By Bernadette H. Carreon
Horizon news staff

Another fisheries observer will be deployed by the Ministry of Justice this month.
Justice Minister Elias Camsek Chin said that the fisheries observer program which has been transferred from Bureau of Marine Resources to the Division of Marine Law Enforcement.
Last week Palau sent Jim Kloulechad as an observer to accompany one of the commercial fishing vessels on their fishing trip.
The program trains fisheries observers to board commercial fishing vessels to gather data to be used for science, compliance and surveillance.
Chin said the ministry has also requested the Secretariat of Pacific Community to assist the observers in acquiring Global Positioning System equipment and iridium cellular phones to help improve the program.
The ministry is aiming to deploy three fisheries observers every month to board the commercial fishing vessels to gather data.
Earlier Peter Sharples, SPC Port sampler and observer coordinator was in Palau for a week to get the observer program going aagain.
Sharples said that the observer task is to gather "unbiased and independent" data that will be useful to the fisheries management in the region.
He said data that is supposed to be gathered by the observer includes the kind of fish loaded into the vessel, how much is marine species are thrown and how much are unloaded.
Palau has obtained training from the SPC on how to gather data as a fisheries observer.
Since the program was introduced to Palau in 1996, there were at least 10 observers who accompanied commercial fishing vessels and collected data.
He said he was in Palau to provide technical assistance to DMLE to get the program running again.