Report of the FAO Technical Working Group on the Management of Fishing Capacity. La Jolla, United States of America, 15-18 April 1998.
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The Technical Working Group on the Management of Fishing Capacity reviewed the various issues related to measurement and monitoring; management and reduction methods; broader policy and institutional considerations; as well as specific high seas aspects. The Technical Working Group (TWG) emphasized the timeliness of this meeting and stressed the crucial need for countries and the international community at large to urgently take steps to address and prevent overcapacity (overcapitalisation) as r ecommended by the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries which the FAO Conference adopted in 1995. The TWG produced a wide consensus on the need: to develop more appropriate measurement methods and monitoring mechanisms, including fishing vessel registry; to give far greater emphasis to fleet monitoring and the assessment of fleet dynamics; to adopt policies which clearly specify access conditions; to give a greater priority to management methods aiming at adjusting rather than blocking the p ervasive tendency for overfishing and overinvestment resulting from open access conditions; to reassess and strengthened management methods used and implementation procedure, in recognition that the applicability of available management methods would nevertheless remain situation specific; and to approach the reduction of fishing capacity with care, avoiding spillover effects and carefully controlling the induced effects of scrapping programmes. The TWG provided guidance and made a number of rec ommendations to better address and tackle these issues within national jurisdictions. The TWG also recognized that the high seas may be confronted with an even greater overcapitalization problem than EEZ fisheries due to the prevalence of rather open access conditions and the fact that there are at present no internationally agreed measure to cause states to control fishing capacity. It recommended that the 1995 UN Agreement and the FAO Compliance Agreement be urgently ratified. The TWG further suggested that complementary measures would be required, aiming in particular at: improving monitoring mechanisms for high seas fleets; strengthening and empowering regional fishery organizations; creating new organizations to ensure full coverage of the resource concerned; controlling the disposal (‘dumping’) of excess national capacity in general, and of older vessels to developing countries in particular; and at addressing the growing importance of flags of convenience. Finally, the TWG felt that much more research work and institutional building efforts were still required at both national and international levels to improve present capacities to properly address the many issues pertaining to the effective control and reduction of fishing capacity.