Under the public-private cooperation agreement between the Vice Ministry of Aquaculture and Fisheries, the Undersecretariat of Fisheries Resources and the National Chamber of Fisheries, 30 captains of the fleet associated with the SPS-FIP were successfully trained in the management of the system of electronic fishing logbook. The implementation had the permanent support of the FIP staff to be able to overcome the challenges of the technological gaps between the captains, who actively participated in successfully generating 986 electronic blogs between August and December 2020.
The electronic fishing logging platform is a fundamental technological tool for the registration of operations in the high seas, which allows to gain efficiencies in data collection and generates additional inputs for the monitoring and traceability of fishing activity, in effect the reporting programs Robust and transparent monitoring and monitoring are the cornerstone of the management and conservation of fishery resources.
For Luis Meza, captain of B/P Esmeralda I, the electronic logbook has benefits “I have the information at hand, faster than when you have a notebook, searching by date and time is an advantage …”, while for Pablo Cerda, as head of departure of one of the project companies, he considers that “it is a tool that allows us to have better control and organize information, it is now more accessible and easy to access.”
The system used is a tool designed in 2018 with the support of WWF and the SRP for the “pomada” shrimp fishery in Ecuador and that after technical roundtables between the SPS-FIP and the National Fisheries Authority was able to be adapted to the small pelagic fishery.
Pablo Guerrero, Director of Marine Conservation of WWF Ecuador states “true transparency of the commercialization chains of fishery products cannot be achieved using paper-based systems. The use of electronic logbooks increases the quality, quantity and availability of fishery information, which will help managers to make better and faster decisions, and also to comply with the increasingly demanding traceability requirements demanded by international markets to export. seafood. Without a doubt, that is the path that our country’s fisheries should travel ”.
The system has proven to be ready for implementation to the rest of the small pelagic fleet to increase the impact of the benefits of this technology for the fishery, under the modernization terms established in the new fishing law.
