Mauritania publishes 4th annual FiTI Report, covering calendar year 2022

The FiTI National Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG) of Mauritania has now published its fourth annual FiTI Report, covering publicly available marine fisheries information for calendar year 2022.

By publishing this report, the National MSG demonstrates Mauritania’s continuing commitment to improve transparency in marine fisheries management. This report enables all interested stakeholders to better understand the status of the country’s fisheries sector, as well as the benefits and challenges of working towards sustainability.

For this FiTl Report, Mauritania’s National MSG aimed to provide information for all 12 of the current transparency requirements of the FiTl Standard. Acting as Report Compilers for the National MSG, the fourth report was prepared by Mr Moustapha Kébé and Mr Abderrahmane Boujoumaa between October 2023 and December 2023. The report was reviewed and approved by Mauritania’s National MSG on 15 December 2023.

The report highlights that Mauritania’s government has made significant efforts to improve vessel information, despite not having an online vessel register with the 14 attributes required by the FiTI Standard. Through the compilation of this report, it emerged that Mauritania has two registers: one for foreign vessels maintained by the Directorate General for the Exploitation of Fishery Resources (DMM) and one for national vessels (including Mauritanian vessels) maintained by the Directorate General for the Exploitation of Fishery Resources (DGERH). Now, both files are consistent with the information derived from license payments and are available online from the FiTI National MSG of Mauritania.

Additionally, information on laws, tenure, fish stocks, fishing agreements, catches and vessel payments of large-scale fishing vessels, artisanal fishing licenses, fish exports, and law enforcement are also available.

However, a number of important information categories are still not publicly accessible, including precise information on the total volume of discards and subsidies, and information on projects in the sector also seems incomplete. The National MSG also found very low implementation of recommendations from the country’s previous FiTI reports.

Mauritania’s 2022 FiTI Report was technically and financially supported by the German Agency for International Cooperation GmbH (GIZ) within the framework of the “ONE WORLD – No Hunger (SEWOH)” initiative, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Summarised and detailed versions of the new FiTI Report are available online from the FiTI National MSG of Mauritania.