Greenwich Town fishers bemoan lack of consultation

Christopher Serju/Senior Gleaner Writer

MEMBERS OF the Greenwich Town Fisherfolk Benevolent Society (GTFBS) are concerned that major decisions affecting the lives and livelihoods of fisherfolk are being made without any input from or consultationswith them, and have accused the National Fisheries Authority (NFA), the main liaison entity between fishers and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and which is supposed to represent their interests, of being the main offender.

During a recent interview, Chairman Winston Monroe made it clear that the NFA continues to ignore the concerns of its members, despite the proximity of the Greenwich Town Fishing Village to its offices at 2C Newport East, Kingston 11.

He explained: “One of the main things is that there are not enough consultations with the fishers, there is none, absolutely none. A lot of the times when decisions are made and programmes come in, it is done without any consultations. People just sit in them office and do the maths and come and enforce. Which, if we did have consultation before implementing, you would have better cooperation based on the buy-in from the beginning and there wouldn’t be so much need to try ‘sell’ the programmes to the potential beneficiaries, at a later date.”

This arbitrary behaviour extends as well to policies which affect fishers directly, Monroe noted, pointing to the planned expansion of the runway at the Norman Manley International Airport which will involve dumping up a section of the sea, which he alleges will destroy a fish nursery.

“The airport runway is slated for expansion, I believe they say that is about April it is supposed to begin. But after about three years, they have only one consultation which was hastily called on the same day,” Monroe told The Gleaner.

Caught off guard but anxious to hear about the likely impact from the runway expansion, the GTFBS had to charter a vehicle to get to the meeting and was the only fishing village represented, because of the fact that it was so hastily called.

“That airport runway expansion will be taking away a section of the spawning ground for fish, so it will be a major fallout for fishing because of the disruption. Look at what happened when they were dredging a section of the Kingston Harbour to make the channel wider and deeper and the problems it's caused. So you imagine the amount of negative impact this will have?”

This kind of behaviour is symptomatic of how big businesses operating in and around the Kingston Harbour have treated the Greenwich Town Fishing Village with scant regard over the years, according to president of the society, Novelette Mighty.

“Most of them come with them big business and they just want to shove us aside. No consultation with us so we can cooperate and try and upgrade we little shabby area. Instead, they just try to shove us out and all of them come see Greenwich Fishing Village here.”

“We are not against development,” interjected Monroe, “we just want to be included because we look at the Kingston Harbour as an economic zone in which we are stakeholders with billions of dollars worth of investments.”

With all the developments planned for the area, the GTFBS had long recognised that it would need to keep apace by transitioning their fishing village from a shanty town to a modern entity.

“So we went ahead from 2015 and put a redevelopment plan together. The then member of parliament was also Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, so we took the plan to Jamaica House and she bought into [it and] there were some agencies that were taking on different aspects of the whole plan.

“Then election run, administration changed and everything is back to square one,” he lamented.

The Jamaica Labour Party won the general election of February 25, 2016, sweeping the Simpson-Miller-led People’s National Party from power by a 33 to 30 majority.

Efforts to get a response from chief executive officer, National Fisheries Authority, Dr Gavin Bellamy, proved futile as he was said to be in meetings with a number of industrial fishers who were trying to meet the deadline for yesterday's meeting to access grants to be provided by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.