COMMITTEE ON FISHERIES

Twenty-second Session

Rome, Italy 17-20 March 1997

TERMINATION OF REPORTING CONCERNING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE STRATEGY ADOPTED BY THE 1984 FAO WORLD CONFERENCE ON FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT AND REPLACEMENT BY REPORTING ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CODE OF CONDUCT FOR RESPONSIBLE FISHERIES

1.    The 1984 FAO World Conference on Fisheries Management and Development endorsed a Strategy for Fisheries Management and Development. The Conference, in its Resolution No. 3, requested the Director-General of FAO to provide the FAO Committee on Fisheries (COFI) and the Organization's Governing Bodies with periodic reports on progress achieved in implementing the Strategy. States and international and regional organizations were encouraged to collaborate with the Director-General in the preparation of such reports.

2.    The first progress report was submitted by the Director-General to COFI's Seventeenth Session in 1987 and the second report to its Nineteenth Session in 1991.The third progress report was scheduled to have been prepared for its Twenty-first Session in 1995. However, the report was not submitted primarily because of the substantial structural changes made in that Session in order to accommodate a Ministerial Session.

3.    The issues stemming from the 1984 Conference have now largely been integrated into the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries adopted at the Twenty-eighth Session of the FAO Conference in 1995. The Code was developed in a manner consistent with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1992 Declaration of Cancún, the 1992 Rio Declaration and the provisions of Chapter 17 of the Agenda 21 of UNCED, the 1995 Agreement on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Stocks as well as the 1984 Strategy and other relevant international instruments. It may accordingly be considered that the provisions of these more recent instruments supersede those of the Strategy.

4.    Contributions by Members to the third progress report on the implementation of the Strategy were taken into account in the preparation of relevant documentation for the last Session of the Committee including document COFI/95/3 "Present Status of World Fisheries: Problems and Prospects" and the 1995 special COFI paper "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture".

5.    The Twenty-eighth Session of the FAO Conference adopted Resolutions 4/94 and 8/95 pursuant to provisions of the Code and these Resolutions provided a mandate for the Fisheries Department to present routinely progress reports to COFI in order to enable it to review the level of implementation of the Code and its effects on promoting responsible fisheries. The Department has also submitted a report on the implementation of the Kyoto Declaration and Plan of Action.

6.    In view of these developments with the Code, in order to avoid the duplication of work, the Director-General considers it appropriate to discontinue his reporting on the implementation of the 1984 Strategy.