FFOS and all fish­ery stake­hold­ers are cel­e­brat­ing and danc­ing in joy through­out T&T to­day.Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj must be loud­ly ap­plaud­ed for his courage and vi­sion in ban­ning the pow­er­ful and well-con­nect­ed lob­by of the In­dus­tri­al Shrimp trawlers (Types III and IV), and in­tro­duc­ing a closed sea­son dur­ing breed­ing times for ar­ti­sanal trawlers (Type I, and II) as re­port­ed in the press.

This move is long over­due and has brought tears of re­lief to many of us who have wit­nessed the dev­as­ta­tion caused to our liveli­hoods and our bio-di­ver­si­ty over the past three decades by mis­guid­ed di­rec­tors of fish­eries.On be­half of all right-think­ing fish­ers and cit­i­zens, FFOS un­re­served­ly and whole­heart­ed­ly con­grat­u­lates Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj.

The good min­is­ter must be mind­ful of the many chal­lenges ahead in­clud­ing the wide­spread dis­con­tent en­dorsed by sci­en­tif­ic pa­pers on seis­mic sur­veys which show that they re­sult in dis­place­ment of fish­er­men and fish pop­u­la­tions and neg­a­tive­ly im­pact spawn­ing species dur­ing the sur­vey which will ul­ti­mate­ly re­sult in re­duced catch for the fish­er­folk for an un­known pe­ri­od of time.

Phys­i­cal dam­age is al­so re­port­ed for small­er fish and fish with swim­ming blad­ders. Im­pacts were al­so seen on the egg and lar­vae stages of fish­es. The long-term ef­fect is de­stroy­ing our mem­bers' liveli­hood.

Dis­tur­bance and dis­place­ment of spawn­ing fish from their spawn­ing ar­eas will have an ef­fect on the fu­ture fish pop­u­la­tion.In the past, rec­om­men­da­tions were made (Dalen et al. 1996) which in­clude seis­mic shoot­ing be­ing at a min­i­mum of 50 km from spawn­ing grounds or mi­gra­to­ry paths. What are we wait­ing for?

It is rea­son­able to ex­pect that our fish will re­act the same as Cana­di­an or Brazil­ian fish. There is there­fore no need to du­pli­cate pro­hib­i­tive­ly ex­pen­sive stud­ies done else­where.T&T re­quire the same best prac­tice which Cana­da and the USA have adopt­ed. Any­thing short of that will be dis­crim­i­nat­ing.Please Min­is­ter Ma­haraj, do not let us fight for 20 more years be­fore seis­mic sur­veys are prop­er­ly reg­u­lat­ed. We can­not fid­dle while our fish­ery is van­dalised.

Ter­rence Bed­doe,

Pres­i­dent, FFOS