1. The Technical Consultation needs to provide advice on the feasibility and practicability of developing non-discriminatory, globally applicable technical guidelines for the eco-labelling of fish and fishery products. Once it is decided that such guidelines are to be developed, the Consultation must address the procedure to be followed in developing them. The process involved will have an important bearing on their legitimacy and acceptability to the different stakeholders, their validity and quality, and the time involved to develop them. The Consultation therefore needs to consider a procedure for their development that will result in widely accepted and high quality guidelines in a time-efficient manner. In doing so, particular consideration needs to be given to:

• ensuring a non-discriminatory certification process;
• ensuring the participation and contribution of all stakeholders in and to the process;
• enabling developing countries to have their interests appropriately considered both substantively in the criteria and indicators and in the elaboration process, as well as their likely need for technical and financial cooperation to support implementation.

2. Another important question to be addressed is the legal nature of the technical guidelines. Should they be binding or voluntary? The decision on this question will certainly have a bearing in the procedure to be adopted for developing them.

4. The immediate roots of the Code of Conduct lie in the 19th Session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries (COFI) held in 1991. This meeting of COFI recommended the development of new concepts which would lead to sustainable and responsible fisheries, which should be elaborated as an appropriate instrument. This recommendation was followed in May 1992 by the International Conference on Responsible Fishing held in Cancún, Mexico which cal led on FAO to prepare an international code of conduct for responsible fishing. These two sets of recommendations, supported by Agenda 21 of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), prompted the development of what was to become the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. The 20th Session of COFI in March 1993, examined a proposed framework and content for the Code, and endorsed a time frame for its completion. At the 21st Session of COFI, the scope of the Code and the process by which this should be elaborated was discussed in detail, as was the need for technical guidelines to the Code.

5. The actual drafting of the chapters of the Code was undertaken by a number of technical working groups, which met at FAO Headquarters in Rome. Membership of these working groups was open and FAO provided financial support to representatives from some developing countries who otherwise might not have been able to participate, facilitating a geographic balance in representation. A number of relevant international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) were also encouraged to participate in the process. After a thorough drafting process, the Code was unanimously adopted by the FAO Conference on 31 October 1995.

6. Overall, the process used in development of the Code of Conduct put very heavy emphasis on transparency, consultation and participation, and this resulted in a relatively slow process, with over four years being required from the initiation of the concept in 1991, to final acceptance at the end of 1995. The Code is voluntary, and a less participatory approach could have been followed, probably requiring much less time. However, the benefits of this slow but widely consultative process lie in the unanimous acceptance of the Code by the FAO Conference in 1995, and the subsequent enthusiasm with which the Code has been accepted, and steps taken to implement it, in many countries and regions.

8. A first draft of the Fisheries Management Guidelines was drawn up by FAO staff, making use of available information and was tabled but not discussed at a Technical Consultation held in Rome towards the end of 1994. This draft was thoroughly reviewed at the "Expert Consultation on Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries Management" held in New Zealand in January 1995, and recommendations were made on the structure and content of the final version. The costs for this Consultation were met by FAO. The participants at the Consultation consisted of 18 experts in fisheries management coming from a range of developing and developed countries and from FAO. The emphasis in selecting participants was primarily on expertise, with careful selection to ensure broad but not comprehensive representation by region and nature of the fisheries.

9. Thereafter, with considerable informal input from experts from Member countries, the process was handled within FAO, where review was undertaken by a committee of senior staff within the FAO Fisheries Department in a series of meetings at different stages of the drafting process. The final version of this volume, and others in the series, were distributed at COFI in 1997. Hence, the Technical Guidelines have been prepared entirely under the responsibility of the FAO Fisheries Department and have a status similar to the FAO Fisheries Technical Papers.