Fifteen years ago, on 19 September 1967, the Director-General of FAO promulgated the Statutes of the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic (CECAF). The Eighth Session held in Lomé in September 1982 was, therefore, the 15th Anniversary of the Committee whose Terms of Reference are given in Appendix 1.
During these fifteen years numerous events have taken place that have had profound repercussions on the fisheries of West Africa the character of which has changed radically: the decolonization process has finished, there has been the deployment of long-distance fishing fleets, changes in the Law of the Sea, the development of intra-and inter-regional commerce, growing aspirations for a new international economic order, and, finally, an awareness of the strategic economic and social importance of fishing for some of the more important countries in the region.
At the time it was created, and under the impulse of a desire to meet the requirement of international action for the development and rational use1 of the resources of the region2, the Committee received a mandate to advise on how to:
promote, coordinate, and support research and development with a view to rational exploitation;
help the governments of the Member States to define the scientific basis for the management of resources;
encourage training;
contribute to the collection, diffusion and exchange of statistical data and information in general;
mobilize and orientate international aid;
encourage regional cooperation.
1 Resolution 1/48 of the FAO Council, September 1967.
2 A large part of which was situated outside the limits of national jurisdiction.
It is important to note here that the Statutes did not explicitly provide for a direct functional link between the Committee and the decision-making level of the Member States (and even more so of the Coastal States), but only an indirect one through FAO. The results of the activities carried out by CECAF bear the mark of this structural feature; the work of the Committee has, on the whole, been correctly orientated as will be seen later on but the Advice and Recommendations aimed at Member States (more particularly the Coastal States) have, sometimes, not been fully used.
At subsequent meetings the Committee gradually equipped itself with the means of achieving its objectives and created successively:
in March 1969, the Working Party on the Regulatory Measures for Demersal Stocks;
in May 1971, the Working Party on Resource Evaluation along with the Sub-Committee for the Implementation of Management Measures;
in December 1972, the Sub-Committee on Management of Resources Within the Limits of National Jurisdiction and the Sub-Committee on Fishery Development. This decision was a major step in the evolution of CECAF which will be discussed later;
in December 1979, the Working Party on Fishery Statistics.
Together with this structural diversification, CECAF, already in 1974, was supported by an Inter-Regional FAO/UNDP Project for the Development and Management of Resources in the Eastern Central Atlantic, known as the “CECAF Project”, the activities of which have generally been decisive, as will be seen later, in the fields of collecting statistics, assessing resources, management principles, training and regional cooperation.
Bearing in mind the structural features of the Committee mentioned earlier and the limitations of the coastal countries as regards expertise, it is obvious that without the technical support of the Project, a large part of the Recommendations and Directives of the Committee would have been more poorly followed up at national or regional level.
Since its creation the Committee has undertaken a certain number of actions in connection with the problem of management. From 1974 onwards it has been able to rely on the Project directly for some of its activities, and throughout the period under consideration (1967–1982) it has benefitted from the work carried on in the laboratories of Member Countries. Table 1 shows the sequence of events as they developed chronologically within the framework of the Committee itself. If the progress achieved is to be evaluated with regard to management in the CECAF region, it is worth looking at the evolution of information on stocks and then judge the way in which this information has been used.
