Declining fish stocks deserve a real assessment, not another cheap shot at oil

Dec 01, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – I was disappointed to see the recent story “Declining fish catch triggers worry among local fishermen.”
The perspective of our fishermen is always valuable, but the piece is filled with half truths and unverified claims. The story seeks to pin any and every decline in fish stocks on the oil industry. Fair enough, it’s an easy target. No one is likely to stand up and say oil is great for fish. But if we want to actually understand what is happening, we need a real assessment. Frankly, the government should have done what every other country does and conduct a comprehensive assessment of our fisheries decades ago. What data is there will show a completely different picture than the one painted by the author. As the Guyana Standard reported last year in “Fishing output in decline for a while… Govt. report” fishing peaked in 2003 and then declined through 2015.
There was no major oil drilling taking place during that time. How can oil be the problem of declining fishers if the decline started long before oil was found? For that matter, how can oil drilling happening 150 kilometres offshore be the cause when nearly all of Guyana’s fishing is done in coastal shallow waters?
There are dozens of countries around the world with much larger oil production than Guyana’s that have huge fisheries. The UK, the US, Canada and Norway all spring to mind. Each boasts a large oil industry and a huge fishing industry in the same waters.
How is this possible? They manage their fisheries. They regularly assess stocks of each species and issue quotas and regulate take so that species that are declining can be restored. Oil has not wiped out the fish in any of these countries. In contrast, the fishing industry in the U.S. often clamours for decommissioned rigs to be kept intact since these vast structures become crusted with corals that serve as nurseries for fish.
There are real problems we must assess.
Waters are warming and storm patterns are changing around the world due to climate change. Foreign fishing fleets from certain countries poach freely from the waters of countries like Guyana that cannot or will not stop them. Blaming oil is an easy way out, but the government needs to take this problem seriously and enact the kind of serious management that other countries have done for decades.
Regards
Donald Singh

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