Fisheries Administration and Lagislation

Unit 6 - Laws and policies related to the environment

6.4. National Environment Policy 2006
A National Environment Policy was adopted by Cabinet in 2006, giving rise to a range of issues, some of which are parallel to concerns about fisheries law and policy. The industry-friendly aspects of the environmental reforms have been criticized by a broad base of environmental supporters.
The Policy itself has no timelines, institutional responsibilities or targets, but instead offers measures and possible action plans that may or may not materialize. The Policy does refer to fisheries, but only indirectly in terms of the effect that environmental degradation could have on fisheries and food for the poor, the need for wetlands and the desirability of building adequate environmental safeguards into development projects in the islands, in particular those relating inter alia to deep sea fishing.
A key concern of stakeholder groups is the Policy’s objective of decentralization (also in the Fisheries Policy) and the lack of human capacity to implement it effectively. The question of whether existing sectoral policies would be replaced, such as those relating to forest, water, biodiversity and pollution, does not appear to have been addressed. Another issue is that other environmental laws have been disregarded, such as the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 or the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974 as amended in 1988. The lack of transparency in developing the Policy was a prominent and widespread concern.
The process for environmental governance described above impacts on the fisheries sector because of the nature of the process and the decisions being taken that affect the fisheries sector. It was explained that proposed environmental legislation declares that law to be paramount, so if there is any conflict between environmental and fisheries laws, the former would prevail. Here again, some of the basic rules of interpretation needs to be adhered to give primary to one sector over the other.
In case of a recent versus old legislation, the latest would ordinarily prevail.
In case of special versus general legislation, the special legislation prevails.