Mauritania publishes 5th annual FiTI Report

FiTI Report Mauritania

Mauritania publishes 5th annual FiTI Report

By Mansor Ndour

The FiTI National Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG) of Mauritania recently published its fifth annual FiTI Report on 25 December 2024, covering publicly available marine fisheries information for calendar year 2023.

By publishing this report, the Mauritania’s National MSG demonstrates the country’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. The report was prepared by the Report Compiler, Dr. Moustapha Kebe, between October and December 2024, and approved by Mauritania’s National MSG on 25 December 2024.

The report shows that Mauritania’s government has made significant efforts to publish fishing vessel information, despite not yet having an online vessel register with the 14 attributes required by the FiTI Standard. Through the compilation of this report, it emerged that Mauritania still 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 now available.

However, several important information categories are still not publicly accessible, including precise information on the total volume of discards (the only information available is that recorded in the reports of Institut Mauritanien de Recherches Océanographiques et de Pêches (IMROP) scientific observers on board certain vessels), information on landings in domestic and foreign ports, and information on transshipments by vessels operating in the foreign regime. Information on projects in the sector also seems incomplete.

The National MSG also found that very few of the recommendations from the country’s previous FiTI reports have been implemented. Some recommendations have even been abandoned or rejected by the National MSG because they have become non applicable or difficult to implement by the government. For example, the following two recommendations on discards have been dropped by the National MSG:

  • Provide information on discards (e.g. total volume, surveys) from artisanal fisheries;
  • Strengthen observation on board fishing vessels to obtain regular information on discards from large-scale fishing.

In addition, the recommendation to collect and monitor information on subsidies granted to the fishing sector (industrial, coastal and artisanal), notably the fuel subsidy, has been deemed inapplicable since the National MSG noted that there is no longer a government fishing subsidy.

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