The 15th INFOFISH World Tuna Trade Conference and Exhibition is being held in Bangkok from 28-30 May 2018, focusing on ways to ensure a sustainable fishery to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
Organised by Thailand’s Department of Fisheries, the group INFOFISH, in collaboration with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the three day conference is set to cover a wide range of topics including fisheries management, markets and new technologies. It is also focusing on food safety, sustainability and environmental issues.
The conference will address the importance of sustainable fishing practices in the world’s oceans, said FAO.
Jong-Jin Kim, deputy regional representative of FAO for Asia and the Pacific, underlined the fact that the international community now has at its disposal a number of new and powerful instruments with the potential to drastically reduce and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. These include the Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA), the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on Catch Documentation Schemes and the FAO Global Record of Fishing Vessels. In this respect, FAO encourages all countries that have not yet ratified the PSMA agreement, to do so, Kim said.
“FAO is also encouraged to see that this conference addresses the ‘social sustainability’ of the value-chain. This issue has been neglected for too long – has the importance of gender balance – and it goes beyond the reputational risk of the industry,” said Kim, noting it was also addressed last year by the sub-committee on fish trade with a mandate to the Secretariat to develop a new guidance document for the fisheries value-chain.
