BELIZE CITY, BELIZE; WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2013 –

National and regional fish experts from across the Caribbean are meeting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines this week for the 9th Annual Scientific Meeting, organized and sponsored by the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM).

The group—which is meeting in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines this week, until Friday, June 14—is currently engaged in working group meetings to conduct scientific data analyses for providing advice to the region’s fishery managers, to review fisheries management progress and ongoing challenges, and to identify priorities for advancing statistical and other scientific approaches required to support new and emerging management needs of major fisheries within the CRFM membership and the Wider Caribbean.

During this 9th Annual Scientific Meeting, national fisheries reports from CRFM member states—which provide details on production data and the fishing fleet—are also being presented.

As in previous years, the scientific meeting information enables fisheries managers to understand more about the status of key commercially important fisheries across the region, and required management actions to ensure sustainability and continued profitability of the industry.

Regional conservation and management plans for the billfish and the blackfin tuna, respectively, as well as the proposed regional lionfish control strategy are among the items which are being discussed by the fisheries experts.

Central to the new approaches being integrated in fisheries management strategies across the region are the precautionary and ecosystem-based approaches to management, which is also giving consideration to the realities imposed by global environmental change, and particularly climate change. The shift in strategic planning also necessitates a renewed focus on disaster risk management, especially in light of the known vulnerability of fishers and fishing communities in many Caribbean states to the damaging impacts of hurricanes.