The PP senator for Murcia, Juan María Vázquez, along with the rest of the popular senators for Murcia, the Valencian Community and Cantabria have registered in the Chamber, a motion for debate and vote in the Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, by the requesting the Government, through a battery of seven specific measures, to support and promote the trawling sector, "as strategic fishing in the blue economy and its contribution to the sustainability of the Mediterranean".
Thus, as explained by the PP senator for Murcia, the motion of the Popular Parliamentary Group requests the Government to “urgently agree with the fishing sector, which must participate in co-management according to the Regulations, OM 423/2020 of May 18 , of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, modifying it where appropriate according to the characteristics of our coasts, the reality and the effort made by the trawlers ".
Similarly, the text of the initiative calls for “recognizing trawling as strategic in the blue economy and its contribution to the sustainability of the Mediterranean, as well as using the catch data that the General Secretariat of Fisheries receives from permanently updated indicators. the different brotherhoods ”.
Juan María Vázquez wanted to influence the third point of the initiative, which asks the Sánchez Executive, “to guarantee direct and indirect employment related to demersal fishing. For this, the rules applicable to the trawling sector must reflect a balance between sustainability of the marine environment and profitability of the economic fishing activity ”.
In a fourth point, the motion of the popular in the Senate indicates the need to "establish a program that promotes and encourages knowledge, technology and innovation, with the direct participation of the fishing sector, which allows further progress in sustainable models trawling and, at the same time, ensure their activity and employment, both direct and indirect. "
Vázquez has also pointed out that, in the fifth point, the motion asks “to develop accompanying measures that cushion the negative impact of the restrictions imposed and prevent the loss of the trawling fleet in Mediterranean Spain”. Likewise, in the sixth section, Vázquez, along with the rest of the PP senators for Murcia and the Valencian Community, requests "to provide greater transparency to the procedures by which each vessel is informed of the days authorized for fishing, informing each boat of the formula used for the calculation ”.
Lastly, the seventh of the measures of the motion, requests “that the applicable regulations regarding the reduction of fishing effort be derogated, which establishes the criterion of the distribution of days of activity based on at the length of the boat ”.
TRAWLING FISHING, STRATEGIC IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
Juan María Vázquez has explained that demersal fishing or trawling is a form of fishing that is as old as it is strategic in the Mediterranean. "What's more, trawling is one of the most important in some Autonomous Communities and localities, and in towns such as Águilas (Murcia), as in so many others, it accounts for more than 50% of sales managed through the Brotherhood Fishermen and others reaches up to 80%.
Likewise, the popular senator has highlighted that only in the province of Castellón, the boats in trawling activity reach 65; and it is a fishing modality that has made great efforts to adapt to the new reality of the blue economy and fisheries sustainability in the short, medium and long term through instruments, rigging and innovative precision techniques that are added to procedures already applied since years ago, as the increase in the diameter of the fishing net, the respect to the periods of reproduction and breeding or by reducing the days of fishing.
"Trawlers are being strategic for other purposes such as, among others, the study and removal of garbage and plastics deposited on sea beds; and we also have to point out that this fishing represents a very important number of jobs, direct and indirect, and the hallmark of many territories for the fish and shellfish obtained through this activity, ”he assured.
To conclude, the popular senator recalls that, since the Fishing Conference in Catania in 2016, the Spanish fishing sector in the Mediterranean was aware of the need to undertake a new management model according to short and medium term sustainability. "And since then, there have been numerous proposals that have been made, from a scientific basis, to adapt fishing activity to this new reality," he concluded.