Ukrainian seafood lovers can look forward to a 40 percent drop in the price of fish once a package of new reforms in the fishing industry does its work, the new head of the State Fisheries Agency Yarema Kovaliv said at a press conference in Kyiv on July 16.
The future reform plans include improving industry inspections, attracting investors, and making the State Fisheries Agency more transparent.
“We will reduce the number of administrative staff, but keep the same amount of fish inspectors,” Kovaliv said of the plans to reform the agency itself.
“These alterations will help us to cut the number of staff from 1,700 to 800 people, and tackle corruption at some levels,” he said. “The lowest salary for inspectors will be Hr 4,000 (per month), and they will go through new staff training.”
According to Kovaliv, once the year-and-a-half-long program of reforms is complete, the price of fish in Ukraine should drop by up to 40 percent.
He said Ukraine’s underused potential in the industry is colossal because the country has plenty of stretches of water to exploit. But he said corruption among industry workers was stunting its growth.
“The average worker’s salary is too low, which encourages them to take bribes,” Kovaliv said.
To boost business and reduce bureaucracy, Kovaliv promised to remove quotas imposed on private fishing companies and entrepreneurs, replacing them with five-year licenses, which he said would reduce bureaucracy.
Fees for fishing will also be lowered, and auctions for rights to catch particular species of fish will be introduced, which Kovaliv said would help cut middlemen out of the fish market. In addition, the agency is to issue special certificates detailing the origin of every catch.
“These tactics will definitely help simplify the system of getting permission to catch fish,” he said, adding that a brand new electronic system at the agency would make managing the country’s water bodies both easier and more transparent.
The electronic innovations will include an updated official website for the agency, he said.
To help push through the reforms, Kovaliv said the agency will be aided by First Deputy Interior Minister Eka Zguladze, the Georgian-born reformer already well known in Ukraine for her rebranding of Kyiv’s police force. Kovaliv said the reform of his agency would bear more fruit if it could draw on Zguladze’s experience to change its old inspections system.
Kovaliv was appointed to lead the State Fisheries Agency in April after his predecessor, Oleh Nikolenko, was fired in the wake of an internal investigation by the Agriculture Ministry. The ministry found Nikolenko had allegedly caused $9.4 million in losses to the state, including $1.4 million pilfered from the bank accounts of the port of Sevastopol.
In its report, the Agriculture Ministry described the agency as “an organized crime group.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
