Measures applied to strengthen management of fishing activities in Vietnam
In the last years, the fishery sector in Vietnam has been thoroughly restructuring to be more professional and modern via the use of IT and digital transformation. This has brought about great achievements and performance boost.
According to Mr. Tran Van Phuc, Director of Binh Dinh Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, in addition to urgent solutions to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in recent years, Binh Dinh province has applied experimental software to trace the origin of caught seafood.
According to him, the electronic fishing log initiative has made remarkable progress after over 5 years in practice. The paper-based fishing logs in the past have revealed several limitations, all of which have been resolved with the application of electronic fishing logs.
The application of electronic fishing logs has helped vessel owners to fully and accurately record their catches, with the addition of precise fishing coordinates, he added.
According to Mr. Tran Dinh Luan, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development provided funded the Department of Fisheries to build a phase I seafood traceability software in 2017.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development continued to support governmental agencies financially throughout 2019 and 2020 in order to refine this software in accordance with the features of Vietnam's fisheries sector.
Stakeholders in the deployment of the seafood traceability software include fishermen, fishing ports, companies processing seafood for export, local and central authorities.
The software will be deployed in six stages, including: Manage exporting vessels and record initial data on ships and crews; record fishing volume through electronic devices; manage vessels entering ports, update on fishing volume; supervise output at ports, issue loading and unloading receipt for trading at port; issue certificate of origin for raw materials used in processing plants.
