Fisheries Centre The University of British Columbia Working Paper Series Working Paper #2015 - 54 St. Vincent and the Grenadines: Reconstructed Fisheries Catches, 1950-2010 Elizabeth Mohammed and Alasdair Lindop Year: 2015 Email:
[email protected] This working paper is made available by the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES: RECONSTRUCTED FISHERIES CATCHES, 1950-2010 Elizabeth Mohammed1 and Alasdair Lindop2 1 Research and Resource Assessment, Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism Secretariat, Eastern Caribbean Office, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. 2 Sea Around Us, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada.
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[email protected] Abstract St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a small Caribbean island country in the southern part of the Windward Isles. Fisheries are predominantly artisanal and subsistence-based, with an industrial element only beginning in the 1990s with the introduction of a multi-gear fleet. This report is an update to a previous study that reconstructed catch data for the country from 1942-2001 and extends the time series to cover 1950-2010. Reconstructions are made for the industrial, artisanal, subsistence and recreational sectors and the total estimated catch is compared to the data officially reported to the FAO. Overall, the reconstructed catch was 1.6 times the data reported to FAO. Artisanal fisheries and subsistence fisheries contributed almost all of the fish removals, making up 98% of the catch in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with the artisanal sector contributing 62.1% of the total. Introduction Study area St.