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Sea cucumbers are harvested throughout the world to produce a dried product from its body, known as "bêche-de-mer" or "trepang", which is exported to eastern Asian markets as a luxury seafood. Sea cucumber fisheries are important sources of income for millions of people worldwide and have become the focus of a new frontier in mariculture of lowtrophic-level animals.
Unfortunately, sea cucumber fisheries across the Indian Ocean are showing signs of significant decline by unsustainable exploitation rates and nearly half of these fisheries are overexploited. In some locations the situation is severe with widely depleted resources and an expansive clandestine fishery and trade undermining management efforts. This situation calls for increased support to improve management of wild stocks and a critical, and cautious, appraisal of aquaculture opportunities by each country.
At a global scale, FAO has supported the development of improved fisheries management systems and aquaculture for sea cucumbers through a series of multifaceted activities. Two outputs were a technical manual on the ecosystem approach to managing sea cucumber fisheries and a condensed guidebook on putting the approach into practice. The documents provide a "roadmap" for developing and implementing better management of sea cucumber fisheries, and complement a previous "toolbox" manual developed by the Australian Government.
While the manuals have been widely distributed, the task still remains to assist fisheries agencies to use them to design modern and practical management plans to save or restore sea cucumber fisheries. This need has been taken up by a workshop series called Sea Cucumber Fisheries: an Ecosystem Approach to Management (SCEAM). The first workshop on Pacific sea cucumber fisheries, held in Fiji Islands in 2011, was recently followed by a second for the Indian Ocean, held at Zanzibar (Tanzania) in 2012....