Report of the eleventh meeting of the RECOFI Working Group on Fisheries Management, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, 19-21 February 2019
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The eleventh meeting of the Regional Commission for Fisheries (RECOFI) Working Group on Fisheries Management (WGFM) was held in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, from 19 to 21 February 2019. The Meeting was convened by RECOFI and FAO and attended by 12 participants from the following seven RECOFI member countries: Iraq, Iran (IR), Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE in addition to the FAO Secretariat and one invited expert. The meeting included participation from the Convention on Migratory Species-United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP/CMS) Secretariat. The WGFM welcomed the entry into force of the MoU between ROPME and FAO/RECOFI, stressing the importance of collective interests and common mandates of the two parties to the MoU. IUU fishing was found a major issue affecting the sustainable exploitation and conservation of marine fishery resources. There was an agreement that IUU fishing-related issues, on the many occasions, were brought to the attention of the WGFM. The WGFM welcomed the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication and acknowledged the great deal of global effort devoted to the development the SSF Guidelines. The WGFM acknowledged the benefits of developing FIRMS Marine Resources of regional relevance for the RECOFI region and recommended the initiation of the process focusing on Spanish mackerel. It was proposed that FAO could provide further support in developing specific case studies using the EAF approach in the RECOFI Area. Participants provided updates of the current work ongoing at the national level with regards to the RECOFI priority species, and discussed data collection challenges. The Meeting noted the difficulties in reporting and sourcing updated data and agreed on freezing the number of current RECOFI priority species. The Terms of Reference for the FIRMS Regional Focal Point were approved. The Meeting was informed that at its ninth session (2017) the Commission was of the opinion that it did not have enough background information about splitting some FAO sub-areas and requested the WGFM to re-consider the proposal to split FAO sub-area 51.3 into divisions 51.3.1. Findings and recommendations of the Workshop on Regional Joint Assessment of Kingfish (Scomberomorus commerson), which was held in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman on 17-18 February 2019 were discussed. The results reveal that the stock appears to be in an overexploitation status with the current fishing mortality and landings exceeding the levels required to exploit the stock at MSY. The WGFM adopted the proposed recommendations of the workshop with certain modifications. The RECOFI Secretariat was asked to submit these recommendations to the tenth Session of the Commission.