FAO Fisheries Report No. 729

Report of the CFU/FAO Fisheries Statistics and Data Management Workshop - University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, 10-22 March 2003

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS
Subregional Office for the Caribbean
Rome, 2004

Table of Contents

The designations employed and the presentation of material in this information product do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations concerning the legal or development status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries

FAO.

Report of the CFU/FAO Fisheries Statistics and Data Management Workshop. University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, 10-22 March 2003.

FAO Fisheries Report. No. 729. Rome, FAO. 2004. 29p.

ABSTRACT

The CARICOM Fisheries Unit (CFU) and the FAO collaborated in providing fisheries data-managers from the CARIFORUM (CARICOM plus the Dominican Republic and the British Dependent Territories of Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands and Montserrat), with guidance to improve their collecting, processing, storage and reporting capabilities of information on the status and trends of their marine capture fisheries.

The participants received step-by-step guidance on the methodological and operational concepts contained in the FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 425, Sample-based fishery surveys: A technical handbook (2002). They were also trained to use a CFU-developed data storage software - CARIFIS - to query, analyse and report on their national fisheries statistics. A proposal to expand the existing data collection systems to capture the social and economic information about the national fisheries sector was presented and discussed.

The discussions that followed the presentations on "Sample-based fishery surveys" identified issues such as multiple fishing gear, migration of fishing units among multiple landing sites and multiple landing by the same fishing units as constraints in previously used national frame surveys. Suggestions for refining CARIFIS and correcting errors/omissions in the software were collected after the practical demonstrations. Similarly, participant observations and suggestions on the proposal to expand existing data collection systems to incorporate social and economic information on the fisheries sector were collected.