by
DR. S. J. HOLT
Representative of the Director-General of FAO
Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am most pleased to bring to you, on behalf of Dr. Sen, the Director-General, and of Mr. Jackson, the Assistant Director-General for Fisheries, the greetings of the Food and Agriculture Organization on the occasion of the opening of the World Scientific Conference on the Biology and Culture of shrimps and Prawns.
My Organization, better known perhaps by the initials FAO, was most appreciative of the kind offer of the Government of Mexico to act as host to this international conference in this splendid capital city. I should, therefore, be grateful if you would kindly convey to the Minister, His Excellency Licenciado Octaviano Campos Salas, this appreciation, and also the fact that my Organization recognizes that his generous acceptance to be Honorary President of this conference confirms the importance that the Government of Mexico attaches to the development of fishing industries and to the international co-operation in this field. It seemed to us highly appropriate that the first scientific and technical discussion, global in scope, of shrimp investigations should be convened in a country which holds such a prominent place in the shrimp industry, and where at the same time the benefits to the industry that can come from scientific research are so well recognized.
The Government of Mexico has, through the agencies of its Ministry of Industry and Commerce, put tremendous care and effort into the local arrangements for this conference and we have also had a most cordial collaboration in its technical preparation. I am quite confident that the benefits of the careful preparations will be enjoyed by the participants in the conference, and that they will contribute greatly to its eventual successful conclusion.
To the appreciation of FAO for the support of the Government of Mexico I wish to add also our thanks to all those other organization and individuals -- both in Mexico and in other participating Member Countries of FAO -- for the contributions they have been making directly to the conference and to related events in the program for the coming two weeks. In this connection, may I express a warm welcome, as guests to our conference, to the officers and members of the Shrimp Association of the Americas, which has been convening in Mexico City in the past few days and with whom we have established an excellent co-operation in the consecutive planning of the meetings. This was a particularly happy circumstance because it will facilitate the highly desirable contact between scientists on the one hand and industry on the other, which is in our view quite necessary for the stability and rational growth of fisheries.
This is the third such meeting convened by FAO to deal with the appraisal of particular types of marine fishery resources. In recent years such meetings have been held on sardines (in Rome) and on tunas (in La Jolla, California). Each of these has not only given an opportunity for the exchange of views among technical people, but has also led to a reorientation and expansion of FAO's program of work in these specialized fields, and to arrangements for continuing and strengthening international co-operation. We hope that the present conference will do likewise in relation to the rapidly growing and diversifying shrimp industry. That it will indeed do so is ensured, I think, by the fact that there will be participating in the conference about 170 experts coming from 30 countries and who have contributed over 80 technical papers for our consideration.
The world harvest of shrimp and prawns is now of the order of 600,000 metric tons annually, and, incidentally, a quarter of this is taken from the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters. This shrimp harvest represents not much more than one percent of the total marine catch of fish and shellfish by weight. It is, however, a harvest of a high quality product, and these species comprise nearer five percent of the world marine catch by value. This is a not inconsiderable proportion in itself, but the international importance of the shrimp fisheries is enhanced by other factors. Firstly, very many countries participate in these fisheries and at least 20 of them have major interests; secondly, more than a third of the world catch enters international trade, and many developing countries are participating in this trade with considerable benefits in earnings of foreign currencies. And thirdly, the shrimp and prawns are among the first marine fishery resources to begin to be cultivated, rather than merely hunted. The growing interest in shrimp cultivation, though as yet it is not quantitatively very important, is of particular significance today, and the conference will be giving special attention to this facet of the industry and of research. Thus, although new shrimping grounds are being discovered and opened up every year in many parts of the world, some important stocks seem already to have approached their peak of production, and we shall clearly, in coming years, need to look increasingly to ways of improving the natural resources, as well as of protecting them from overfishing and from, for example, the consequences of pollution.
I should now like to say a few words about the work of FAO in the wider fisheries context. Although since FAO was founded in 1945 it has had a Fisheries Division, at the beginning of 1966 the status of the fisheries unit was raised to that of a Department, and a six-year program of expansion was begun. At the same time a high-level inter-governmental Committee on Fisheries was established under the FAO Constitution to guide the FAO program and also - and perhaps more important - to provide a means of consultation between governments on international aspects of fishery policy. Mexico has been at the two sessions of the Committee on Fisheries since it was established last year, active as one of its 30 Member Countries. The Committee has already taken several important actions including the first steps towards the establishment of inter-governmental regional fishery organizations for the Indian Ocean and for the Middle and Southeastern Atlantic. In addition, scientific advice is being provided on fishery problems of worldwide scope by a group of eminent scientists constituting FAO's Advisory Committee on Marine Resources Research, which is now entering its fifth year of work.
Parallel with this strengthening of the headquarters unit of FAO, and the creation of new instruments for international action in fisheries, has been a very rapid growth in our efforts to assist Member Governments to develop their national fishery institutions at all levels in research, management and administration, food technology, economic planning, vessel construction, and the training of fishermen and of scientists. These efforts are being made mainly with the support of the United Nations Development Program, under which technical assistance experts are provided and more recently, on a much bigger scale, pre-investment projects are conducted under the Special Fund of the UN. To give you an idea of the scope of this assistance, I might mention that there has just been held here in Mexico City a meeting of the staff from our projects in the Caribbean-Central America region. There are now FAO fishery projects in all the Central American countries, in Cuba, and in most of the other islands of the Caribbean, in Venezuela, and in Colombia. A large Special Fund project in Mexico has recently been approved, and we in FAO look forward keenly to the much fuller collaboration with our Mexican colleagues that this will bring about. In the next year or two our field staffs in this area, and their national counterparts, will be working on ten or more research or exploratory vessels assisting in an appraisal of the fishery resources of all kinds in these waters. Shrimp studies, I may say, play a considerable part in these projects. Similar developments might be listed in South America, in Africa, and in Asia.
Meanwhile, more international funds are becoming available for investment in the fishing industries of developing countries, through the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, and through the regional development banks. In consideration of all requests for loans from these sources, a priority question is “Are there the fishery resources available to sustain the levels of industrial development which are being planned?”, thus stressing again the urgent need for the exploration and assessment of the natural resources. To get a global view of the productive capacity of known resources is one aim of a major project of FAO called the Indicative World Plan for Agricultural Development (IWP). Under this Plan, to which all FAO Member Countries are contributing, an attempt is being made to set realistic targets for food production including, of course, fish and shellfish, for the years 1975 and 1985. This is an enormously complex and difficult task, but we feel it is an important one to be accomplished if the present and future problems of world food supply - and particularly protein supply - are properly to be understood and means for their solution found.
The urge of interest in fishery development coincides with a veritable explosion of man's interest in the ocean in all its aspects. The scale of ocean research is now far, far greater than it was, say, ten years ago, and although the practical applications of this research are many and varied, surely fisheries must benefit greatly from it, directly and indirectly. Indeed, as increased food production becomes of more vital importance to human survival, we in FAO feel that everything possible must be done to secure that the ocean will provide ever-increasing and valuable harvests, and that to this end the fishery resources are fully utilized, protected and husbanded. It is now generally recognized that this will only be possible on the basis of scientific knowledge about these resources, and it is our hope - and expectation - that this world conference on shrimp and prawns will contribute to that end.
En conclusión, Señor Presidente, me permito nuevamente hacer extensivas nuestras más expresivas gracias a todas las personas que se han asociado con la Organización y que han dado tan generosamente su tiempo y sus energías en la preparación de esta Conferencia, y en particular a nuestros colegas en la Dirección General de Pesca e Industrias Conexas, a la Comisión Nacional Consultiva de Pesca, al Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Biológicas-Pesqueras, y muy especialmente al Gobierno de México.
Muchas gracias Señor Presidente.
