IUU fight yields upbeat outcomes hinh anh 1Illustrative photo (Source: VNA)
HCM City (VNA) – All the 28 coastal provinces have made efforts to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and reaped positive outcomes.

Accordingly, the percentage of fishing vessels with a length of 15m or more that have installed vessel monitoring systems (VMS) equipment and have signals on related tracking system reached 90.87 percent, an increase of 0.61 percent compared to that two years ago.

The situation of Vietnamese fishing vessels being arrested and handled by foreign countries has been on the decline, with no cases detected since the beginning of October 2021.

For such outcomes, all the 28 localities have intensified their control of fishing vessels entering and leaving the ports, workers aboard, seafood throughput at ports, and the traceability of aquatic products in accordance with regulations.

Assisting these efforts, the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) has organised working trips to these areas to guide processing and export firms in implementing a series of seafood purchasing criteria.

VASEP has cooperated with the departments of agriculture, fisheries sub-departments, and management boards of fishing ports in coastal localities to help them promote advantages and solve difficulties in inspecting fishing vessels' arrival and departure; and recording and measuring the output and species of seafood arriving at ports. Similar support also comes to create favourable conditions for legal raw materials to be consumed at high prices, and for enterprises to have sufficient certificates of origin recognition for processing and export.

According to Nguyen Thi Thu Sac, VASEP Vice Chairwoman, it is hard to have the European Commission's “yellow card” on IUU removed if there are still vessels violating the law in foreign waters. Therefore, concerted efforts to eliminate such violations are necessary, she affirmed./.
VNA