The fighting in Gaza has forced farmers and herders to abandon their lands and has paralysed fishing activities, bringing local food production to a halt and severely affecting livelihoods, FAO warned today. Recovery in the agriculture sector, once hostilities cease, will require significant external assistance over the long term.

The FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department has released a new technical paper Assessment and management of seafood safety and quality: current practices and emerging issues that compiles the state of knowledge on seafood safety and quality with the aim to provide a succinct yet comprehensive resource book to seafood quality and safety managers. Topics on emerging issues such as new pathogens, the impact of climate change on seafood safety, and the changing regulatory framework are included.

Wild-capture fisheries provide a critical source of nutritional and economic benefits to people worldwide. With coastal populations projected to grow by 35 percent in the next 20 years, the demand for fish will continue to increase and with it the need for the sustainable management of aquatic resources.

Stock status is a key parameter for evaluating the sustainability of fishery resources and developing corresponding management plans. While managers and policy-makers need information on the status of individual fish stocks to develop effective management strategies, determining the status and potential production of wild-capture fish stocks still remains a main challenge. The majority of stocks are not assessed, often as a result of insufficient data and a lack of resources needed to execute formal stock assessments.

The FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department has just released a study, Developing new approaches to global stock status assessment and fishery production potential of the seas, as an important step in investigating the performance of methods that can be used to estimate stock status. The document focuses on two approaches to estimating fisheries status: one based on single-stock status, and the other based on ecosystem production. The results are not intended to provide direct advice to motivate management measures on specific fisheries, but to give an indication of the health of fish stocks and their production potential.

The fisheries and aquaculture sector contribute significantly to Africa’s overall economy. In a new study published by FAO, the value added by the fisheries sector as a whole – which includes inland and marine capture fisheries, post-harvest, licensing of local fleets and aquaculture - was estimated at more than US$24 billion in 2011, representing 1.26 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of all African countries.

A close look at figures highlights the key role of marine artisanal fisheries and related processing, as well as inland fisheries which provide one third of the continent’s total catches. While aquaculture is still developing in Africa and is mostly concentrated in a few countries, it already produces an estimated value of almost US$3 billion a year.

As data on licence fees paid by foreign fleets were not easily available to the national experts participating in this study, an attempt was also made to estimate the value of fisheries agreements with Distant Water Fishing Nations (DWFNs) fishing in the exclusive economic zones of African States. Considering that 25 percent of all marine catches around Africa are still by non-African countries, if also these catches were caught by African States in theory they could generate an additional value of US$3.3 billion, which is eight times higher than the current US$0.4 billion African countries earn from fisheries agreements.

All in all, the sector as a whole employs 12.3 million people as full-time fishers or full-time and part-time processors, representing over 2 percent of 15-64 year olds in Africa. About 27 percent of the people engaged in fisheries and aquaculture are women, with marked differences in their share among fishers (3.6 percent), processors (58 percent), and aquaculture workers (4 percent).

Aimed at providing an overall picture of the sector in Africa by assessing the contribution to national and agriculture GDP and the employment generated by the whole fisheries sector, “The value of African fisheries” study was carried out in the framework of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)-FAO Fisheries Programme (NFFP) funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). See also the Policy briefs prepared by NEPAD in collaboration with the Partnership for African Fisheries (PAF) and the NFFP.

Yvette Diei-Ouadi is an FAO Fishery Industry Officer in Rome. In the following interview she explains why this project was first implemented and what she saw when she visited the beneficiary communities 10 years later.