Chile during 2001 reached 3,039,546 tons, a 15% drop from the previous year. However, Chile's standing was better than Peru, the world's main producer, whose landings fell 23%, and the global 2001 production, that decreased 18%. According to the Chilean press the decline can be attributed to "the ban on sardine and anchovy fishing in the central-southern region..", restrictions "..representing 500,000 tons in spite of good biomass conditions". However sources from the Chilean fisheries industry indicate that the main problem is the annual quota system, because resources are in constant movement, and the situation is far from that of a few years ago when the annual catch was seven million tons. Besides scientific reports from Fisheries Un