INTRODUCTION

In the last 20 years the issue of “Women in Fisheries” (WIF) has become increasingly important, particularly following the first three World Conferences on Women; the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, Mexico, 1975; Copenhagen, Denmark, 1980; Nairobi, Kenya, 1985. The Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995 and the World Food Summit, 1996 gave a significant boost to the issue, creating greater awareness. The Beijing Conference highlighted the need to promote the status of women, to implement gender-sensitive economic policies and programmes targeting poor women and the World Food Summit underlined the central role of women in food security and the need to guarantee their right to productive resources and equal opportunities to use and develop their skills.

It is in this context that WIF has to be considered because WIF as a term underlines not only the role of women in the fishery industry as such but also women as wives and mothers with all their household activities. The aim of this work is to bring the issue of WIF closer to readers by facilitating the retrieval of information concerning studies and research centring on women’s participation in the fishing industry, from women and captures, to women and aquaculture, women and small-scale fisheries, women and the processing sector, women and marketing.

The bibliography represents an updating of a previous bibliography compiled by Patricia Merrikin (1990) “Women in fisheries - a selective annotated bibliography” (FAO Fisheries Circular No. 811 Revision 1). This study’s focus is from 1990 to date. For any previous works reference can be made to Merrikin’s bibliography.

Some salient points have emerged from this work:

• First of all it can be noted that literature on women, and in this case on WIF, is increasing constantly. However a great part of this literature, and in particular workshops and projects, have focused more on women in Africa and Asia. Attention on women in the Pacific and in Latin America has only occurred in the last few years. In October 2000 INFOPESCA organized a workshop in Uruguay entitled “Primera Reunión de Puntos Focales de la Red Latinoamericana de las Mujeres del Sector Pesquero-Acuícola”. The workshop raised many questions concerning the role and the responsibilities of women in all countries of South America, thus paving the way for further literature also in Spanish.
• Secondly, during the period covered by this bibliography, the majority of projects and workshops tackling women’s issues have been organised in the context of the Programme for the Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa (IDAF).
• A third point is that WIF sites are spreading on the web. In certain cases, these sites are under the auspices of the United Nations for example Women Watch (http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/), in other cases they are specifically for WIF such as http://web.mit.edu/org/s/seagrant/www/wfn.html. It is interesting to note that TV documentaries on this subject are not very much produced.
• A fourth observation is that policy makers and development workers have become much more sensitive to gender issues and to the role of women particularly in developing countries. The general feeling in the workshops is that there is still a need for formulating projects targeting women while trying to better understand their role and needs.

To fulfil this research, documents have been reviewed from the Fisheries Branch Library, the David Lubin Memorial Library and bibliographic databases, the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA), the International Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences (CABI), the International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology (AGRIS), and through the Internet. The bibliography is divided into five main parts: monographs, articles, documentaries, projects and workshop papers, and website addresses on WIF. Each part is organized in alphabetical order, then for each author chronologically by date of publication, and original titles have been kept. Each entry presents basic information such as date, editor, place of publication, number of pages and a short summary highlighting the basic issues of the document. In the case of articles the volume of the periodical, the number of the issue and pages are marked, and in the case of projects and workshops, the project’s name and number are provided together with the number of pages. There is a geographic and a subject index at the end of the bibliography, that make reference to the page number where the index entry is.

In this bibliography, I have attempted to bring the readers’ attention mainly to projects and studies retrieved from the databases available at FAO and through the Internet. Therefore this bibliography cannot be regarded as comprehensive.

I would like to thank particularly Ms. Patricia Merrikin and Mr. Uwe Tietze who, based on the experience of the previous bibliography, gave me very useful suggestions, Ms. Graciela Pereira from INFOPESCA and Ms. Helga Josupeit who advised me and supported me in the preparation of this work. They have also agreed to make it available on the Internet, on Globefish’s website, www.globefish.org and on the website of “Red Latinoamericana de las Mujeres del Sector Pesquero” hosted by INFOPESCA’s site, http://mujeres.infopesca.org/. I am also very grateful to Ms. Jean Collins, Mr. Armand Gribling and Mr. Andrea Perini who assisted me in the retrieval of all the documents useful for the bibliography from the Fisheries Library. I would like also to thank Ms. Adele Crispoldi and Mr. John Curry for their interest in this work.