Conch ‘shame’ - Fisheries boss rips sale of marine delicacy during close season
Published:Sunday | January 5, 2020 | 12:00 AMCarlene Davis - Sunday Gleaner Writer
It is 4:35 p.m. on New Year’s Day and customers are able to enjoy conch soup in all its glory on Hellshire Beach in Portmore, St Catherine, despite a one-year conch ban which is still in effect.
The closed season for queen conch (genus Strombus), which was announced on March 1, 2019, continues until January 31, 2020. During the period of the close season, it shall be illegal for any person to catch, sell queen conch and/or harvest any conch products, such as conch shell and conch opercula.
When The Sunday Gleaner arrived on the beach, persons were observed purchasing soup from a vendor who indicated that conch with crawfish soup was available and could be purchased in sizes small, medium and large. The reporter purchased a medium.
Hearing that conch was being advertised and sold openly in the banned period did not sit well with André Kong, director of fisheries in the Fisheries Division of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries (MICAF), who described the action as shameful.
“It is illegal for them to have it in their possession. It is not supposed to be happening, and what they are doing is contributing to the demise of the conch population and to the hardships of thousands of Jamaicans, and also contributing to Jamaica not being able to make foreign exchange. That’s what these people are doing and they don’t understand this at all,” said Kong.
Last year, it was reported that Jamaica earned as much as US$6 million per annum in foreign exchange through the conch industry.
“Florida is known as the Conch Republic, in the Florida Keys,” Kong told The Sunday Gleaner.
“They totally overfished their conch population and totally destroyed it, and it would never come back and it can’t come back 20, 30 years after, it’s not coming back at all. The great United States of America, with all their money, could not bring it back, and this is what we are trying to avoid, this is why we had to close this.”
Said Kong: “You have people that stop fishing the conch because them want to save it, but they are seeing people catching it same way and they feel a way and I don’t know what to say to them, because they say they feel like to go catch it to and gwaan make a money. So, I tell you that this is absolutely crazy, man. We need to make an example of these people. They are just doing this thing bright and bold. They don’t care,” said Kong.
But what will be done when the ban, which was aimed at giving the conch population an opportunity to replenish, expires at the end of January?
“We do everything by scientific research. The team went out there recently to look at it and they are working on the report and the recommendation,” said Kong.
“I can’t pre-empt what the scientists are going to say, but the reason why we had to close it is because, when we did our scientific research, what we found out there was extremely troubling, in that the conch population was significantly reduced.”
He added: “Now, we have been studying this thing from the early ’90s and the information we had was that Jamaica had one of the largest populations of conch in the world, Pedro Bank. The same people who did the surveys know the bank like the back of their hand, and when they go out there and they don’t see conch, it was very, very frightening, so we had to do what we did to save the thing, and what we are asking is for Jamaicans to cooperate.”
Kong is asking persons who have purchased or witness the selling of items in the close season to make a report to the authorities.
“Shame on the people who buy it, shame on the people who continue to catch it, because they are being penny wise and pound foolish, and what they are doing is destroying their own livelihood. What we need is well-thinking people to go and give witness. You have to be able to say ‘I’m going to go and I’m going to work with the National Fisheries Authority and the police, and I’m going to collect this information and provide the evidence and go to court and say, yes, I bought this thing from these people’,” said Kong.