Give us tax-free fuel.

That is the call from a major player in the fishing fraternity, as he appealed to the Government to encourage the growth of the fishing for export industry.

Roderick “Ricky” Francis, CEO of B&D Trawling Ltd, said that due to the high cost of fuel used in boats, catching fish for the export market and competing with those countries in which working conditions are not as costly, made it nigh impossible to capitalise on a viable market that clearly exists.

The cost of fuel has made the exporting of fish prohibitive for some, including B&D, better known for its conch harvesting, considering that fishing grounds are up to 100 miles away. With fuel being the major input, making a profit can be tight.

That situation too, Francis said, is something that the Government has been asked to look at over the last five years: duty-free fuel for fishing, but nothing tangible has occurred.

“We have a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) sitting on the table for over five years,” he said.

“If we could get tax-free fuel, it would generate more job producing exports. The price of fuel has gone up so that we can’t export, say 10,000 pounds of fish each week. We can’t do that anymore. When you look at our competitors – Honduras, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Colombia… all of them get tax-free fuel. These are the same people we are competing with. We are not competing against the Jamaican man. We are competing against the other countries who are going into Florida, into Europe, so they have a bigger competitive advantage over us,” said Francis, whose business is 99 per cent export-based in respect of conch meat in particular, with a retail store at the company’s headquarters there for locals to cash in on.

Poaching, he said, had cut deep into his company’s, and that of other Jamaican firms’, operations, and he believes that more could be done to keep that problem in check.

He believes that a strategic approach could be instituted to catch external thieves who consistently fish in Jamaican waters, many of whom go unpunished.

“There are simple solutions that can help a lot. One of the solutions is the Coast Guard boat goes to Pedro Cays once a week to change shift. But if they anchored down on the west side of the bank, that presence alone would be a significant deterrent. So instead of going back, they could spend some time anchored down. I don’t know why they won’t employ that. Maybe they have different strategies, or maybe it is based on cost.

“Also,” Francis carried on, “poaching boats come and they get a slap on the wrist and let them go. We need to change the legislation so that when poaching boats come, we seize them…put up heavier deterrents to those from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and as The Bahamas is getting into a self-imposed lockdown, the price of conch is going to go up internationally, that will create more demand, and more incidents of poaching. That’s why I am asking for the Government to be conservative until we go through this process,” Francis said, referring to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification that is currently being worked on.

MSC is a system which will validate the sustainability of Jamaican conch and appeal to environmentally aware customers.