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Poland Fishing and Forestry
The fishing and forestry industries were important
producers
for both domestic consumption and the export market during
the
communist era. For both industries, however, the resource
base
had begun to shrink noticeably by the end of the 1980s.
Fishing
The fresh-water fishing industry is concentrated in the
numerous lakes of northern Poland. Fishing fleets also
operate
along the 528-kilometer Baltic coast and in the North Sea
and the
North Atlantic. The deep-sea fleet, developed in the 1970s
to
serve the new official emphasis on fish as a cheap source
of
protein, had grown to 101 trawler-factory ships and ten
supply
and service vessels by 1982. Besides fishing in the North
Atlantic, Polish fleets fished off Africa, South America,
Alaska,
Australia, and New Zealand. Activity in the more distant
fisheries involved much higher expenses, however,
especially for
fuel. In the 1980s, the Baltic fishery, which provided
about 25
percent of the total catch, was plagued by shortages of
supplies
and storage facilities. At the same time, pollution in the
lakes
caused fresh-water catches to decline rapidly. In 1990
Poland
exported about 123,000 tons of fish and fish products.
Data as of October 1992
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