Murmansk crabbers hit by dramatic contraction of fishing season

Murmansk crabbers have been hit by huge contraction of the fishing season 2009 resulting from the respective government order, fishery sources in Murmansk told www.fishnet-russia.com (https://www.fishnet.ru/).

In a greater detail, for the first time during the recent five years the Russian fleets will not conduct commercial red king fishery in the Barents Sea until September 2009. More specifically, according to the order No.407 dated 12 December 2008 issued by the Federal Fisheries Agency, commercial fishery of red king crab in the Barents Sea is prohibited from 1 January 2009 to 31 August 2009.

Therefore, four companies who have received red king crabs quotas for offshore fishery in the Russian EEZ in 2009 will have to wait for nine months before they will be allowed to harvest 11,080 tonnes or 2,915,480 crabs all together.

Those companies and their quotas are given in the table as below.

Note: in 2006 red king crab quotas for offshore fishery in the Barents Sea were distributed between 22 companies, the number decreased to 4 in 2007-2009. The quotas are based on the average size of ca.4 kg per individual.

According to the aforementioned order of the Agency, the red king crab fishery is banned until 1 September 2009 for commercial purposes only, while the operations under the research and stock conservation programs remain allowed. As per the day of publishing the January issue of the Russian Fish Report, no information regarding research quotas 2009 have been available. As for the previous years, in 2007-2008 two national fishery research institutes, namely Murmansk-based PINRO and Moscow-based VNIRO, have been conducting surveys out of the following quotas: