Email

Print

Julie Robinson, Ocean Strategy Lead, The Nature Conservancy
"June 29th is recognized as being international fisher folk day, this has been a tradition for many decades. However, today we recognized that one day is really not sufficient to really express our gratitude to the people who are the foundation of our fisheries industries. Ms. Desiree kind of mentioned this, this is actually a culmination of a number of different activities that took place, there has been the women in fisheries forum, there has been the boat to boat dialogue that has been taking place, there is the blessing of the boats and finally today we end with what is in my personal opinion the most important day of all which is recognizing and giving thanks to an outstanding fisher in Belize. So this year's theme is "Gender Equity and Ocean Health: Supporting access to markets for small scale fisheries " So I would like to dissect this for a little bit so just bear with me when we talk about small scale fishers, this is incredibly important for Belize, our entire fisheries industry is small scale artisanal fishery. Small scale fishers contribute about half of the global fish catch in developing countries that is significant. It provides employment for about 90 percent of the worlds capture fisheries, think about that, we are a significant group of people, you know when we compare it to the industrial fisheries fleet and a lot of that is destined for local human consumption, in many countries like Belize it is slightly different there is a lot that usually goes to the export market."

Beverly Wade, Administrator, Belize Fisheries Department
"The Belize Fishing industry continues to be strong, production has been stable and continues to be a significant contributor to our national economy, it continues to provide jobs, food and income generation for thousands of Belizeans from every corner of this jewel of ours. The spiny lobster and queen conch fishery continues as our primary fishery commodities and in 2018, Belize fisheries export earnings amounted to approximately 38 million dollars with lobster earning increasing to 24 million which is very much attributed to our fishers now looking at new markets, moving very much aggressively into the whole lobster markets and it has greatly increased our production and it has greatly increased our ability to now generate more income from that commodity which is very important to us and of course conch our second most important capture fisheries contributed approximately 13 million to that 38 million so those two fisheries still remain very much significant to us."

Julie Robinson
"It is my distinct privilege to welcome everybody here today to celebrate and express our gratitude for the hard work and the initiatives that fishers do every single day out at sea and also for everybody who is working in the industry whether it is in the processing plant or the vendors or the people cleaning, really it is everybody, it is really about us giving gratitude today to everything that all of you do for out fisheries industry."

Paulino Elmer Rodriguez, 2019 Outstanding Fisher of the Year
"First of all I just want to say thanks for this recognition and really it was a surprise for me, it did not know about this and I just want to say thank you very much and as what my son has said, as a fisherman I need to continue supporting the manage access of sustainable fishing to be responsible fisher and to support our fishers which is one of the most important for myself as a fisher and the chair person for the fishing co-op, thank you very much and I do appreciate and like I said it was a surprise for me, I did not expect this thank you very much."

The award ceremony is one of a series of activities to commemorate fisheries month.