Collaboration recently established with SPRFMO allowed the recovery of almost 900,000 t that had not been reported to FAO over the 2003–2009 period, including 650,000 t of jack mackerel caught by vessels flagged by Vanuatu [40]. Although in the Article

XI of the FAO Constitution is clearly stated that all member countries should communicate regularly statistics and other technical information available to the government to allow FAO compiling and disseminating data on global trends, not all countries submit their annual fishery statistics to FAO. Failing to report is mainly due to the selleck compound fact that for several countries is difficult to collect reliable catch statistics in a continuous manner, as it is a costly activity that needs skilled personnel and in many

cases production points (i.e. landing sites) cover a large geographical area and are dispersed. However, there are also cases in which data have been collected but trivial problems in communication (e.g. turnover of the responsible Selleck AZD2281 officer, etc.) hamper the transmission of information to FAO. FAO has been recording modalities of submission and evaluating the catch data received for the last ten statistical inquiries (2000–2009 data). The introduction of electronic questionnaires since the 1999 inquiry certainly contributed to the improvement of more timely reporting as the average number of submissions within the deadline increased from 51 in 2000–2003 to 72 in 2007–2009 (Fig. 3). Despite FAO’s efforts, unfortunately the number of non-reporting countries has remained stable, although countries PIK3C2G or territories that never

submitted catch data during the decade are not many but more than half of the countries did not report at least once. The quality of fishery data is known to be very uneven among countries. Besides data on timing of submission, also information on species breakdown and an evaluation of data consistency have been recorded since the 2000 inquiry. Rank values from 4 to 1 were assigned to all countries for the three indicators, which were then combined in a ‘General evaluation’ index of country’s submission for each year. The ‘General evaluation’ score obtained by each country for 2009 has been plotted in a matrix against the ‘Per capita supply’ of fishery products [2], which was considered as a valid indicator of the importance of fisheries in each country as unfortunately data on fishery contribution to national GDP are not consistently available for all countries. Data submitted or non-reported were considered inadequate in relation to the relative importance of capture fishery for over half of the countries.