Dalley to meet with Whitehouse fishermen
WESTERN BUREAU — Land and Environment minister Horace Dalley will next Wednesday meet with fishermen in Whitehouse, St James to try and resolve their long-standing concerns.
“On May 1, I will be leading a team to Montego Bay on the instruction of the Prime Minister (P J Patterson), to deal with and to explore ways of resolving the problems the fishermen are having,” Dalley said.
He was speaking recently at the official handing-over ceremony of an audio-visual laboratory by the Japanese government to the Montego Bay Marine Park.
Over the past three years, fishermen in the Whitehouse area of Montego Bay have been complaining that they have been losing millions of dollars in revenue and equipment as a result of the development of the upscale Ritz Carlton Rose Hall Hotel.
The fishermen charged that following the development of the hotel in 1999, there was a run-off of mud and marl into the sea, which destroyed their traps. Since then, they claim, they have been forced to set their pots as far west as Sandy Bay to avoid the growth of some kind of algae that was spreading across from the Ritz Carlton to the Cari-Blue Hotel.
Now, they want to be compensated to the tune of $10 million and are calling for the relevant authorities to remove the algae.
Last month, a meeting was called to address the fishermen’s concerns, but the meeting was aborted after it became clear that neither agriculture minister, Roger Clarke nor representatives from the hotel would participate in the meeting.
But Dalley said representatives of the fisheries department, the minister of state in the ministry of agriculture, the junior minister in the ministry of tourism and representatives from the National Resources Conservation Authority and the National Environmental Planning Agency will be in attendance at next week’s meeting.
“We are not unmindful of the situation that we face in Whitehouse. We have received several technical reports, we have received verbal reports, emotional reports, unprofessional reports so we know that something is happening in that area,” he said. “I want to assure the fishermen and also the business people that we will be looking at the matter and going to the heart of it.”
