eurostat I COORDINATING WORKING PARTY ON ATLANTIC FiSHERY STATISTICS (CWP). FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS ROME, 1990 PREFACE METHODOLOGICAL NOTE A. THE CWP AND THE CWP MEMBER AGENCIES B. STATLANT SYSTEM OF QUESTIONNMRES C. TIME UNITS D. COUNTRIES OR AREAS INTRODUCTION Alpha and Digital Codes for Countries or Areas E. NATIONALITY F. CURRENCIES AND FUNDS G. FISHING AREAS (Basic concepts and definitions) 1. Marine and Inland Waters 2. Internal waters 3. Areal grid systems H. FISHING AREAS FOR STATISTICAL PURPOSES 1. FAO major fishing areas 2. Regional breakdown of major fishing areas I. CATCH AND LANDING STATISTICS (Basic concepts and definitions) J. CONVERSION FACTORS K. fDENTIFIERS FOR AQUATIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS N. FISHERMEN STATISTICS APPENDIX A I SESSIONS OF THE CWP APPENDIX A II CWP MEMBER AGENCIES ANNEX I CATCH CONCEPTS: DIAGRAMMATIC PRESENTATION ANNEX II SPECIES ITEMS, SORTED BY 3-ALPHA IDENTIFIERS ANNEXIH SPECIES ITEMS, SORTED BY FAO ENGLISH NAME ANNEX IV THE INTERNATIONAL STANDARD STATISTICAL CLASSIFICATION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS (ISSCAAP) ANNEXV LIST OF COUNTRIES OR AREAS SORTED BY MULTILINGUAL NAME ANNEX VI LIST OF COUNTRIES OR AREAS SORTED BY ISO 2-ALPHA CODES ANNEX VII LIST OF CURRENCIES SORTED BY COUNTRY AND TERRITORY MULTILINGUAL NAME ANNEX VIII LIST OF CURRENCIES SORTED BY ISO 3-ALPHA CURRENCY CODE PREFACE Conscious of the fact that source and reference documents related to the concepts and definitions used in fishery statistics are widely dispersed and not always readily available, the eleventh Session of the Coordinating Working Party on Atlantic Fishery Statistics (CWP) proposed that a Handbook of Fishery statistics should be compiled in which the essential elements of these doc­ uments should be brought together. Mr L. P. D. Gertenbach, shortly before he retired after many years as FAO' s Senior Fishery statistician, and as Secretary of the CWP, was commissioned to produce a draft of this Handbook. In finalising this first edition, additional material was submitted by the secretariats of the CWP Member Agencies (CCAMLR, EUROSTAT, FAO, ICCAT, ICSEAF, ICES, NAFO and OECD). In recognition of the workload involved in producing this first edition, the CWP adopted the deliberate policy of concentrating on a single language version. English, as the working language of the CWP, was that selected. At a suitable time after the merits of this edition have been assessed, it is intended that other language versions will be produced. Until such time certain of the tables have been compiled in English, French and Spanish and it is hoped that these will provide a key by which non-English language users may be able to obtain the information they require. The material presented in this document represents only a part of the total Handbook but it was considered useful to issue these sections which are largely self contained. The reader will occasionally find reference to sections not yet prepared. These will be issued as soon as time and resources permit. M.A. Robinson D.G. Cross Senior Fishery Statistician Administrator Fishery Information, Data and Fishery Statistics statistics Service Euro stat FAO Fisheries Department METHODOLOGICAL NOTE In conceiving this Handbook of Fishery Statistics the CWP intended that it should cover the concepts, definitions and related matters as applied to fishery statistics of the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent waters by the CWP Member Agencies. Many of these principles are applied in a wider context but the user is advised to check the validity of such applications. The Handbook was developed to indicate the principles applied by the international agencies in the Atlantic. There has been no attempt to include details of national systems, many of which, having been developed for specific national purposes, differ from those used internationally. Authorities considering introducing or revising national statistical systems are requested to ensure that the system developed incorporates a high degree of compatibility with the international standards. In its efforts to develop useful and practical systems, the CWP is consistently keeping these standards under review and welcomes the comments of the national authorities on the application of these international standards at the national level. Comments should be addressed to: Senior Fishery Statistician Fishery Information Data and Statistics Service FAO Fisheries Department 00100 Rome - Italy Bibliographic reference: Coordinating Working Party on ·Atlantic Fishery Statistics. Handbook of (f is'hery statistics. '.Rome; .F4\0. T9 90 • ;pag. var. A. THE CWP AND THE CWP MEMBER AGENCIES An Expert Meeting on Fishery Statistics in the North Atlantic Area was organised by FAO and co­ sponsored by ICES and ICNAF in Edinburgh (Scotland) on 22-29 September 1959 and was attended by 71 participants from 14 countries and 6 inter-governmental agencies. The Expert Group undertook reviews of the requirements of users of fishery statistics and of existing discrepancies in the standards used by FAO, ICES and ICNAF. More importantly it initiated the joint task of these agencies by proposing and encouraging, for a large variety of sectors within the overall fields of national, regional and global fishery statistics, harmonisation in the following important sectors of work in fishery statistics: - concepts and their definitions, - classification of craft, gear, species, areas, etc., - methods (including harmonised questionnaires), - simplification of reporting procedures. The Expert Meeting concluded its report (published in 1962 as FAOFisheriesReport no 3) as follows: (i) The Meeting invites the Governments of Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, Iceland and the United Kingdom; and ICES, ICNAF and FAO to appoint one expert each to form a continuing Working Party on Fishery Statistics in the North Atlantic Area with the power to co-opt additional members to help them in their task. (ii) The Working Party should keep under continuous review the progress made in the implementation of the recommendations of the Meetings; consult with the officers of governments and of international organisations with respect to difficulties encountered and, keeping in mind the actual state of fishery statistical services in the different countries, make suggestions for further national and international action in its field to governments and international organisations as appropriate. (iii) The Meeting requests the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to arrange for its Fisheries Division to function as Secretariat for the meetings of this Working Party. The Tenth Session of the FAO Conference (Rome, 31 October - 20 November 1959) approved this recommendation. Subsequently ICES and ICNAF agreed to participate and support the CWP, as the Continuing Worldng Party on Fishery Statistics in the North Atlantic Area came to be known. The Governments of Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, Iceland and the United Kingdom also agreed to provide experts to participate in the CWP. Since that time the CWP has performed its appointed tasks, and in 1969, underwent an expansion to include a number of other international agencies and to cover the whole of the Atlantic Ocean. While maintaining the acronym "CWP" it changed its name to the "Co-ordinating Working Party on Atlantic Fishery Statistics". currently the CWP holds formal sessions at 3-4 year intervals, these sessions being attended by the representatives of the secretariats of the member agencies and of the statistical reporting offices of member countries of these agencies. This national representation is co-ordinated by the agencies to give as broad as possible a spectrum of national statistical systems and experiences. The sessions of the CWP and references to the reports of these sessions are shown in Appendix A I. The CWP member agencies now cooperate closely and, in recent years, have organised intersessional meetings, known as Ad hoc Inter-Agency Consultations on Atlantic Fishery Statistics, of representatives of the secretariats. These meetings have had the function of reviewing progress since the last full CWP session and to.identify topics for consideration by the CWP at its next full session. Details of the CWP member agencies are given as Appendix A II. The CWP arrangement is, for the present, confined to the Atlantic, mainly due to the earlier establishment of fishery statistical agencies in that area. In the Pacific, developments have been rather different, but there now seem to be enough agencies concerned with fishery statistics to warrant some kind of formal arrangement for cooperation between them. FAO and SEAFDEC (the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Centre) have already made considerable progress towards the formation of a joint system for the collection of data from Southeast Asian countries. Closer contact is also developing between the South Pacific Commission (through its Tuna and Billfish Programme), the CPPS (Permanent Commission for the South Pacific) and FAO and also with the International North Pacific Fisheries Commission. C. TIME UNITS The CALENDAR (or C/WL) YEAR, the period between 1 January and 31 December, is the annual time unit normally used in fishery statistics. For certain specific purposes (e.g. for Antarctic pelagic whaling fisheries; and fiscal purposes) it is deemed more appropriate to use a SPLIT YEAR. Such situations arise when the sector under consideration exhibits appreciable activity over the end of the calendar year. The end points of the split year may be selected as desired but should be preferably at a time when activity in the sector is reduced. For Antarctic fisheries, the split year is 1 July-30 June. In tabulations where space restricts the labelling of a split year to a single year or where data for calendar and split years are tabulated together, the practice is for the split year to be represented by the calendar year in which the split year ends. Thus a split year recorded in a statistical bulletin as 1982 refers to the split year 1981-82. Attention is drawn to the apparent anomalies that may be observed when comparing data from two sectors of fishery statistics.