PREFACE

In the period from the mid-1950s to 1992, the Soviet fishing industry was centrally controlled. Fishing companies were allocated vessels and the distant water fishing world was divided among the various state-controlled fishing enterprises. There is no overstating of the tremendous achievement of the USSR in developing their fisheries during this period, which started when the USSR's first Pushkin class factory trawlers (modelled literally on the pioneering British factory trawlers, the Fairsky and Fairtry) moved into the North Atlantic. Between 1954 and 1956 the USSR ordered 24 ships of this class from West Germany yards. Several hundred larger Mayakovski class factory trawlers soon followed and this class quickly became a familiar sight in fishing ports around the world. By 1970 the Soviet Union had a fleet of 400 large (>1 000 GRT) vessels, giving them the largest distant water factory trawling fleet in the world, more than twice the size of that of Japan, its nearest rival. Bigger and better designs followed such as the Atlantic, Super Atlantic, Tropik and Meridian class vessels, often built in East German or Polish yards, were added to their fleets.

The management of the expansion of the Soviet distant water fishing had a geographical basis. In the Far East, fishing was under the control of DALRYBA with TINRO (Pacific Scientific Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography), Vladivostok responsible for fisheries research and resource evaluation. In the North Atlantic, all three USSR Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) were active and in addition Russian fishing companies were based in Murmansk (home to the largest Soviet fleet) and Kaliningrad (second largest). The Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (PINRO) in Murmansk was responsible for research and resource evaluation for fisheries exploited by vessels from this port. Responsibility for research in the Atlantic belonged to AtlantNIRO, Kaliningrad. Responsibility for research and exploration of the Indian Ocean lay with the Southern Scientific Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (YugNIRO)^[1] based in Kerch, Ukraine. All applied fisheries research work was generally coordinated by the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO), before December 1991 (USSR), and after December 1991 for Russia only, by the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, which were based in Moscow.

At the time of the beginning of Ukrainian (USSR) fishing activities in the early 1960s, little, if anything, was known about the off-shore fisheries resources of the Indian Ocean, not least the deepwater species. The pioneering activities of YugNIRO significantly changed that. And, despite the recent expansion (and contraction) of the fisheries associated with seamounts in the southern Indian Ocean, the information collected by the YugNIRO remains still the most complete source of information available. The extent and enormous value of their data was noted by both Ad Hoc Meetings on Management of Deepwater Fisheries Resources of the Southern Indian Ocean^[2] and these meetings requested the FAO to seek to document, in the first instance, what information exists, and second, to explore the possibilities of arranging for the tow-by-tow data to be made available through a database. This second objective was in view of the desirability of establishing a common catch and effort database to support resource analysis and management decisions of deepwater stocks in this region. A pilot programme for encoding YugNIRO data has been undertaken so that the costs of undertaking this task may be estimated and other operational problems identified. The first step has been completed and the task of finding funds to be able to undertake this extremely important work must now be addressed. In addition, some form of access agreement remains to be negotiated that protects the interests of the Ukranians - the source of the information - but also makes this vital source of information available for use by those attempting to provide advice on the management of the resources in this area.

Dr Evgeny Romanov of the World Ocean Fishery Resources Department, Southern Scientific Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (YugNIRO), with the support and contributions of his colleagues, has achieved a commendable result in producing this report. In doing so, FAO believes that a major contribution has been made to securing the pioneering information that was collected on the unexploited fishery resources in the Southern Indian Ocean - information that is rarely available in most other heavily-exploited regions of the world. In doing this, a valuable task has been completed to the benefit not only to the regional countries of the Southern Indian Ocean, but also to the wider scientific and distant water fishing nations with an interest in exploiting the fisheries resources of this part of the world's oceans.

R. Shotton
[Officer responsible for the Western Indian Ocean]
Marine Resources Service
FAO Fisheries Department
Rome