The Executive Secretary of the Falklands Islands Fishing Companies Association FIFCA, James Bates would like to issue the following press statement.
From Tuesday 1 December 2020 the Falkland Islands Maritime Authority will sit within the Directorate of Emergency Services and Island Security (DESIS). For over 30 years the Directorate of Natural Resources (formally Fisheries) was the home of the maritime function. However, in recent years, the government has been working towards meeting both its national and international obligations, leading to the establishment of the Maritime Authority in 2018.
Britain reduced its foreign aid spending commitment on Wednesday to 0.5% of gross domestic product from 0.7%, causing junior minister Baroness Liz Sugg to resign and an immediate outcry from development organizations and the spiritual head of the Church of England.
The UK’s first major domestic fisheries legislation in nearly 40 years passed into law. The Fisheries Act 2020 gives the UK full control of its fishing waters for the first time since 1973. The Fisheries Act will enable UK to control who fishes in British waters through a new foreign vessel licensing regime and ends the current automatic rights for EU vessels to fish in UK waters.
A new study has documented a harrowing but increasingly prevalent trend, in which fishermen cut the bills off live albatrosses in order to free them from hooks. Once this barbaric procedure has been performed, trawlermen throw the endangered seabirds back into the ocean to die.
Uruguayan authorities have pledged to respond to complaints from the Spanish fleet fishing in the South Atlantic and which normally operates from the port of Montevideo where they call for supplies and cargo transshipments.
More than 4.3 million sq. km of some of the world’s most precious marine environment – 1% of all the world’s ocean – will be protected following the success of the UK’s Blue Belt Programme, the Prime Minister has confirmed.
At least four Spanish fishing vessels, which normally operate in the South Atlantic, most of them with Falklands' licenses, left for Vigo and Marin in Galicia, avoiding transshipment operations in the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, according to the country's leading Maritime and ports information report.
Four South American countries joined forces this week in a bid to combat illegal fishing by huge Chinese fleets off their coasts. Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru threatened measures “to prevent, discourage and jointly confront” illegal fishing near their exclusive economic zones in the Pacific.
Montelourido, ZDLC4, is the latest trawler to be launched at a Galician shipyard for the Falklands flagged fleet. The delivery took place this Monday at Nodosa yard in Marin, during a very austere and limited ceremony because of the pandemic, and will operate along her sister vessel on Falklands fishing grounds.