With the first 40 days of fishing completed, the first Peruvian anchovy fishing season in the central-northern area of the country has already exceeded 2 million metric tons of catches, 82% of the quota assigned by the Ministry of Production (PRODUCE).
Luis Icochea, former director of the Institute of the Sea of Peru (IMARPE) and professor at the La Molina Agrarian University (UNALM), highlighted that “these results demonstrate that in the Peruvian anchovy fishery there is no overfishing or predation of the resource since, despite the climatic variability, the anchovy has continued to breed thanks to the precautionary management of this activity.”
”The most likely thing is that the industrial fleet will comply with 100% of the assigned quota in the coming days, which will allow a recovery of this sector, which has been hit hard in recent years due to sea warming which took away temporarily the anchovy but it did not disappear,” Icochea said.
Icochea specified that the fishing fleet only captures less than 25% of the (minimum) observable biomass, leaving more than 7 million tons of anchovy in the sea for future reproduction. “Luckily, a good second fishing season is expected, but we should not be triumphalists because we depend on the oceanographic conditions of the Peruvian sea,” he stated.
Landings
According to the latest official reports from PRODUCE, the Áncash region leads anchovy landings with 32% of the total, followed by La Libertad with 26% and Callao with 11%. Currently, in all areas, the predominant anchovy size of is 12-12.5 cm, the legally permitted capture size.
