The Federal Government is sending a long-awaited action plan during current week to European Union (EU) to get the country's over two years banned seafood export lifted, sources said on Thursday. According to statements of the federal and provincial ministers given on various occasion, the country has to invite the EU officials for inspection of fish harbour, seafood processing plants, fishing boats and seafood auction halls in August-September period this year.
The action plan that the EU had previously asked with a complete schedule of all sites identified for inspection was not until now made because the government was not prepared to invite the European experts to carry out a thorough inspection. There was a challenge ahead of the government to implement the EU's standards before such call.
Marine Fisheries Department has evolved the plan and will send it to EU this week, sources said, adding that about all spadework has been done in this connection. Similarly, Karachi Fish Harbour Authority (KFHA) has also carry out a rehabilitation project of the fish harbour and did much of the needed work on modification of fishing boats, revamping of auction halls and implementation of EU terms.
Although, EU has not marked Pakistan in the list of countries it is scheduled to visit this year for carrying out of such a job at their harbours and seafood factories. The seafood exporters hope that the submission of the plan will yield positive results.
The plan will also tag a list of only those seafood exporting plants which follow the EU standards, however, officials of KFHA said that before the EU visit the authority will have ensure tidiness at fish harbour.
KFHA has already started cleaning the harbour water and sent a formal request to the federal government for carrying out dredging so that the navigational channel could be deepened and filthy from seabed could be removed. According to Sindh Fisheries Minister Zahid Ali Bhurgari, the government has issued work orders of modification of about 170 big-sized fishing boats which will shortly be completed. Some 141 boats are already under modification process while 38 boats have already been modified, according to the officials.
Recently, board of directors of KFHA has approved master plan for developing the fish harbour in line with the global standards. The cost for implementation of the master plan has initially been estimated at Rs 2.500 billion. It may be mentioned here that the EU had slapped the ban on Pakistan's seafood products in April 2007 after rounds of inspection for the last some years.
The EU wanted the government to follow its specifications to ensure clean seafood catch with traceability codes, tidiness in boats and the maintenances of cold-chain of products from boats to auction halls and then to factories, but it could not do. The country's seafood export has marked the figure 236.586 million dollar for the first time in last fiscal year up from 211.649 million dollar in fiscal year 2007-08 despite a ban by EU.
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