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Mozambique: Green Light Given for Fishing Agreement With EU
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
19 December 2007
Posted to the web 19 December 2007
Maputo
The Mozambican government has authorized the signing of a partnership agreement with the European Union, under which a fleet of European fishing vessels will be allowed an annual quota of 10,000 tonnes of tuna in Mozambican water.
According to the government spokesperson, Deputy Education Minister Luis Covane, the EU will pay Mozambique 900,000 euros (about 1.3 million US dollars) a year for these fishing rights. The agreement covers a five year period, but no firm date for signing it has yet been fixed.
The country's first fishing agreement with the EU ran from 1987 to 1993, and covered fishing for prawns, gamba (deep water prawns), tuna and other species. Covane said the agreement ended in 1993, when Mozambique reached the conclusion that there were now enough Mozambican fishing companies to exploit the prawn resources in its territorial waters.
At the time, prawns, mainly fished in the Sofala Bank, off the coast of central Mozambique, were Mozambique's most valuable export. As it became ever clearer that the stocks were being overfished, the prawn fisheries were closed to foreign vessels.
It took ten years to negotiate the second fishing agreement with the EU and it was not signed until 2003. It was in force from 2004 to 2006, and did not include prawns. This agreement only allowed European vessels to fish for gamba and tuna.
"Now we have the third agreement", said Covane, "which will allow intervention by a fleet of 89 EU vessels, to catch 10,000 tonnes of tuna a year".
He added that the money paid by the EU will mostly be used in activities to develop the Mozambican fisheries sector.
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Under the 2004 agreement the EU pledged to pay 3.5 million euros a year for the gamba fishing rights, and 600,000 euros a year for the tuna. The EU fleet was allowed to take 1,000 tonnes of gamba a year - but failed to do so, because it is much more difficult to catch deep-water prawns than their surface water cousins. The European vessels that fished in Mozambican waters from 2004 to 2006 did not possess the appropriate equipment for catching gamba.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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