Inventory of Artisanal Fishery Communities in the ... - Fao - Copemed

1 - Background
At one of the annual Steering Committee meetings of COPEMED the question of the lack of
systematic information on artisanal fisheries at the regional level was put forward and given
considerable attention. The Steering Committee supported the plan to reinforce the data collection
system of this sector, due to its great importance in the Region, and promoted a Seminar on that
topic.
After an assessment of the poor level of knowledge of the artisanal fishery sector in the Region,
and its integration within the countries, there was a unanimous consensus to extend the mandate of
that seminar to a medium-term programme of work. One of the main issues of such a programme
was to assist in finding solutions and alternatives to establish a robust data collection system,
useful for sectoral studies in the Region. S. Coppola (FAO-FIR) who formulated this activity was
appointed as team leader.
Within this framework, the Workshop in Malta was used to start the operation aimed at
reinforcing national systems and their capabilities in artisanal fisheries, using the most appropriate
methods and expertise to secure regional exchange of data, techniques, results and software. A
detailed programme of work was set up by the co-ordinating group within the Copemed project.
2. The original programme
2.1 The objective.
The objective of the original programme was to review the artisanal fisheries statistics produced
by all countries in the Copemed area. Because of the nature of the mandate, the programme was
mainly based on statistical monitoring, data collection and dissemination. It was planned, firstly,
to undertake an assessment at the national level, followed by a complete study that would consist
of (i) an inventory of existing information and data; (2) defining the characteristics of artisanal
fisheries at the national level, and (3) defining standards in order to harmonise outputs from
national statistical systems to allow regional aggregation, at least in the Western-Central
Mediterranean.
This should have been achieved by:
'identifying the Institutions in charge of statistical surveys and dealing with artisanal fisheries
the Mediterranean;
'contacting the national persons responsible, introducing the objective of this programme to
them and exploring the possibility and feasibility of the Copemed Project helping to
improve the methodology, the approach, the manuals, forms and questionnaires that they use,
in order to harmonise the data collection and reporting instruments (codification system,
reporting statistics, frequency of updating, etc.);
'preparing a questionnaire, for distribution among the national experts responsible for the data
collection, to obtain general information on the status of data collection (qualitative and
quantitative) on artisanal fisheries in their respective countries;
'as an end product, preparing a series of national reports on the existing statistical systems
which covers the different aspects of data collection, processing and presentation as a whole.
Also, the analytical part of the statistical systems, including the analysis of the results, should
have been stressed in order to start evaluating the level of accuracy and reliability of the
results produced.
4