The crew of the Galician cephalopod fleet fishing in Mauritanian waters will hold a demonstration later this month as a pressure measure, ahead of the voting to be held in the European Parliament (EP) in September on the new European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF).
CIG-Mar Secretary, Xavier Aboi, said the move, scheduled for 30 August in Marin (Pontevedra) will be performed “in defense of the fleet and workers.”
In addition, on Thursday it is expected that union leaders and representative shipowners meet the secretary of Rural and Marine Affairs, Rosa Quintana in Santiago. And on Friday they are to attend the meeting of spokespeople of the Town of Marin.
Aboi emphasized that each of the vessels that stopped fishing in the Mauritanian fishing ground had an average invoicing of EUR 240,000, “which is not being collected in the maritime economy.”
This also affects the fishing socioeconomic sphere of Marin, the CIG-Mar spokesman added.
The leader said that, at the moment the crew members have a pending aid payment for the months of June and July, and ensured that “most of them having temporary contracts will go on strike,” the agency Europa Press reported.
Meanwhile, it is expected that some of the excluded boats from the Mauritanian fishing ground set sail late in August to the Falkland Islands.
To Aboi, that situation is “unfortunate” because they are boats that are “not ready” for the fishing activity in that area.
For her part, the Commissioner of Fisheries of the European Union (EU), Maria Damanaki, stated the European Commission (EC) “is aware of the social and economic implications for the Spanish cephalopod fleet,” the newspaper La Opinión reported.
“The cephalopod fleets have not been excluded from the protocol in force, but they are mentioned with a zero quota, since Mauritania has decided not to grant any cephalopod fishing opportunities to foreign fleets,” she added.
“However, the protocol with Mauritania grants the EU fleet priority access to the available exceeding specimens in the fishing areas in the country. This means that as far as there was a surplus in terms of cephalopod stocks and Mauritania decided to allocate a part of it to foreign fleets, the EU fleet would have priority access over those from other countries,” Damanaki concluded.
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