Edited by Tony J. Pitcher, Daniela Kalikoski and Ganapathiraju Pramod.

DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD

It is true that we have a global fisheries crisis, but it is equally true that we already have the tools to understand its causes and overcome it. One of the elements of this toolkit is the Food and Agriculture Organization (UN) Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, launched in 1995 and endorsed by all of FAO’s member states. The Code, a mixture of high principles and common sense, is now very widespread and available in several languages other than English, and can be seen as a self-help guide for governments interested in moving their fisheries toward sustainability.

The code is voluntary, but it is unclear whether it being voluntary has made its implementation in the field more or less difficult. Had it been obligatory, its language would certainly not have been as clear as it is. Indeed, this clarity of language is what makes it possible to tell whether countries are complying with its various elements.

In this report, Professor Tony Pitcher and his team have assessed how the various FAO member countries are performing with regards to implementing the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, a decade after it was launched. They do not cover all maritime countries of the world, but the countries they cover represent over 96% of the world catch. The assessment covers Article 7 on Fishery Management, to many the veritable core of the Code.

To this end, they relied on an immense body of literature, and the judgment of independent experts, who helped verify their evaluation for most of the countries. As such, this study represents a valuable review of the status of world fisheries. Moreover, by using numerous criteria to assess countries’ performance, Dr Pitcher and his co-authors have obtained robust results, not likely to be overthrown in future re-assessments.

This document, thus, will be crucial in future attempts to rank countries in terms of their performance in managing and conserving the resources in their EEZ, as reflected in many ways by compliance with the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Thus, for example, we will have to consider whether countries subsidize their fisheries in spite of their resource being in decline (not explicit in the Code, but implicit in Code clauses 7.2.2; 7.6.3; 12.9), whether they adequately protect threatened marine mammals, birds, seabirds, or any other marine animal occurring in their EEZ (Code clauses 7.2.2, 7.2.3. 7.6.9), and whether they have set up adequate no-take managed areas (Code clause 7.6.9). This will contribute to a balanced evaluation of the way countries manage the whole of their EEZ, and not only the fisheries therein.

In the meantime, however, I congratulate Tony Pitcher, Ganapathiraju Pramod and Daniela Kalikoski for an extremely original, rigorous and useful assessment of countries’ performance on implementing the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries.

Daniel Pauly,
Director, Fisheries Centre, UBC

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