REMOTE SENSING ON LOCAL MULTIDAY FISHING FLEET TO MITIGATE MARITIME CRIMES By Commander PCMAT PERERA

摘要

As per the annual report of Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Recourses Development (MFARD) in 2015 a total local fishing fleet is nearly 63000 in year 2015. Out of that 4447 are Multiday fishing trawlers which are go beyond the national waters for industry. With the dawn of the peace, restrictions that have been imposed on fishing were relaxed with aiming to increase the catch. With the statistics of the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Recourses Development, Significant developments in the industry were seen in subsequent years. Similarly, numbers of fishing boats that are arrested while engaging various types of maritime crimes out at sea were also increased over the period of time. Rapid growth of maritime crimes was a security concern of the government and taken many steps to control the trend but long lasting solution is inevitable. Involvements for Drug Trafficking, Human Trafficking and Environmental Crimes such as Illegal Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) are some of the Maritime Crimes that Sri Lankan fishermen are involved or in other hand multiday fishing trawlers are used for. Even though governmental bodies are there to administer and to regulate multiday fishing fleet, absence of proper procedure to monitor them out at sea caused many security concerns. In an era where the man kind is capable enough to send vehicles far end to the universe to search external life, absence of a system to monitor own fishing fleet for the purpose of security and to ensure their safety is something to consider seriously. Most of developed countries are using various types of monitoring systems to monitor their fishing fleets out at sea. VMS (vessel monitoring system) is one of the recognized systems developed exclusively for fishing vessels monitoring. The government of Sri Lanka has taken the action to install VMS to local multiday fishing trawlers. To regulate a large fishing fleet it is necessary to have advance methods of monitoring rather depend on conventional methods. To manage with high density of fishing movements VMS will be the best application for the Sri Lankan context. Even though Sri Lankan government is stepping in to the new technologies lack of coordination among governmental bodies were significant and restructuring of the procedures of fishery administration must be done along with the new system. Remote sensing on local fishing fleet and information sharing is utmost important and my paper is to understand how it can be done effectively and to highlight the advantages that can be derived to strengthen maritime security through an effective monitoring and information sharing.