Multi-day fishing vessels with deep freezers under state scrutiny

The quality of fish in multi-day fishing vessels with deep freezers is now under scrutiny of  the Fisheries Ministry.

Provisions amounting to LKR 3 million had been made for examining the quality of fish stored in the deep freezers of the multi-day fishing vessels.

A sum of LKR 3.61 million had been spent by the end of the year under review on the said research project.

It was the objective of this project to examine the quality of fish stored in the multi-day fishing vessels with deep freezers but it was revealed as per the performance report that the agency had examined the quality of fish in the vessels over 50 feet in length without deep freezers.

Even before the year 2017, the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency had found that the post-harvest damage of the fish with respect to the multi-day fishing vessels without deep freezers had been around 40%.

Instead of taking action to minimize the post-harvest damage, research had been conducted to further examine the post-harvest damage by incurring a sum totalling LKR 7.49 million during the years 2018 and 2019.

In order to design a multi-day fishing vessel with a deep freezing system under the objective of minimising the loss of quality in the fish harvest of the multi-day vessels, a consultancy report had been obtained from the University of Moratuwa in the year 2017 by spending a sum of LKR 950,130.

Nevertheless, action had not been taken to design a multi-day fishing vessel by using that report.