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  Conservationists present plan to curb illegal fishing YELLOW-CARD:The EU listed Taiwan as uncooperative in the fight against illegal fishing. A red card could mean a ban on Taiwan’s seafood exports, costing US$14m a year By Chen Wei-han  /  Staff reporter 

    Members of marine conservation groups advise the government to create an online system for fishery catch reports at a press conference in the legislature in Taipei yesterday.Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times   Ocean conservationists at a legislative hearing yesterday called for a cloud-computing fisheries management system and a unified nomenclature system for commercial fish species to curb illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The European Commission (EC) identified Taiwan as an uncooperative nation in the fight against IUU fishing last month after a Taiwanese fishing boat was found illegally trawling for tuna and carrying shark fins in international waters near Papua New Guinea in September.

Following the yellow-card designation, the Fisheries Agency announced measures to curb IUU fishing, including regulations requiring fishing vessels weighing more than 10 tonnes to submit reports to fishermen’s associations when unloading their catches, which would take effect in July next year.

Saying that the agency’s measures are incomplete, Taiwan Fisheries Economic Development Association standing director Hsu Cheng-yu (徐承堉) said most inshore fishing boats, usually less than 10 tonnes and often operating in sensitive sea areas, are excluded from the requirement.

Statistics gathered by fishermen associations has long been considered to be heavily underestimated due to the limited capacity of associations to manually record reports, as well as illegal fishing activities that often go unreported, Hsu said.

Matsu’s Fish Conservation Union said that the government has not been able to produce credible and up-to-date statistics on fishing catches and fisheries resources, but has instead relied on a coastal development plan formulated 20 years ago to zone industrial, fishing and conservation areas, which is useless to protect fisheries resources and fishermen’s livelihoods.

  The groups called for the establishment of a cloud-computing fisheries management system to replace manual record keeping to allow individual fishing boats to record and report each catch, to be used for accurate policymaking, academic research and a traceability system for sustainable fisheries.

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Wen-yen (邱文彥) said the EU has a zero-tolerance policy on IUU fishing, and the nation’s aquatic products would be banned in the EU should Taiwan be given a red card, which would cost Taiwan 13 million euros (US$14.02 million) in exports every year.

Meanwhile, the lack of a legal nomenclature system for commercial fish species has led to rampant seafood fraud and mislabeling, marine conservation activist Asoka Lin (林愛龍) said, adding that shark meat — usually priced at between NT$50 and NT$60 a kilogram — is often used to adulterate mackerel products, which is generally sold at between NT$700 and NT$900 a kilogram.

In response, Fisheries Agency Deputy Director Huang Hung-yan (黃鴻燕) said the agency has designated 24 fishing harbors as points where larger boats must unload their cargo, which would be inspected, weighed and recorded by fishermen’s associations.

An electronic recording and reporting system would gradually replace manual record-keeping in the future, with such a system already deployed on some distant fishing vessels, which could also be installed on large fishing boats operating in near-shore areas, Huang said.

      

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