The most recent meeting of the Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture (COFI) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ended July 15 in Rome, and Dr. Dyhia Belhabib represented the Sea Around Us.

COFI is essentially the global parliament of fisheries. It is the only global inter-governmental forum where major international fisheries and aquaculture problems and issues are examined.

Dyhia also participated at a COFI side event where catch reconstructions were discussed between the FAO, the Sea Around Us, country representatives, staff from The Pew Charitable Trusts and Vulcan Inc., and other interested parties. This side event was sponsored by the governments of The Bahamas and The Gambia in collaboration with the Sea Around Us. It was a good opportunity for Dyhia to explain what catch reconstructions are, and why they are helpful to countries for improving their national data on fisheries catches.

Here is a summary of the Sea Around Us’ experiences at COFI and the associated side event:

This was the second time that Sea Around Us participated at COFI. And this time, we had a side event organized by FAO and co-sponsored by The Bahamas and The Gambia, in collaboration with the Sea Around Us.

FAO strives for reliable catch statistics and they help countries in their data collection and capacity building. FAO relies heavily on statistics provided by countries. However, often some catch data are deemed to be non-existent simply because a country has no formal data collection program in place for certain aspects of fisheries, e.g., recreational fisheries or subsistence takes. This constrains the data FAO can report on behalf of these countries, leading to global statistics under-representing actual total catches, as clearly documented in a paper in Nature Communications by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller in early 2016 [accessible here], and in other regional [e.g., Pacific islands, accessible here] and country-specific publications [example accessible here or here]. This is where the Sea Around Us with its catch reconstruction approach can contribute, by using reasonable and conservative methods to estimate those catches missing from official data collection programs.

Side event at COFI

The Sea Around Us submitted a proposal for a COFI side event co-sponsored by the governments of The Bahamas and The Gambia. The COFI organizing committee combined this proposal with a data event proposed by FAO. Thus, FAO kindly organized a combined side event, and Dyhia Belhabib was able to meet several FAO statistical staff, including Marc Taconet, Lucas Garibaldi and the new Director of the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy and Resources Division (FIA), Manuel Barange.

During the event, Dyhia had the impression that there were misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding the reconstruction methods that the Sea Around Us and the large number of our international collaborators use. This misunderstanding indicates to us that many of the people who quickly criticize a country’s catch reconstruction often seem not to have read the relevant papers and reports carefully to understand the methods and approaches used. To criticize that the methods used are not ‘proper’ or ‘relevant’ seems to also miss the fact that around 1/3 of all reconstructions have now been embedded in the scientific literature and have thus undergone independent and critical expert peer-review. Thus, it is not viable for the international fisheries statistical community to continue to disregard, ignore or downplay this growing body of global work.

Some other criticism that made the assumption that all the reconstruction work was done from Canada (where the Sea Around Us is headquartered) also points to a clear lack of proper prior research from those who raised this point. The Sea Around Us worked with over 400 co-authors from 200 countries. Dyhia’s work alone requires her to spend over 50% of her time working on active engagement with our partners in West Africa. The diversity of the panel participants, including from The Gambia and The Bahamas (apparently their first ever participation at COFI) talking about catch reconstructions was very informative by itself.

As part of our engagement, Dyhia also held direct discussions with FAO staff to hopefully help dispel the lingering misconceptions about the methods used to derive the reconstructed catch data. After all, we often are able to use classical catch data estimation methods to ‘reconstruct’ catches. For example, in The Gambia we merely multiply data on fishing effort by a typical catch assessed for that kind of effort. The Gambia is currently re-assessing its artisanal fisheries using the catch reconstruction method to submit to the FAO these new data, corrected backwards in time. Both The Gambia and The Bahamas will be following up by including data resulting from catch reconstructions as part of their next data submission to FAO, a huge step for the countries and for the Sea Around Us.

This also led to a conversation about separating catch data by major fisheries sectors, namely small-scale and large-scale, which the Sea Around Us has applied to all countries in the world, in part in support of the FAO Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty, which was adopted at the last COFI meeting. This led to a conversation with the FAO team on fishing effort, and we will follow up on this. Hopefully one day, regional fisheries bodies, scientists and the general public will be able to access official data separated by sector, and thus better contribute to the public resource debate. We are hopeful that we will be able to collaborate with and assist FAO in the future. After all, we strive for the same goals.

Finally, The Bahamas made a statement on the main floor of COFI in support of the importance of considering reconstructed data as an alternative to ‘nothing’ in data reporting schemes.

Conclusion

This year’s COFI in Rome allowed the Sea Around Us to work with the FAO, member countries, and NGO’s to better understand the importance of catch reconstructions, which can help fill data gaps and provide a more accurate and comprehensive historical baseline for fisheries catches.

The Sea Around Us now has a video section where users can view interviews and presentations on a variety of subjects — from MPA’s to bottom trawling to shifting baselines. Click here to view the page.

The following story was published in the Inter Press Service News Agency, and is by journalist Christopher Pala.

The original article can be found here.

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In 2011, Dyhia Belhabib was a volunteer in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver when she was asked to participate in the Sea Around Us’s project to determine how much fish had been taken out of the world’s oceans since 1950 in order to better avoid depleting the remaining populations of fish.

Belhabib had studied fisheries science in her native Algeria, so she was initially asked to oversee the Algeria component. She ended up leading the research in 24 countries. And though she was an expert and an African, over the next five years, the world of African fisheries took her from surprise to surprise, many of them disquieting, just like Voltaire’s Candide. And echoing Pangloss, who repeats “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds” to a Candide dismayed at the state of the world, the Food and Agriculture Organization insisted the world catch was “practically stable.”

“The most depressing thing for me was the realization that African countries got no benefit at all from all the foreign fleets,” she said. “In fact, the fishing communities suffered a lot, and in most places, the only people who made money were the government officials who sold the fishing licenses.”

The study found that the global catch was 40 percent higher than the FAO reported and is falling at three times the agency’s rate. But under this picture of decline, Belhabib uncovered a dazzling array of cheating methods that highlighted the low priority most governments place on fisheries management – and implicitly on the health of the people who depend on the sea for most of their animal protein.

When Belhabib started with Algeria, she was puzzled to see that the government reported to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) that between 2001 and 2006, it had fished 2,000 tons of bluefin tuna on average, and yet reported to the FAO that it had caught almost none. Belhabib discovered that for once, the FAO’s zero catch was not a metaphor for “We have no data,” as the study found in many countries. In fact, undeterred by the fact the Algerian fishermen didn’t know how to fish tuna with long-line vessels, the government had simply bought some boats and sold their quotas to countries that did, notably Japan and Italy.

The next country she tackled was Morocco, which took over the Western Sahara in 1975 over the objections of its nomadic people and the international community. The territory has unusually rich waters and two-thirds of Morocco’s catch comes from there. The study estimated the local value of the catch since 1950 at 100 billion dollars, but since it was almost entirely sold in Europe at twice the price, the real value of the catch was 200 billion dollars.

Had the Moroccan government insisted that foreign fleets pay 20 percent of that value, as the EU claims it does today in Morocco (in fact, the study found it pays 5 percent), it could have received a revenue stream of one billion dollars a year, which, had it gone entirely to the Western Sahara, would have doubled the GDP per capita of 2,500 dollars a year for its 500,000 people. Under the current agreement, the EU pays 180 million dollars for access to all of Morocco’s waters, or 120 million dollars for access to the Western Sahara’s waters. How much actually goes to the territory is unclear. Other nations pay far less.

Mauritania has a fleet of locally flagged Russian and Chinese large trawlers that haul in whole schools of small blue-water fish called sardinella. The coast is studded with idle processing plants built to turn them into fish meal, which is used as animal feed. Belhabib discovered that the ships were reporting to the government only a tiny fraction of their actual haul – some of it illegally taken from neighboring countries and selling the rest for higher prices in Europe. “The authorities had no idea,” she said. “They thought their fleet were landing and reporting their whole catch.”

In Senegal, which unlike Mauritania has a strong tradition of fishing, President Macky Sall expelled the Russians in 2012 because their ships had depleted the populations of sardinella, infuriating many Senegalese. “The Russians just got licenses in Guinea Bissau and went back to Senegal and continued to fish, though not as much,” Belhabib said.

The Senegal reconstruction also documented how the European bottom-trawlers severely depleted the country’s near-shore. As population pressure increased demand for cheap fish, the number of artisanal fishermen soared, and many went to work up the coast in Mauritania, where few people fish. But a conflict in 1989 with Mauritania resulted in the expulsion of thousands of Senegalese fishermen, even as the industrial fleets were increasing their catch off both countries, most of it stolen.

Out of desperation, hundreds of Senegalese fishermen and dozens of canoes over the past decade have been boarding Korean and Portuguese converted trawlers that drop them off near the coasts of other countries. There, they illegally drop baited hooks into underwater canyons out of the reach of bottom trawlers where large, high-value fish can still be taken. These spots, marine biologists say, have served as marine reserves, places where coveted, overfished species could reproduce unhindered – and are now being depleted too, pushing the stocks closer to collapse.

Belhabib’s team also discovered to her horror that subsidized European Union fleets had flocked to the waters of countries weakened by civil war, notably Sierra Leone and Liberia, increasing their stolen catch when the people needed cheap protein most.

They found that South Africa made no attempt to control or even report the extensive fishery in the rich waters off its Namibian colony; in 1969, for example, 4.8 million tons of fish worth 6.2 million dollars were caught, but only 13 tons were reported to the FAO. Today, Namibia has the best-managed fishery in Africa after effectively banning foreign-flagged fleets

Finally, examinations of illegal fishing determined that Spain, whose seafood consumption is double the European average, steals more fish than any other nation, followed by China and Japan.

By Daniel Pauly

To manage the fisheries in their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), countries need to know their catch. Ideally, countries (i.e., their department of fisheries or equivalent agencies) would know much more—size and productivity of the stocks being exploited, economics of the fisheries, etc.—but it is essential to know about catch as the goal of a fishery is to generate and maintain a catch, and if possible, to increase it.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) does maintain a publicly available database of fisheries statistics, based on submissions by its member states, but this covers only landings (i.e., it omits discarded bycatch), does not identify the EEZs where the landings come from, doesn’t present the data by sectors (i.e., industrial, artisanal, subsistence and recreational) and doesn’t estimate the illegal and otherwise unreported and undocumented (IUU) catches usually generated by roving distant-water fleets.

A publicly accessible database that builds on the FAO statistics but overcomes the deficiencies mentioned above has now been created (at www.seaaroundus.org) which covers the fisheries of all maritime countries and territories of the world, from 1950 to 2010, and will be regularly updated. It is based on historic catch reconstructions by about 400 colleagues throughout the world, a decade-long support of the Sea Around Us by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the technical wizardry of programmers at Seattle-based Vulcan Inc., which complemented a two-year grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

The database, which also presents catch-related data and indicators (e.g., ex-vessel values of catches, different types of subsidies received by the fisheries of each country, stock-status plots) allows managers, scientists, students or ocean activist to find out how much is caught of the EEZ of each country and territory, by species or group of species, by sectors, by catch type (discarded or retained), and thus to acquire an understanding of the fisheries that was impossible to obtain previously, and which should help toward an improvement of their management. The data underlying the interactive graphic displays can be downloaded for further analysis.

All information on marine biodiversity in that database is derived from FishBase (www.fishbase.org) for fishes and from SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org) for invertebrates. These recognized online encyclopedias are closely linked to www.seaaroundus.org, and so allow for acquiring more information on exploited species.

Additionally, the database has a spatial expression, i.e., the catch data it contains have been plotted in space using knowledge of the global distribution of exploited fish and invertebrates (from FishBase and SeaLifeBase) and of the fisheries that rely on them. The result is that catch maps can be produced, by (group of) species and/or countries, showing, for example, how fisheries have expanded geographically from 1950 to the present.

As mentioned above, this database does not provide all the key information required to manage fisheries; notably, it lacks time series of biomass (i.e., the weight is of the fish left in the sea). We have plans to overcome this deficiency in the next few years. In the meantime, however, we hope that the interactive graphs and maps that can be viewed on, and datasets that can be downloaded from, www.seaaroundus.org will contribute to a better understanding of marine fisheries. For example, using this database, we could recently demonstrate that the world marine fisheries catches are about 50% higher than suggested by the FAO statistics (which can be viewed as a good thing, since it implies the oceans are more productive than we thought), but have been declining rapidly since 1996, which is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.

This was just one example of what can be done with our database and website. We hope that these tools, moreover, will be questioned by empowered users, and that their feedback will gradually improve both. We also hope that, in the process, our website will become a relied upon one-stop go-to place for information on marine fisheries, and will thus contribute, via their improved management, to the incomes and food security of the millions of people who depend on fish.

The database described here allow time contrasting, for the first, the performance of large-scale (industrial) and small-scale (artisanal and subsistence) fisheries on a global basis. The definitions of large-scale (‘industrial’, often mislabeled ‘commercial’) and small-scale (often mislabeled ‘traditional’) are those prevailing in each maritime country. Governments tend to favor industrial fisheries, although it is the small-scale fisheries with meets most of the sustainability criteria.

The original article in the Huffington Post can be found here.

How will the 10 billion people expected to be living on Earth by 2050 obtain sufficient and nutritious food?

In the face of declining fish catches this question is much harder to answer. Yet, in a wide ranging article, several researchers — including Dr. Dirk Zeller from the Sea Around Us — try to answer it.

Read the full commentary in Nature here.