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• 2 min de lectura
Fishing guild leaders urged the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) to immediately resolve the lack of simultaneous Spanish interpretation at its Scientific Committee (SC14) meeting, which is taking place in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.
These meetings will continue next week with key decisions for the sustainable management of jumbo squid.
It is worth remembering that SPRFMO's own Finance and Administration Committee (FAC) had approved, after years of efforts, a Fund for Spanish Interpretation aimed at ensuring the effective participation of Spanish-speaking countries in the organization.
However, at the current Scientific Committee meeting, this commitment has not been met, under the argument that a service provider could not be secured.
Alfonso Miranda Eyzaguirre, president of the Committee for the Sustainable Management of Jumbo Squid in the South Pacific (Calamasur), described what happened as a "regrettable omission" that must be resolved immediately:
He pointed out that it is unacceptable that, despite the organization itself having recognized the need for Spanish interpretation and having approved a specific fund for it, the lack of a provider is now being used as an excuse.
"Simultaneous interpretation has been available anywhere in the world for decades. What is at stake is not a logistical detail, but the real capacity of the countries that contribute 99% of the resource to participate on an equal footing in decisions that define the future of jumbo squid," he stated.
For her part, Elsa Vega, president of the National Society of Artisanal Fishing of Peru (Sonapescal), also considered it important to have the agreements being adopted internationally on squid capture in Spanish.
The president of Calamasur maintained that SPRFMO manages fisheries from which approximately 99% are caught off the coasts of Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, Spanish-speaking countries.
"That their representatives —including technicians and artisanal fishermen whose interests are at stake— must follow, discuss, and negotiate complex technical decisions in English, without available interpretation, places these countries at a real disadvantage compared to English-speaking delegations and distant-water industrial fleets, which do operate comfortably in the organization's working language," he specified.
He added that the practical result is an asymmetry of negotiating power: it is not just a matter of linguistic courtesy, but of the effective capacity of a member country to influence decisions that directly affect the livelihood of its artisanal fishermen.
