The Minister of Fisheries of Canary Islands, Narvay Quintero, will try to make the new fisheries agreement between the European Union (EU) and Mauritania contemplate several requests of the Canary Government on Thursday in Brussels.
The agreement, signed on 10 July, will be effective for four years and must be ratified by the European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament (EP).
Quintero plans to meet with community representatives to request them to include cephalopod fishing for the Canary Islands fleet, and for landings to be performed in Puerto de la Luz and Las Palmas.
“This agreement will not improve the conditions of the previous one because it does not address the two main demands of the fishing and port sectors from the Canary Islands so we can still try to negotiate an exception for the islands,” he explained.
The Canarian official noted that the document does not make any reference to the possibility that the boats must unload their catches in Puerto de La Luz and Las Palmas, which means that unloading must be carried out in Mauritanian ports.
In addition, it does not consider one of the main demands of the Spanish and Canarian fishing sector: the return of cephalopod vessels to the Mauritanian fishery ground, which had been excluded in compliance with the agreement that expired in December.
Moreover, he stressed that Mauritanian representatives have not yielded on the issue of the sailors from the African country, who will continue constituting 60 per cent of the total crew.
Nor have they taken into consideration MACAPEL (Mauritania, Canary Islands and Pelagic) cooperation project, encouraged by a group of Mauritanian and Canarian entrepreneurs in order to develop investments in port infrastructure in Mauritania, the agency Europa Press reported.
“The negotiations for this fisheries agreement have lasted for almost a year and have shown the harshness of the positions in Mauritania at the time of setting increasingly rigid conditions for fishing capture,” the Fisheries official said.
The Minister of Fisheries will meet with the Director of International Affairs and Markets Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of the EC, Stefaan Depypere; and the head of the Unit for Bilateral Agreement and Fishery Control in International Waters, Roberto Cesari.
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