Oct
8
Rosa Quintana at the informative meeting on the Aquaculture Act of Galicia. (Photo: Xunta de Galicia)
Aquaculture Act of Galicia will promote offshore activity
SPAIN
Thursday, October 08, 2015, 22:00 (GMT + 9)
The first Aquaculture Act of Galicia will make it possible to diversify the offshore activity, which for the Galician authorities means a future opportunity “because there is less competition for space than in the case of aquaculture, which is developed in inland waters”.
This was explained by the head of the Undersecretariat of Marine Affairs, Rosa Quintana, who also stressed that the future law seeks to facilitate multi-trophic aquaculture, that is to say, a type of activity that enables the combination of species that have different feeding requirements or different taxonomic groups. This will make it possible to create balanced systems in terms of environmental sustainability and production diversification.
Quintana stressed the importance of aquaculture to the economy of Galicia and noted that this legislation is intended to facilitate the commitment to developing this activity in a sustainable way from the social, economic and environmental viewpoints. To this end, she highlighted, “what is sought throughout the regulatory body is to streamline administrative procedures and provide greater legal certainty for all those developers who want to develop an aquaculture project.”
Two professional bodies of the Galician Administration, the Technical Commission of Aquaculture and the Interadministrative Aquaculture Commission, will provide scientific and technical advice on the design and implementation of measures related to aquaculture and advisory, control and monitoring of aquaculture planning issues and qualifying degree processing, respectively. The Interadministrative Commission will be attended by representatives of all departmental areas that have to do with the issuance of reports on whether or not to develop an aquaculture project.
Another important development that includes this bill is the possibility of voluntarily transforming shellfish gathering into aquaculture, allowing shellfish collection permit holders in natural banks to adapt, on a voluntary basis, their activity to the aquaculture practice.
The resulting activity will be referred to as aquaculture in collective farming parks and will have a specific regulatory regime. With it, the maintenance of the current collective shellfish gathering structure is guaranteed and it will be granted to the associations of the sector, with priority to those that have been managing the area under dispute. As the secretary highlighted, this will make it possible for them to become eligible for aid that the EU puts the provision of the aquaculture sector, which until now could not be used because they were shellfish collectors and not fish farmers.
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