The Regional Workshop is organized by the IOTC Secretariat and co-financed by the Indian Ocean Commission –SmartFish Project, the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystems Programme (BOBLME), and the IOTC. 19 coastal countries have been invited to the Workshop, including: Bangladesh, Comoros, Djibouti, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Isl. Rep. Iran, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Oman, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, and Yemen. It is expected that 2 participants per country attend the Workshop.
The Workshop builds on a Request from the IOTC Scientific Committee, at its Sixteenth Session, as follows:
Para 103. The SC NOTED the difficulties that some countries have to report data to the IOTC as per the required standards, and that this lack of reporting originates in some cases from an insufficient understanding of the IOTC Requirements. In this regard the IOTC Secretariat will receive financial support from the EU-funded IOC-SmartFish Project for the organisation of a regional workshop to understand the IOTC Data Requirements and REQUESTED that the IOTC Secretariat considers funding scientists and statistical officers/managers from non IOC countries to the Workshop, in particular from Iran, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
In recent years, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) has adopted new measures that extend the requirements for fisheries statistics, both for IOTC species and other species that are bycatch of fisheries directed at IOTC species, in particular large pelagic sharks, marine turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals. These include measures to mitigate as much as possible the impact of fisheries for IOTC species on bycatch species, as identified above, and set minimum data reporting requirements for those species; measures that extend data requirements for fisheries that use fish aggregating devices; and measures that set minimum data requirements for the collection of operational catch and effort data by IOTC Contracting Parties and Cooperating Non-Contracting Parties (CPC).
In order to accommodate the new requirements, the IOTC Secretariat has amended the existing IOTC Data Reporting Forms and Guidelines for the reporting of Fisheries Statistics to the IOTC. The Guidelines will be used extensively at the Workshop and Workshop participants are encouraged to download and consult them before the Workshop.
Other Workshop documents will be published as they are available.
