With regard to the control of fishing 

 companies, the state-owned apparatus 

 continues for the most part to remain intact 

 with only small pockets of privatization. The 

 DALMOR high-seas company, for example, 

 has several employees who hold shares in the 

 company. 



47 



While privatization is still at the drawing 

 board stage for the fishing companies, the 

 processing and marketing sector of the 

 industry has made great strides. Private 

 enterprises are expanding rapidly and 

 competing with former state-owned 



marketing monopolists. The government 

 organizations which have had a monopoly on 

 the processing and selling of fishery 

 products,'** are now faced with numerous 

 private wholesale and retail shops that are no 

 longer obliged to buy their inventories from 

 Polish companies; they can now import 

 them, if the price is right. Foreign fish 

 wholesalers have established branch offices in 

 Poland and compete with both state-owned 

 and private Polish suppliers. In the fish retail 

 sector, there has been an explosion of new 

 private outlets. ■*' Already in 1991 over 68 

 percent of all fishery retail outlets were 

 privately owned, and by 1993 the retail 

 privatization is almost complete. It should be 

 noted that private retail shops have 

 substantially better facilities than their state- 

 run competitors 



50 



The most effective privatization is in the 

 smallish Baltic fisheries where, during 1990- 

 93, private fisherman leased 137 cutters from 

 state-owned companies.^' 



Legislation is now being discussed by the 

 Polish parliament which is designed to 

 introduce fishery management principles, 

 policies and standards that would be 



comparable to those currently prevailing in 

 the European Community." 



VI. nSHERIES ADMINISTRATION 



In 1989, after the downfall of Poland's 

 communist-led government, the Central Board 

 of Fisheries, which administered the entire 

 fishing sector (including the fleets, processing 

 plants, as well as wholesale and retail 

 marketing) was dissolved. Following a series 

 of changes, fisheries were finally placed 

 under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of 

 Transport and Maritime Economy in 

 Warsaw." The Ministry immediately began 

 the process of privatizing as much of the 

 fishing industry as possible in order to adapt 

 to the new market conditions being created in 

 Poland. 



RYBEX, the state-owned fishery export 

 company of Poland's Ministry of Foreign 

 Trade, monopolized Polish fishery exports for 

 40 years. It collected a 3.5 percent 

 commission on such exports. This displeased 

 the fishing companies that had not only 

 produced the export commodities, but often 

 also initiated contacts with foreign importers, 

 negotiated the contracts, and shipped the 

 goods. They considered RYBEX a parasitic 

 organization, but under the communist system 

 of centralized control there was no recourse. 

 To make matters worse, RYBEX paid the 

 exporting companies an average price for the 

 same commodity, regardless of quality. 

 DALMOR, which exported the highest quality 

 of fishery products, felt that RYBEX was 

 subsidizing companies with poorer quality 

 goods, stifling any incentive to improve and 

 make a better product. A new law, passed in 

 1990, allowed private companies to export on 

 their own account. DALMOR was the first of 

 the three large high-seas fishing companies to 



223 



