AFTER years of being dormant, the Guyana National Fisherfolk Organisation (GNFO) was resuscitated following its elections last Friday.
During a brief ceremony and election exercise held in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom, subject Minister, Zulfikar Mustapha, told the gathering that great responsibility comes with the restoration of the organisation.
He said the officers, who will be placed in various areas, should keep in mind that their job is to serve the fishermen of Guyana to the best of their abilities.
“As a government, we want to ensure that the benefit of the programmes and policies that we have put in place reach the real beneficiaries, and we have some very unscrupulous persons in this country who want to make maximum profit at the expense of the poor and the working class of this country, and we will not tolerate it,” Minister Mustapha affirmed.

Further, he said: “This is happening at an opportune time when the Ministry of Agriculture and the Government of Guyana are encouraging our fisherfolk to become more aware of your role and responsibility, and also your participatory approach to fisheries management and decision-making process of our country.”
Additionally, Minister Mustapha told the fisherfolk that the organisation will receive the full support of the Government of Guyana in the development of the country’s fisheries sector. “The government is committed to giving you the kind of support and, as a matter of fact, what we recognise is that the fishing industry as a whole has the potential to bring in much-needed revenue to the country,” the minister said.
Minister of Labour, Joseph Hamilton, also told the newly elected members of the organisation that “co-op societies” should remodel and modernise themselves to better fulfil their mandates.

“When I got into this job, the first thing I learnt is that one of the richest countries in this world, Switzerland, is built and the pillar that it stands on is cooperative societies,” Minister Hamilton said, adding: “I think too long in Guyana we have done an injustice to cooperative society and, in a lot of instances, we have given it a bad name and it has left a bad taste in people’s mouth.”
Hamilton further told the gathering that through his ministry, cooperative societies like the fisherfolk organisation will benefit from a number of training opportunities, which he hopes they, the group, would take advantage of. “We will support every cooperative society by training because a lot of times the society dies, not because of money, it is because of the management of it and so we are hoping at the level of the cooperative department and at the Board of Industrial Training to give technical training to officers of co-ops,” Minister Hamilton said.

He added that the training exercises will help cooperative societies to improve the management of their respective organisations, and it will also teach persons how to handle finances and make smart investments choices on behalf of their organisations.
Speaking about the issues facing fisherfolk, newly elected Chairman, Pameshwar Jainarine, said: “Some of the issues faced when the organisation was resuscitated in 2015 are the same issues we face now. These include inadequate boarding facilities, run-down wharfs, bad roads leading to some of the landing sites, lack of trained personnel managing the landing sites, poor markets and prices for our catch, and payment of VAT on items that were made to no longer attract VAT.
“The GNFO members couldn’t deal with the issues. They were under the thought process that the former Minister of Agriculture would’ve assisted, and after seeing that nothing was being done, they became frustrated and stopped attending meetings. We are functioning but not as we’d like. This is why we’ve embarked on a nationwide scoping exercise to bring more landing sites, or what we would say ‘the primary fisherfolk organisations’ into the GNFO,” Jainarine said.