By Lisa Hamilton
One of the reasons the United States (U.S.) has lent the support of its Southern Command to Guyana is to help monitor illegal fishing in Guyana’s territorial waters. However, when questioned by the media at a press conference on Tuesday about the specific countries involved Chief of Staff of the Guyana Defense Force (GDF), Brigadier Godfrey did not state.
On Tuesday, Bess and Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller signed an agreement for the exchange of goods and services to improve defence cooperation between the two countries.
This includes increased inter-operability, readiness, and effectiveness of the respective military forces through increased logistics corporation. It is flexible when it comes to determining areas for further security bilateral cooperation.
Questioned as to the extent to which illegal fishing affects Guyana which has warranted U.S. attention, Admiral Faller stated: “Globally, illegal fishing is a significant problem and it is impacting food security globally and we’ve seen recent incidents that, off the waters of Ecuador, where Chinese fishing fleet of up to 300 vessels was proven to have incurred into the Exclusive Economic Zone. So, our efforts working bilaterally and then working regionally are to increase and strengthen what we call ‘domain awareness’ which is a term for sharing information about who or what is moving on the sea the sea and over the sea. It’s very important,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Bess said that Guyana is challenged by illegal fishing and the country has worked through inter-agency channels to deal with such. The Chief of Staff said that the added assistance from the U.S. has been welcomed.
However, no specific country was named when Bess was asked twice which countries pose illegal fishing threats to Guyana. “The vessels that are involved in illegal fishing in our territory most of them are emanating from our neighbouring countries,” he said.
Guyana supports the international treaty intended to stop Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. The GDF is responsible for protecting Guyana’s EEZ. In 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture agreed to work collaboratively to eradicate illegal fishing in Guyana’s coastal and inland waterways. In 2016, the country also signed an agreement with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for cooperation to prevent, deter and eliminate IUU fishing in its territorial waters.
