Bahrain without fresh seafood on Saturday
Bahrain could be without fresh seafood if its fishermen moved ahead with a threat to go on strike on Saturday.
The inability to address long-standing problems facing fishermen for the last one year have prompted them to take action to press for their rights, Waheed Al Dossary, the honourary president of the Bahrain Fishermen Society, said.
“We regret that the directives given last year by Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa to tackle our problems and find adequate solutions have not been implemented,” Al Dossary said.
Last year, a week-long strike by fishermen over proposed coastal developments left the country without fish. The action was ended after pledges by the government to help tackle the fishermen’s concerns.
According to Jassem Al Jairan, the society chairman, the livelihood of more than 1,700 families is threatened as a result of the failure to find solutions to the fishermen’s problems related mainly to the reduction of the fishing area.
“Fish stocks in Bahrain have declined by about 50 per cent while fishing areas have been reduced by 75 per cent,” he said.
Fishermen said that land reclamation work over the last five years has dramatically depleted fish stocks, robbing them of around 80% of their earnings.
However, Abdul Redha Shams, head of the National Pisciculture Centre, while admitting that land reclamation work was to blame for the reduced fish stocks, overfishing was also a cause for the depletion.
Fishermen engaged in overfishing “catch small immature fish and this breaks the circle of life, not allowing a new generation of fish to breed again,” he said.
The authorities in Bahrain have resorted to releasing thousands of local fish into the sea as part of a scheme to increase stocks.
