Report of the CFU/FAO Fisheries Statistics and Data Management Workshop. University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, 10–22 March 2003.

Abstract

The CARICOM Fisheries Unit (CFU) and the 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 meth odological 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. The discussions that fol lowed the presentations on “Sample-based fishery surveys” identified issues such as multiple fishing gear, migration of fishing units among multiple landing sites and multiple landing by the same fishing units as constraints in previously used national frame surveys. Suggestions for refining CARIFIS and correcting errors/omissions in the software were collected after the practical demonstrations. Similarly, participant observations and suggestions on the proposal to expand existing data collect ion systems to incorporate social and economic information on the fisheries sector were collected.