After nearly eight years of implementation, the policies under Decree No.67 have been brought into full play, meeting the aspirations of a large number of fishermen. The goal of modernising fishing vessels has been initially achieved, and the number of near-shore fishing vessels decreased by 13.2% while the number of offshore fishing vessels has increased by more than 20%. Decree No.67 has contributed to the investment and upgrading of dozens of fishing ports, storm shelter anchorage areas, and infrastructure projects for seed production, aquaculture, etc.
However, the implementation of Decree 67 also revealed many shortcomings, such as working loans for fishermen with relatively high interest rates, while the lending mechanism, approval procedures across many levels and methods for loans are not favourable for fishermen.
The new insurance policy only applies to 62% of the offshore fishing vessels and 56% of the fishermen. The new building and maintenance of a steel hull fleet has faced many difficulties, such as damaged ships due toowners of 65% of steel fishing vessels not properly maintaining their vessels according to regulations.
In some localities, the approval of the list of ship owners eligible to borrow capital for new construction in some cases is not correct, the ship owner is not knowledgeable about the profession. Some ship-owners do not have enough capacity to manage and operate new large-scale, modern ships.
Some fishermen said that this is a policy supported by State capital, but do not understand that this source of capital has been borrowed by fishermen from commercial banks and they must be responsible for this loan.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has reported to the Government and coordinated with ministries, branches and localities to develop a draft decree amending and replacing Decree No.67 in order to suit the new situation.
Accordingly, the new draft decree proposes the Government to consider and decide on several key contents as follows: continue to prioritise investment capital for construction of infrastructure for fisheries and aquaculture; provisions on debt restructuring so that fishermen continue to enjoy interest rate support for loans to build and upgrade ships which are at risk due to objective and force majeure reasons in order to create favourable conditions for ship-owners to continue production activities and repay loans; amending the ship-owner conversion policy, allowing the change of ship owners and new ship owners to continue enjoying supportive policies upon handover of the ship and loans from the previous ship-owner...
The State guarantees to maintain the level of support and insurance coverage during the period when customers have outstanding loans and increase the level of support for hull insurance and crew insurance support.
With the new contents as mentioned above, the new decree is expected to create more favourable conditions to support the fisheries sector in the future.
