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7325172 
Technical Report 
Honduras, a fish exporting country: Preliminary reconstructed marine catches in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Fonseca, 1950 – 2010 
Funes, M; Zylich, K; Divovich, E; Zeller, D; Lindop, A; Pauly, D; Box, S 
2015 
Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia 
Vancouver, BC 
1-16 
16 
English 
The country of Honduras has coastal territory on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, presenting a wide diversity of ecosystems in both regions. These ecosystems support important fishing activities for national and international consumption. However, in recent years, most of the fisheries of Honduras were seriously affected by, or have even collapsed after, a significant decline of their stocks. Management decisions have played and continue to play a key role in the present situation, often relying on key data to understand fish extractions and the status of remaining stocks. Through comparisons of official catch data reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on behalf of Honduras and independent sources of information, the present paper estimated unreported landings and hence, reconstructed the total fisheries catch from 1950 to 2010 within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Honduras. The resulting time series of reconstructed catch indicated that the total estimated catch was 2.1 times the data reported by the FAO on behalf of Honduras. The unreported catches were composed of discards from the industrial shrimp fishery (45% of unreported catch), unreported artisanal (40%), subsistence (11%) and unreported industrial (4%), whilst catch from recreational fisheries was excluded due to lack of data. Although overexploitation in the coastal areas of Honduras has many causes, the results of the present paper puts into perspective the importance of a well-designed data collection and administration system (including accounting for discarded catch), as well as the biological, and even social, consequences that catch underestimation raises.