On October 2, 2013 TBTI held a panel session as part of the World Seafood Congress that took place from September 28 – October 3, 2013 in St. John’s, Canada. The special session was jointly organized by TBTI partnership and Ecology Action Centre, an NGO based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The topic of the panel session was Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries: Implications and Implementation of the FAO Guidelines.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is in the process of developing ‘International Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries’. The aim of the panel session was to discuss the implications of the FAO guidelines for local fishing communities, fishing industries and governments worldwide and talk about how to effectively implement these guidelines.
The panel session, which was chaired by Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee, Memorial University of Newfoundland, began with a keynote presentation by Dr. Yvette Diei-Ouadi (FAO), who provided history, background and highlights of the FAO guidelines. This was then followed by the presentations from Adam Soliman (The Fisheries Law Centre, Vancouver) and Dr. Easkey Britton (TBTI Partnership and MARE Centre, Amsterdam) about access to justice in light of the FAO guidelines, the new EU Common Fisheries Policy and the FAO guidelines. Katie Schleit (Ecology Action Centre) gave a final presentation during which she talked about the relevance of the FAO guidelines to Canadian fisheries.
