Sustained promotion of responsible fisheries to secure the competitiveness of ASEAN fish and fishery products in intra- and inter-regional trade: SEAFDEC initiative

Since its establishment in December 1967, the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) has continued to advance the development of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture for food security and poverty alleviation in the Southeast Asian region. In the span of 48 years of its existence, SEAFDEC can indeed boast of enormous technical advancements that had shifted the course of development of the region's fisheries and aquaculture towards sustainability, based on its proactive mandate 'to develop and manage the fisheries potential of the region by rational utilization of the resources for providing food security and safety of the people and alleviating poverty through transfer of new technologies, research and information dissemination activities'. Along line with such mandate, SEAFDEC has been developing and implementing countermeasures to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in the Southeast Asian region considering that IUU fishing activities obstruct all efforts of the Southeast Asian countries to achieve sustainability in fisheries. The progress of such endeavor by SEAFDEC was summarized in a Keynote Remarks delivered by the author Mr. Hajime Kawamura during the Third Meeting of the ASEAN Public-Private Taskforce for Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture in Penang, Malaysia on 20-21October 2014.