In Sweden – one of the more progressive European countries in terms of eco-labelling – milk products, fruit and vegetables were eco-labelled in the mid-1980s. Clean and Green operating in the Philippines is one of the well-experienced organizations in the region. What would be the best timing for the introduction of eco-labeled products from fisheries in the ASEAN region.
Ecolabelling schemes in the region should be used as a tool to promote sustainable fishing practices. Fashion in the last few years has been to call this co-management, something that tries to achieve an appropriate balance between the roles and responsibilities of the government at its various levels and the local communities – the main resource users, for whom livelihood and quality. life is at stake. What is needed is accessibility – the methods must be meaningful to the populations living in the target areas, as well as robust enough to be used under field conditions.
What are Fisheries Refugia?
The key themes emerging from the fisheries component of the project relate to the important role that coastal and marine habitats in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea play in sustaining regional fisheries, and the general low-level coordination between fisheries and environmental management in the region. A major significant output related to the completion of the tasks of the preparatory phase of the fisheries component consists of the national reports on "Fish stocks and habitats of regional, global and transboundary importance in the South China Sea". The activity has also built the institutional capacity of individual SEAs to contribute to the development of the refugia system, including the identification of areas of critical life history importance for commercially important species.
The project's fisheries refugia activity aims to fill this gap by building regional capacity in the use of area-based or zoned approaches to fisheries management that focus on fish life cycles and habitat linkages. The reports from the RWG-F meetings highlight that there was initially some misunderstanding of the difference between fishing refuges and marine protected areas (MPAs). It has been recognized that the use of fishing refugia can result in some of the conservation benefits that the use of MPAs typically aims to achieve, although there is a shared understanding within the project that refugia should not be promoted as substitutes for MPAs.
In order to provide a clear and simple framework for the initial development of the refugia system, the identification of candidate sites will be based on determining where and. Translating talk into action is an ongoing focus of the South China Sea Project, and essential to the achievement of the project objective of establishing a regionally coordinated approach to action aimed at reversing environmental degradation trends in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand to reverse. Christopher Paterson is the fisheries expert in the project coordinating unit of the UNEP/GEF South China Sea project.
Building an Online Collaborative Databa in Southeast Asia – The South China Se
The organizations initially involved have been the SCS project's Specialized Executing Agencies, all of whom recently used the datasets referenced in the meta-database in: (a) national-level reviews of coral reefs, seagrasses, mangroves, wetlands, fisheries and land-based pollution, and (b) the characterization of 26 mangrove sites, 43 coral reef sites, 26 seagrass sites and 41 wetlands during the preparatory phase of the project. Many databases developed as part of previous environmental and fisheries projects in the region have only lasted as long as the projects themselves.
It is expected that the metabase will continue to be used after the end of the project. The SCS Metadatabase acts as a search tool to identify environmental and fisheries datasets in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand region. We hope that assigning responsibility for the metadata base to those working in countries will help build the longer-term sustainability of the tool and provide an effective forum for peer review of metadata entries.
In addition to supporting the goals of the SCS project, the SCS metadata can be applied to other projects and organizations through minor adaptation. The SCS metadata base is therefore a tool that not only functions as a key information resource to assist fisheries habitat management in Southeast Asia, but one that can also be adapted and applied to anywhere worldwide. Collaborative activities such as the development of this metadata base are important to ensure that ecosystem data and information, which are regularly updated, are made more accessible to the wider community.
The SCS metadata can benefit fisheries management by highlighting what fisheries and habitat data exist and where they can be accessed, a task that previously required considerable time and effort. Comments from users are encouraged to help us refine the meta-database and improve its usability. While the SCS Metadatabase has been developed in close collaboration with the SCS Project partner network, we welcome any feedback on how it can be improved to meet the requirements of a wider community of users.
Reader’s Review
Find us at www.seafdec.org and click on the Fish for the People link on the right side of the screen. There you can download previous issues of Fish for the People in PDF format and consult current information about the publication. Since many issues of Fish for the People have already been published, we hope we have given you a good idea of the purpose and general tone of the publication.
We further invite contributions from authors interested in promoting relevant issues on fisheries in developing countries. While the publication will continue to focus on the Southeast Asian region, future issues may address relevant issues from other tropical regions. The publication targets not only experts or scientists, but also other traditionally less technically oriented fisheries stakeholders, such as policy makers, donors, government staff, managers, and more generally, an informed lay public with an interest in how we manage fisheries become .
With the help of Fish for the People, we hope that the authors will gain the attention and consideration of the target fisheries stakeholders and contribute to the future achievement of more sustainable fisheries. After three years of publication, Fish for the People, for various reasons, has accumulated a certain stagnation in the timely publication of the issue. With that in mind, and for now, we're going from three issues a year to just two, starting with Volume 3 (2005).
Announcement
Articles should focus on emerging issues relevant to sustainable regional or tropical fisheries management. The additional guidelines aim to further assist Member States in developing the most practical national system in various aspects to improve their fisheries management towards responsible fishing.
Of the seven species of marine turtles, six - the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), green (Chelonia mydas), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), olive ridley (Lepidochelys oliviacea), loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and hawksbill (Natator depressus) - are still common in the Southeast -Asian waters found. This project's objectives include reviewing international issues related to fish trade and the environment that may have a potentially negative impact on the sustainability of fisheries in the region. SEAFDEC is a regional organization mandated to promote sustainable fisheries in the region, including the management and conservation of fishery resources such as fish and sea turtles.
In the past, SEAFDEC projects emphasized the conservation of sea turtles and promoting means for fishermen to avoid sea turtle bycatch, such as using TEDs with trawl nets. In 2001, white shrimp and blue shrimp were introduced to culture in the country and a production of 4 tons was achieved. Cultivation of the white SPF shrimp has just been allowed in the central and northern parts of the country, where it already dominates production, while black tiger shrimp remains the most important cultivated species in the south.
China is now the leading producer of farmed shrimp in the world with a yield of 760,459 tons in 2003, about 45% of the total world production. Product quality and related shrimp farming standards and certification have been emphasized in the development of guidelines such as Good Aquaculture Practice (GAP) and Code of Conduct for Responsible Shrimp Aquaculture and their implementation in many ASEAN countries. This is likely to lead to an oversupply of shrimp products as demand is growing at a much slower rate.
Farmed shrimp production will reach around 1.8 million tons in the next two years, with ASEAN countries and China supplying nearly 70%. It is important to realize that a large proportion of shrimp farmers in the region are still small and relatively poor.
Event Calendar
SEAFDEC is an autonomous intergovernmental body established as a regional treaty organization in 1967 to promote the sustainable development of fisheries in Southeast Asia. SEAFDEC specifically aims to develop fisheries potential in the region through training, research and information services in order to improve food supply through the rational use of fisheries resources in the region. To offer training courses and organize workshops and seminars in fisheries technology, marine engineering, extension methodology, post-harvest technology and aquaculture;
To conduct research and development in fishing gear technology, fish ground surveys, post-harvest technology and aquaculture, to investigate problems related to the handling of fish at sea and quality control, and to undertake studies on the fishery resources in the region; and 3.
