Brussels, 13/10/2006 (Agence Europe) - After a two-day trip to Romania, Joe Borg, the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, was in Bulgaria on 12 and 13 October to meet fishermen and members of the government of the country.
On 12 October, Mr Borg visited the port of Varna on the Black Sea to meet representatives of the fisheries sector and Nihat Tahir Kabil, the Bulgarian Minister for agriculture and forestries. The Commissioner spoke of the country's progress in implementing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and visited the fisheries monitoring centre of Varna, which comes under the competence of the National Agency of Fisheries and Aquaculture (NAFA). This centre hosts the satellite vessel monitoring system (VMS), which will soon cover all vessels greater than fifteen metres in length. The Varna Centre is also equipped with a new IT system to register catches. On Friday 30 November, Mr Borg met the Transport Minister, Peter Vasilev Mutafchiev, to discuss the Green Paper of the Commission on the future European maritime policy. In the Bulgarian capital, Mr Borg met the Bulgarian President, Georgi Parvanov, the vice prime minister and foreign affairs Minister, Ivailo Georgiev Kalfin and the Minister for European affairs, Meglena Kouneva.
Since the decline, in the 1990s, of deep-sea catches, the fisheries sector in Bulgaria has concentrated on activities in the Black Sea. The country's fleet is made up of around 1000 vessels and the fisheries sector employs 12,300, more than 5000 of whom are active in the field of aquaculture. Bulgaria adopted sizeable reforms in order to take on the rules of the CFP (fleet registration, a computerised catch registration system, vessel monitoring by satellite and the creation of a "markets and structures" unit within NAFA). Furthermore, the Commission is analysing the draft national strategic plan for the fisheries sector. (lc)