| In the area served by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), which includes 22 Pacific Island countries and territories, anchored FADs have been used since the late 1970s. First introduced from the Philippines, via Hawaii, they were quickly adopted by both industrial and artisanal fisheries sectors : in 1984 more than 600 anchored FADs had been deployed in the region. Since these early days, the development of the technique by the industrial and the artisanal sectors have followed parallel paths with little interaction. In the industrial private sector, companies are funding, deploying and monitoring their own FADs. For some fishing companies, using purse seiners and pole-and-line vessels, from the Solomon Islands or Papua-New-Guinea, these FADs... |
