About 2 hours before the Ministry called its press conference, the leaders of Oceana Belize and the Coalition for Sustainable Fisheries called its own press engagement to explain why they fired the first shot at the Government on this gillnet ban issue.
Here's what they had to say in response to the government's insistence that their press release was unfair and preemptive:
Representatives from Oceana tell 7News that there are 2 possible reasons why these aggrieved fishermen did not benefit from the 2-million-dollar projects to transition away from gillnets. The first reason is that they did not have an active and valid license to fish in Belize. The second possible reason is that the Fisheries Department failed to include them on the list of licensed fishermen. We are told that at the very beginning of the talks on a possible gillnet ban, Oceana made a request to the Fisheries Department for a list of all the licensed fishermen under the Freedom of Information Act. They say that the Fisheries Department furnished them with that list, and they made sure to engage all the fishermen listed.
