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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Fishermen blame Aboud for poor sales

by

20140401

Fish­er­men and fish ven­dors yes­ter­day ex­pressed dis­tress over un­usu­al­ly low sales dur­ing one of their busiest sea­sons, Lent.The fish­er­men, who say fish sales came to an abrupt halt af­ter state­ments made in the me­dia by en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist Gary Aboud, are call­ing on him to apol­o­gise and let the coun­try know that not all the fish are bad.

Last week, Aboud and pres­i­dent of the La Brea Fish­er­folk As­so­ci­a­tion Alvin La Bor­de warned peo­ple not to buy fish from the Gulf of Paria be­cause of a fear of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from the oil spill in De­cem­ber last year.Dead fish have been float­ing ashore on beach­es in south Trinidad."The day af­ter he said don't buy fish, our cus­tomers stopped com­ing," said Ja­son Ali, a fish ven­dor at the Co­corite Fish­ing Fa­cil­i­ty.

Ali and group of oth­er fish ven­dors, showed the T&T Guardian sev­er­al con­tain­ers of fish on ice, say­ing hav­ing fish left over dai­ly was not typ­i­cal dur­ing Lent.The fish­er­men and ven­dors say they are los­ing thou­sands of dol­lars in fish sales every day."We have boats work­ing and no­body to buy fish. We turned away three boats sell­ing fish to­day. We can't buy it be­cause it isn't sell­ing," Ali said.

Con­tain­ers filled with carite, king­fish, cro cro and salmon re­mained un­cov­ered at the de­pot as fish­er­men said they had seen less than a hand­ful of cus­tomers that day.Bur­ton Sam­my, who has been sell­ing there for three years, de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as strange."Usu­al­ly we would see about 20 peo­ple here be­fore lunch. To­day I saw two cus­tomers."The fish ven­dors were cook­ing king­fish fil­lets when a news team from the T&T Guardian ar­rived. They said try­ing to eat some of the fish was their best al­ter­na­tive to watch­ing it go to waste.

The fish­er­men say their catch comes from the North Coast, from ar­eas such as Blan­chisseuse and Las Cuevas."Our fish is safe to eat. We don't get our fish from the Gulf of Paria. The EMA (En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty) said the fish is good to eat. We have chil­dren to feed and fam­i­lies. "Gary Aboud just made one state­ment and our sales shut down."Last week Aboud iden­ti­fied mul­let as one of the va­ri­eties af­fect­ed by the oil spill.

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion sub­se­quent­ly sent a re­lease say­ing the Na­tion­al Schools Di­etary Ser­vices Ltd did not use that par­tic­u­lar kind of fish for school lunch­es.


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