Tuna Long-Liner vessels are expected to add about 50-60 million dollars annually in the country's seafood exports. Although conditions in the fisheries sector are not satisfactory due to a host of reasons, Tuna vessels, which operate in deep sea beyond 35 nautical miles, have made up the losses, recorded in conventional fisheries sector.
Currently, 20 Tuna vessels are operating in deep-sea waters of the country, whose contribution in total seafood comes to around $10 million in two months, according to conservative estimates.
"Although, fishing in conventional sector was low in December, January and February, Tuna vessels did excellently and contributed enough to cover up the losses," seafood exporters said.
Pakistan is exporting seafood mainly to Europe, Far East and Middle Eastern countries and some quantity to USA also, and the value of total export has been dwindling by $120-150 million every year.
Sources said that total exports of seafood could be over $150 million by the end of this fiscal year, which would be possible only because of contribution from Tuna vessels. Pakistan last year exported $137 million dollars worth of seafood.
While pointing out that if fishing through Tuna vessels were not there, the country's seafood exports would be even lower than last year's figures due to economic inability of local fishermen to go for fishing.
This year, they said, due to severely reduced economic viability of their voyages, boat owners in order to avoid continuous losses were compelled to stop fishing from Ramazan to Muharram.
"This resulted in a huge drop in processing in this period which was reduced to 20 percent only of their capacity, which created a very bad situation for the Export Processing Plants to operate in such a situation," sources said.
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