So as you heard from the story, 95 percent of illegal fishers who fish at night at Gladden Spit are Hondurans. But how about our very own Belizean fishers? Are they among the illegal foreign fishers too? Well, Fisheries Administrator Beverly Wade says she doesn't believe that our fishers are the problem, that's why only licensed Belizean traditional fishers who are allowed to fish in Gladden Spit during a set time of the year.
Wade told us more about the requirements needed to become a licensed traditional fisher and the new study the Southern Environmental Association and the Fisheries department are working on to better manage the catch of traditional fishers.
Beverly Wade, Fisheries Administrator
"It really looks at having a history of earning a livelihood from that site so we have a lot of difficulty sometimes because some people are saying I am from an adjacent community like in Gladden Spit area and I think I should have a license for there and our thing is no we had a set time so Government of Belize as we approached how we would have managed fisheries had a set time that we said that this is a set time that we would allow people to come for new licenses, we do look at cases, one of the things we do at Gladden Spit is that some fishermen might want to give up their license and give it to their son or nephew or somebody right but it kind of a closed scenario so you have a set number of license so for 2019 we only licensed 85 fishers for that side, we do not see that expanding tremendously because it is there as I said as an area that traditional fishers for generations have gained their livelihoods from and those are the people we want to see continue benefiting but we are also cognizant that there is a need to control effort in the area so that is why we would not open it up for anybody who wants to make a case."
"We really haven't put catch limits on them but we are doing some studies with some researchers in partnership with the co-managers in Gladden Spit to now kind of do a status of the population that is there right, that is part of the different approach that were there from the very beginning when that area was characterized and so we are looking at having an understanding of the population to also explore as I said before what the fishers are saying to see if the fish has really, well not what used to be there but if there are aggregations that are outside of that boundary that we have declared because you know we have to declare a physical boundary and go a step further and look at things like catch limits to even see if the current number of fishers we have is really the number of fishers we should have."
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