Countries that should improve their data collection and reporting systems are mainly found in Africa, Asia and among the island states in Oceania and the Caribbean (Table 1). The quality of the statistics included in the FAO capture databases learn more is mostly dependent upon the accuracy and reliability of the data collected

and provided by countries. When analyzing aggregated or global trends, the number of countries, the size of FAO fishing areas and the extended species coverage included in the database often play a buffer effect. Despite significant annual variations by country, fishing area and species, recent global total catch trend has been quite stable in the last four years (2006–2009) for which statistics are available at the time of writing, ranging between 88.9 and 90.1 million tonnes. On the other hand, in some cases disaggregated data series may be biased or disrupted due to a range of reasons: • erroneous reporting: magnitudes of reported catches may be erroneous due to shortcomings in the data collection system, wrong procedures applied in raising sample data, 20 or for political reasons, e.g. countries with a centrally planned economy which report continuously growing catches to match targets

set in yearly or multi-year national plans; As already noted in Section 3.2.1, trends in the data series also reflect political

and natural events that greatly impacted the fishery sector in a country. For example, striking decreases of capture production in the 1960s for the Democratic Republic PLX3397 solubility dmso of the Congo and in 1996 for Burundi and Rwanda were due to political crises and civil wars, while the drop of Spanish catches in the Southeast Atlantic was a consequence of the Namibian independence. Adenosine triphosphate Hurricane Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast at the end of August 2005 and, although the Western Central Atlantic fishing area covers the US coast from North Carolina to the Mexican border, total catches by the United States in that year decreased by almost 20% in comparison to the previous year. Serious catch reductions are also expected as a consequence of the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the March 2011 tsunami in Japan. Unexpectedly, other natural disasters, like the December 2004 tsunami that affected many important Asian fishing countries and the cyclone Nargis that in May 2008 caused the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Myanmar, did not result in significant catch decreases as it would have been expected due to the magnitude of the devastations. FAO requested clarifications to the most involved countries. Indonesia replied that damages in Banda Aceh due to the tsunami were compensated by increased catches in other regions.