LATVIA
Any further decline in quotas will hurt Varita
EU support programmes have been very useful In the Baltic Sea the main catch in terms of volumes is of sprat followed by herring, cod, and flounder. In the Gulf of Riga on the other hand, Baltic herring is the primary catch followed by European smelt, while the coastal fishery targets mostly herring and flounder. The sprat and herring fishery together from all fishing zones amounts to some 50,000 tonnes. This fishery provides the raw material for the Latvian fish processing sector including for the canning industry. In addition the fish is block frozen and is exported to countries in Eastern Europe. This trade has been hit lately by the embargo on exports to Russia and other countries of the customs union with the result that fishers and processors are working hard to find new markets for their pelagic fish.
trawlers targeting herring and sprats in the Gulf of Riga. Varita catches some 3,200 tonnes of fish a year in total, which is the size of its annual quota. Each year, however, the quota has been decreasing. Figures from the Latvian Ministry of Agriculture show that the quota for sprat in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Riga has almost halved over the last decade from 58,000 tonnes to 30,000 tonnes in 2015, while the quota for herring has been more stable moving from just under 25,000 tonnes to just over that figure over the same period.
Quotas have been sliding for a decade
Mr Lapins says the fall in quotas is based on the evaluations by the scientists studying the resource, evaluations that he finds difficult to agree with. But companies can do little to prevent
In Saulkrasti, 50 km north of Riga along the coast, Agris Lapins owns a fishing company with four
The company has four vessels fishing for sprat and herring in the Gulf of Riga. www.eurofishmagazine.com
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the decline in quotas, he says, but the situation is not good for us. The only way to compensate for smaller quantities of fish is to create a product with more added value, to make more with less. When the weather starts to warm up the vessels will load up with ice from an ice generator in the factory so that the fish can be stored in ice as soon as it arrives on board. The four vessels in the Gulf of Riga can be tracked in real time. A vessel monitoring system shows the positions of all the vessels in the area, the ports they come from, whether they are fishing vessels or not, and other data besides. With a glance at the screen Mr Lapins can tell what his vessels are doing out on the water, whether they are fishing or returning to port. The
vessels fish throughout the year with the exception of a month in summer from 10 May to 10 June when the fish are spawning. If in summer it gets very hot (beyond 20 degrees centigrade) then too fishing is interrupted because the quality of the fish tends be lower. From October to the end of April is the period when the quality of the fish is at its peak. When the temperature of the water is 6 degrees the quality of the fish is good. In summer the fish tends also to have more fat, though this does not impact the quality in any way, says Lelde Lielmane, the sales manager. The decrease in the quota allocated has meant that the company really works for only seven or eight months in the year. The four months in summer (May to August) are used for
The processing factory is just a few meters away from where the fish is landed. Eurofish Magazine 3 / 2016
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03/06/16 5:31 pm