Update – 20th December 2011

A few months ago, several members of the UDC Group for Marine Resources & Fisheries began working on the GAP2 Galicia case study.

Preliminarily, we performed a project presentation at the headquarters of the Galician Federation of Guilds, to members of the institution itself, as well as the larger fraternities of the Guilds for Aguiño, Ribeira and Cambados.

The purpose of this presentation was, in part, to agree the extent of involvement of the Federation of Fishermen’s associations in GAP2 project development, set reasonable goals for progress, assess the delimitation of the study area and to attain the collaboration of the entire sector. To this end, three major Guilds agreed to become involved and undertook to manage the cooperation and involvement of their member fishermen, especially during the first phase of interviews (“Ecosystem mapping”).

Following this commitment, two meetings were convened in Cambados and Aguiño with those fishermen who had planned to participate. A brief presentation was given, of the aims and objectives of the project, focusing primarily on the methodology and strategies to be followed, debating why the involvement of the sector and its operations was necessary.
The explanation of the second phase or “monitoring period”, initially created more doubts among the fishermen. One of their major concerns was the excessive time required to collect the data and complete the daily logbooks. Moreover, the inclusion of a daily geographical location device (“logger”) in each vessel would be a control mechanism that not all sectors would be necessarily happy to take on.

Given these perceptions, we tried to confer to the sector a serious commitment to treating any information obtained with the utmost confidentiality. With this agreement in place, we believe that much of the industry would now be willing to keep a logger on their boat. As for the option to cover a daily summary report of monitoring, the answer is more varied now. Therefore, upon the completion of the “Ecosystem mapping” phase, we propose to develop a series of workshops with involving fishermen, and generating one or more logbooks models best suited to the activity of each vessel or fleet segment.
We’ll see how this phase progresses in the coming months.

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