an idea of how extensive these shipbuilding 

 activities were over the past 30 years. 

 Information on the building of fishery vessels 

 (as well as any other vessel) was a state secret 

 under the old communist regime, as was the 

 number of persons employed. The authors 

 made no attempt to obtain additional 

 information since historical background will 

 not significantly help in understanding either 

 the present or the future activities of 

 Ukrainian shipbuilding given the changing 

 economic conditions. 



To modernize the Ukrainian fleet of fish 

 processing and transport vessels, the 

 Ukrainian Government organized a conference 

 on June 23, 1993, in Nikolayev on the Black 

 Sea, the center for Ukrainian fishing vessel 

 construction. Attending were fishery experts 

 from Ukraine and the Russian Federation and 

 reportedly also representatives of various 

 German companies.* 



A West German company has delivered to 

 the Nikolaev shipyards modern cold storage 

 and refrigeration equipment to build 16 

 supertrawlers. Anatolii KYNAR, a 



representative of the Ukrainian President in 

 the Nikolaev region, stated at a press 

 conference that Ukraine can earn up to $900 

 million a year (by the year 2000) by 

 modernizing its shipyards and gearing them 

 for exports. 



ni. CATCH AND GROUNDS 



A. Fishery Catch 



Before the dissolution of the USSR, 

 statistical data on the Ukrainian fisheries catch 

 was collected by the AU-Union Research 

 Institute for Fisheries and Oceanography 

 (VNIRO) in Moscow, transmitted for 



publication to the Food and Agricultural 

 Organization (FAO) in Rome, and 

 incorporated into the published catch data for 

 the Soviet Union. Each former Soviet 

 republic, however, kept its own set of 

 statistics, and historical data on the Ukrainian 

 catch are probably available, but the authors 

 have been unable to obtain them from the 

 Ukrainian State Committee on Fisheries 

 despite repeated requests. A limited set of 

 January-June 1992 and 1993 catch statistics 

 was graciously supplied by the Danish 

 Ministry of Fisheries and FAO (appendix 5). 



During the first 6 months of 1993, the 

 Ukrainian high-seas catch amounted to 

 155,000 metric tons (t), almost 30 percent 

 below the catch harvested during the same 

 period in 1992. Despite the decreased catch 

 in 1993, the supply of edible fishery products 

 decreased only slightly (by 0.2 percent). In 

 1993, the utilization of the catch to produce 

 edible fishery products was almost equal to 

 the 1992 figure (110,000 t in 1992 and 

 109,000 t in 1993). This was possible 

 because the reduction of harvested fish to 

 fishmeal during January-June 1993 decreased 

 by 40 percent (from 17,000 to 10,000 t), 

 compared with such catch reduction during 

 the comparable time period in 1992. 



To earn hard currencies and pay licensing 

 fees for access to foreign fishing zones, the 

 Ukrainian marine fishing companies exported 

 82,000 t of the catch, or about 73 percent of 

 the 6-month landings. Only about 1,000 t 

 was exported to the Commonwealth of 

 Independent States. The specific commodities 

 exported are not known, but were most likely 

 frozen fish. The above statistics appear to 

 indicate that the Ukrainian people received 

 precious little of the country's fishery catch 

 for their own consumption; in the first half of 

 1993 only 26,000 t, or less than 25 percent of 



152 



