Sascha Wil­son

With a scarci­ty of fish on the lo­cal mar­ket, cus­tomers may face steep­er prices as fish­er­men grap­ple to meet the high de­mand dur­ing the Lenten sea­son. Paint­ing a grim pic­ture of a fast de­plet­ing lo­cal fish stock, fish­er­men are pray­ing that their catch­es in­crease. Fish prices are now at an all-time high with re­tail prices rang­ing from $12 to $45. A num­ber of fac­tors con­tributed to the fish scarci­ty, they said, in­clud­ing bad weath­er, sea seis­mic sur­veys, shrimp trawl­ing and pol­lu­tion.

"Right now fish scarce...We not catch­ing fish as be­fore," said past pres­i­dent of the Ota­heite Fish­ing Com­mu­ni­ty De­o­raj Seep­er­sad. "Since be­fore the Christ­mas the prices high." He said peo­ple be­lieved that fish­er­men jacked up the fish prices for Lent. "That is not true...We don't hold fish dur­ing this time and there is more de­mand for fish around this time," he said.

One of the ma­jor fac­tors to de­ter­mine whether they could meet the de­mand if the prices were to re­main the same, in­crease or de­crease, was the weath­er, said fish­er­man Fran­cis Ar­joon. Ar­joon, pres­i­dent of the Guayagua­yare /Or­toire Ma­yaro Fish­er­folk As­so­ci­a­tion said: "We are keep­ing our fin­gers cross that we can get fish to meet the de­mand and that peo­ple will get it at a rea­son­able time...The fish stock is de­plet­ing big time."

He said the 3D seis­mic sur­vey was a ma­jor con­trib­u­tor to the dy­ing fish in­dus­try. "For most of 2011, we had sur­veys and one still go­ing in the south-east," he said. "It chas­es the fish away and we don't have a di­rect time when they will come back." An­oth­er fish­er­man, Pe­ter Gloudon, how­ev­er, iden­ti­fied shrimp trawlers as ma­jor cul­prits and called for the tech­nique to be banned in T&T.

"They are killing the ju­ve­nile com­mu­ni­ty (young fish) and dam­ag­ing the sea bed," said Gloudon, chair­man of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Fish­er­folk As­so­ci­a­tion. He said T&T lead­ers should take pat­tern from Venezuela's pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez who banned shrimp trawl­ing and in­stead de­vel­oped shrimp farm­ing. Not­ing that shrimp was al­so be­com­ing scarce on the lo­cal mar­ket, he said: "If we don't take the bull by the horn, what we will have is a cri­sis.

"In the next five years, there will be a to­tal col­lapse of the fish­ing in­dus­try in T&T," he added. He said two oth­er ma­jor con­trib­u­tors to the de­cline in fish sup­plies were ma­rine seis­mic sur­vey, which were chas­ing the fish away, and drilling op­er­a­tions on the south-east penin­su­la which were caus­ing the dump­ing of chem­i­cals on the ocean floor.