Vung Tau multispecies trawl FIP joins MarinTrust Improver Program

The Vung Tau multispecies trawl fishery improvement project (FIP), based in southern Vietnam, has been accepted into the MarinTrust Improver Program as part of its multispecies pilot.

This FIP is the second to be accepted into the IP’s multispecies pilot project, after the Gulf of Thailand mixed-trawl FIP. The multispecies pilot criteria focuses on complex fisheries.

The MarinTrust Improver Program aims to encourage fishmeal-processing facilities that are not yet meeting the criteria for the MarinTrust Standard to implement timely improvements to eventually achieve full MarinTrust Standard certification.

“The objective of the multispecies criteria is to enable the assessment of highly complex fisheries, in which sometimes hundreds of species are regularly caught. The criteria have been developed by experts and are based on ‘best-practice’ fisheries management, as specified in international norms and guidance including the 1982 Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity as captured in the 1995 Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF), with additional input from the 2006 regionalization of the code for Southeast Asia (Regional CCRF),” MarinTrust Impacts Manager Nicola Clark said.

The Vung Tau application will test this new criteria to decide on improvements, which MarinTrust hopes will ultimately allow producers of marine ingredients and multispecies fisheries to demonstrate their commitment towards responsibly sourced raw materials by achieving MarinTrust certification.

“The pilot project is enabling MarinTrust to test the methodology in active fisheries so it can be refined and ultimately develop a fully robust and realistic set of criteria to eventually include within the full MarinTrust fishery assessment,” Clark said.

Kim Delta Consultants are leading the FIP on behalf of the Fishmeal and Fish Oil Association of Ba Ria (Ba Ria – Vung Tau Province). Entrance into the Improver Program will support the FIP in meeting a series of improvement milestones that are specific to its fishery action plan and to implement progress that ultimately leads to an application for full MarinTrust certification, Kim Thanh, FIP coordinator for the Vung Tu trawl fishery, said.

“The recognition of MarinTrust for all the efforts FIP Vung Tau partner members in past years will hopefully realize the dreams of having open fishery data sources and initiating more FIPs in southern Vietnam. We believe this to be critical for the new era of collaboration of fisheries in the region,” Thanh said.

Photo courtesy of thi/Shutterstock