Methods for Assessing Mediterranean Fisheries - Fao - Copemed

Methods for Assessing Mediterranean Fisheries
Pere Oliver
all boats over 15 m was important, even prior to ratification of that Agreement,
and would constitute a de facto commitment to flag State responsibility.
55. The Secretariat was requested to prepare a simple and
comprehensive questionnaire to collect data on fishing vessels and
distribute it immediately to all member countries. The Council agreed to a
deadline for submission to the Secretariat of complete data on national fishing
fleets operating in the Mediterranean in 1994-5 by the time of the October 1995
meeting of the FAO Council. The data should be broken down into vessel
categories over and under 15m OAL (overall length), and these two categories
should in turn, be divided into sub-categories of vessels predominantly operating
active and passive fishing gear respectively. Each sub-category should include a
breakdown of vessels by total HP and/or total Gross Registered Tonnage (GRT)
as available.
At this meeting the following resolution was also adopted:
GFCM Resolution 95/4
The Council calls on its member countries to prepare a list of
fishing boats in operation from national ports in the Mediterranean and
provide this information to the GFCM Secretariat by October 1995 in the
form specified in the report of the Twenty-first Session of the General
Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean.
Unfortunately, seven years later the list of fishing boats in operation from
national ports in the Mediterranean has still not been completed.
In July 1995 a Group of Independent Experts to Advise the European
Commission on the Fourth Generation of Multi-annual Guidance
Programmes was established to report to the European Commission. The work
carried out by this group is relevant regarding the establishment of an effortcontrol
system in Mediterranean fisheries, based on the assessment of levels of
fishing mortaly.
Effort is a measure of the activity of the fishing fleet. The term is, however,
ambiguous as it is used in two different contexts: As a measure proportional
to the fishing mortality (Fisheries biology), but also as a measure
proportional to the variable costs of the fishing vessel (Fisheries
economics).
One of the key problems in reducing fishing mortality through effort
control is to ensure that the effort parameters which are selected for
control are relevant to fishing mortality. There are numerous examples of
attempts to control effort through decommissioning, reduction of allowable days
at sea etc. which have failed to achieve the primary objective, to reduce fishing
mortality.
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