Comments on FAO's State of Fisheries and Aquaculture, or ‘SOFIA 2010’

Comments are provided on a few sections of the FAO's 2010 edition of the bi-annual ‘State of the World's Fisheries and Aquaculture’ (SOFIA), i.e., its characterization of the present as a period of ‘stability’, the peculiar role of China's fisheries statistics, the under-reporting of much of the small-scale fisheries catch from developing countries as a key aspect of the deteriorating quality of statistical data submitted to the FAO by member countries, and some other minor topics (but not aquaculture). Overall, this SOFIA report, like its predecessors, provides an excellent starting point for debates about the status of global fisheries, rather than settling them, and a few vignettes are presented, which illustrate this. Moreover, this debate should be broader, e.g., involve more university- and civil society-based researchers, to provide the wide variety of views and analyses required to strengthen FAO in its laudable mission of providing dependable information on the state of global fisheries.