Legislation Underway for Mandatory Fishing Boat Insurance in Response to Hurricane Damage

Legislation is in the works to make insurance for fishing boats mandatory.

Chief Fisheries Officer Dr Shelly-Ann Cox said following the unprecedented destruction caused by the passage of Hurricane Beryl on July 1, Government was not taking chances.

“New draft legislation was approved by Cabinet, so we now have to go back to Cabinet and then to Parliament. But we’re looking at the timeline of this year, where we’ll mandate third-party liability insurance for vessels. So it’s something that we are actively pursuing,” she told the DAILY NATION yesterday.

Cox said they were also looking into parametric insurance and negotiating with companies to determine what would be an affordable premium. She added that any boat owner wishing to get comprehensive insurance would be free to do so but they wanted to at least ensure every boat had third party.

She acknowledged that some fisherfolk had bad experiences with insurance in the past, which was why they had to work out something reasonable, especially if Barbados was to meet its international obligations.

“Persons have had issues with the claims process in the past. So that would have discouraged them from signing up for insurance and then self-insuring based on their savings that they will put aside for boat repairs, or if anything happened to the boat.

“However, this kind of intervention took guidance from a lot of the International Maritime Organisation standards and guidelines. We want to make sure that we implement certain standards that we’re signing on to. That was really the premise from which we went about trying to integrate that into the new legislation. But knowing that, we still have to do a bit of groundwork before we can implement that,” she said.