Kali­fa Clyne

The com­pen­sa­tion giv­en to T&T's fish­er­men is ex­treme­ly fair, con­sid­er­ing about 90 per cent of them ad­mit to fish­ing else­where dur­ing pe­ri­ods when seis­mic sur­veys are be­ing done.So said eco­nom­ics lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Roger Ho­sein dur­ing the uni­ver­si­ty's Trade and De­vel­op­ment Unit lec­ture on com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages for fish­er­men dur­ing seis­mic sur­veys.He de­liv­ered the lec­ture at the Fac­ul­ty of So­cial Sci­ence at the uni­ver­si­ty's St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus yes­ter­day.

In Oc­to­ber the Min­istry of En­er­gy re­port­ed that fish­er­folk were paid ap­prox­i­mate­ly $8,545 a month a boat dur­ing the seis­mic pe­ri­od.The min­istry al­so said be­tween 2010 and 2013 over $77.3 mil­lion was paid to fish­er­folk by five oil com­pa­nies as com­pen­sa­tion for seis­mic ac­tiv­i­ty .The en­ti­ty re­spon­si­ble for grant­i­ng li­cences to com­pa­nies to do seis­mic sur­veys in T&T is the En­er­gy Min­istry.

Ho­sein said as long as fish­er­men were not moor­ing their boats, the com­pen­sa­tion giv­en to them by oil com­pa­nies was "gen­er­ous.""There is no le­gal con­tract that says fish­er­men can­not fish in oth­er parts of the coun­try while the seis­mic sur­vey is be­ing con­duct­ed and most of them do fish in oth­er ar­eas," he added.Ho­sein al­so chal­lenged oil com­pa­nies to pay more at­ten­tion to com­pen­sat­ing com­mu­ni­ties.

He said: "As it is now, the com­pen­sa­tion goes main­ly to boat-own­ing fish­er­men and that is good. They play a ma­jor part in con­tribut­ing to na­tion­al food safe­ty and they should be com­pen­sat­ed."What we need to con­sid­er is that strate­gies may need to be put in place to re­plen­ish fish stock af­ter a pe­ri­od of time. Com­pa­nies may find it use­ful to make an in­ter­ven­tion along those lines."Who owns the fish in the sea?" Ho­sein asked.

"In a sense it is not on­ly the boat-own­ing fish­er­men but al­so mem­bers of the fish­ing com­mu­ni­ties and the coun­try as a whole."He said as part of com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages for seis­mic sur­veys, com­pa­nies need­ed to con­sid­er the im­pact on com­mu­ni­ties and plan com­pen­sa­tion strate­gies that ben­e­fit­ed the en­tire com­mu­ni­ty.