Report Of The Technical Consultation On The Measurement Of Fishing Capacity PDF Download

The Technical Working Group on the Management of Fishing Capacity produced a wide consensus on the need to develop more appropriate measurement methods and monitoring mechanisms, including fishing vessel registry; to give far greater emphasis to fleet monitoring and the assessment of fleet dynamics; to adopt policies which clearly specify access conditions; to give a greater priority to management methods aiming at adjusting rather than blocking the pervasive tendency for overfishing and over-investment resulting from open access conditions; to reassess and strengthened management methods used and implementation procedure, in recognition that the applicability of available management methods would nevertheless remain situation specific; and to approach the reduction of fishing capacity with care, avoiding spillover effects and carefully controlling the induced effects of scrapping programmes. It provided guidance and made a number of recommendations to better address and tackle these issues within national jurisdictions, and recognized that the high seas may be confronted with an even greater overcapitalization problem than EEZ fisheries due to the prevalence of open access conditions and a lack of internationally agreed measures control fishing capacity. It recommended that the 1995 UN Agreement and the FAO Compliance Agreement be ratified, and suggested that complementary measures would be required, aiming in particular at: improving monitoring mechanisms for high seas fleets; strengthening and empowering regional fishery organizations; creating new organizations to ensure full coverage of the resource concerned; controlling the disposal ('dumping') of excess national capacity in general, and of older vessels to developing countries in particular; and at addressing the growing importance of flags of convenience.--Publisher's description.