The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE crawfish season appears to have gotten off to a slower start that usual in terms of yield, the Bahamas Commercial Fishers Alliance president said yesterday, although it was still too early to call the the season a bust.

“This is the first trip of the season,” Adrian Laroda told Tribune Business.

“It’s just been slow and long. It’s unusual because normally the first trip is five to 10 days, but we are now looking to the fourth week. A lot of guys just don’t want to waste time coming back to shore with nothing then going back out again, so they’re trying to make this first trip profitable. They’re just having difficulty finding harvestable product because poachers would have been wreaking havoc,”

“There are people who went on to bait their traps two weeks before the season opened, and they came back with reports that they had seen a lot of product out there and they were expecting a good yield, but by the time they got back out there their condos were damaged, traps were damaged and that sort of thing. It’s not slow in terms of productivity, it’s slow in terms of the yield.”

Mr Laroda saidthis may not be indicative of how the remainder of the season will unfold.

“This may not be indicative of the entire season,”he added. “After the first trip fishermen come in, and when they go back out again they’re able to find more product. It’s just that this first trip, poachers got to some of the traps before the local fishermen and harvested the product before them.

“I wouldn’t say the season is going to be a bust but this first trip out has not been very good for fishermen. We’ll see what happens later on. Most boats go out August 1, and in five-seven days guys come back in because the would have reached their capacity, but we have guys now looking to go into their fourth week.”

In a previous interview Mr Laroda said that he was optimistic that the customary target of five million pounds of crawfish would be hit this season.

CARICOM’s Office of Trade Negotiations (OTN), in a bulletin last year on the region’s crawfish industry and trade volumes, noted that the Bahamas was its “top exporting member state” based on 2009 data, accounting for 86 per cent - some $60.372 million of its total $70.2 million crawfish exports for that year - even though this nation’s prices are 20 per cent higher than the global average.