Fisheries Administrator Refutes Claims that Industry is in Crisis
Rigoberto Quintana
The Fisheries Administrator also sought to address concerns raised by the Belize Federation of Fishers in its July twelfth press release. In that statement, the federation raised an alarm after announcing that through its partnership with the Summit Foundation out of the U.S., they found that conch stocks were heavily fished and showed significant signs of depletion. According to Quintana, through the IDB, the department is working on a seven million dollar loan to conduct stock assessments on several commercial species. He added that the findings of the Summit Foundation are highly questionable.
Rigoberto Quintana, Fisheries Administrator
“We have been in dialogue with them since the inception as government we had requested of them to provide a full proposal of what was their intent in Belize. Later on they were to present the preliminary findings and we had the meeting the last visit they had. They mentioned their report was in an advanced stage, almost ready for publication which we have concerns. But we have written to them formally, copied the prime minister, that the government has formally proposed to have a scientific working group that will work along them to look at the validation of that data they are using and to use our fisheries data see how they, because I think they analyzed twenty commercial specials. I don’t know about twenty commercial species that we have in Belize. So those things we will leave it to science and experts from our side. I can tell you the damage has been done.”
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