Ghana has announced plans to expand the area in which small-scale fishers can operate, in response to persistent violations by industrial trawlers encroaching into this zone. The country’s inshore exclusion zone, or IEZ, will now extend 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from shore, up from 6 nmi (11 km) currently. Emelia Arthur, Ghana’s newly appointed fisheries minister, made the announcement at the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France, last week. Small-scale or artisanal fishing is a significant part of Ghana’s economy, employing more than 200,000 people and operating some 12,000 canoes, and the IEZ is legally reserved for small-scale fisheries. However, industrial trawlers have increasingly violated this zone, often using destructive methods such as bottom trawling. These activities have severely depleted fish stocks and damaged artisanal fishing gear. The decision to expand the IEZ aims to safeguard the livelihoods of artisanal fishing communities, said Arthur, who also announced more rigorous enforcement against encroaching vessels and those practicing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The new rule will need parliamentary approval, but Arthur said legal reforms are underway. “We are then going to enforce that regulation so severely that semi-industrial vessels and industrial vessels are not going to be permitted to operate in this zone,” she said. “We have a big issue with IUU,” Isaac Okyere, a researcher from the University of Cape Coast, told Mongabay by phone. “There are instances where the vessels have two different gears: one is licensed and one is not licensed — with that they catch…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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