2006 NEW YEAR’S MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fisheries and the UN Fish Agreement- Moving from Words to Action in St-John’s; Newfoundland and Labrador; Ministers agreed on a Declaration; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.307.8908; http://www.npafc.org/new/publications/Newsletter/NL19.pdf

I would like to take this opportunity to extend to all of you my New Year greetings. I was greatly honoured to assume the presidency of the NPAFC last October in Jeju, Korea, and I look forward to working with all of you over the next two years. Coming back from Jeju, I was thinking what a wonderful Commission we have. It is a well organized and efficiently functioning organization, its members work well together and achieve important results, it provides powerful science, and most importantly it fits perfectly into the current realm of reforms and new directions that we are engaging into internationally. As you may already know, in the last year at various international meetings, ministers with responsibilities for fisheries (or their representatives) have agreed on the critical state of various fisheries, and committed to action and urgent reforms to address illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. At the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), March 12, 2005 meeting in Rome, Ministers stressed the need to strengthen international cooperation and efforts to identify, target, and reduce IUU fishing. Later in May 2005, at the Conference on the Governance of High Seas