At the 31st session of the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), held in Rome on 10 June 2014, delegates adopted the International Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries, an international instrument on small-scale fisheries that is based on the increasing recognition of small-scale fisheries as a principal contributor to poverty alleviation and food security.
The Guidelines opened for discussion at 10:15 a.m. Italian time in Rome and were adopted at 10:22 a.m. after the alternate paragraph 6.18 was accepted. Paragraph 6.18 was bracketed in the Chair’s text after the second round of technical consultation in February 2014. An alternate wording to the paragraph has now been suggested, which was found acceptable to all countries.
The Guidelines, which will be voluntary, focus on the needs of developing countries, and are relevant to small-scale fisheries in marine and inland waters, covering fishing as well as related post-harvest and upstream activities. They will be in support of national, regional and international initiatives for poverty alleviation and equitable social and economic development, and for improving governance of fisheries and promoting sustainable resource utilization. Their objective is to provide advice and recommendations, establish principles and criteria, and information to assist States and stakeholders to achieve secure and sustainable small-scale fisheries and related livelihoods.
The Committee on Fisheries (COFI), a subsidiary body of the FAO Council, was established by the FAO Conference at its Thirteenth Session in 1965.
The Committee presently constitutes the only global inter-governmental forum where major international fisheries and aquaculture problems and issues are examined and recommendations addressed to governments, regional fishery bodies, NGOs, fishworkers, FAO and international community, periodically on a world-wide basis.
COFI has also been used as a forum in which global agreements and non-binding instruments were negotiated.
For more, please see:
http://www.fao.org/fishery/ssf/guidelines/en
http://www.fao.org/cofi/en/
ICSF 2014