The CARICOM Fisheries Unit (CFU) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (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.
