Abstract
Jordan has a short coastline in the Gulf of Aqaba, to the north of the Red Sea. It is the only access the country has to sea, and thus numerous economic activities are concentrated there. The fisheries catch taken within the small Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of Jordan in the inner Gulf of Aqaba is presented, based on a variety of government and non-government sources for the years 1950–2010, and compared with the catch Jordan reports annually to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The different sectors of the fisheries are treated separately and the composition of the catches estimated. There are strong discrepancies between the reconstructed catch and FAO data, in part due to Jordan’s fishing fleets having operated outside of their waters, in Saudi Arabian waters, from 1950 to 1984, and to an overall lack of interest for what are rather small operations, generating very low catches. The catch was around 150 t · year−1 from 1950 to the mid-1960s, then declined, due to conflicts in the area, and started to increase again in the mid-1980s, with some fluctuations. The highest catch of 330 t was achieved in 2009. Overall, the estimated reconstructed catch of Jordan from 1950 to 2010 was 1.7 times what is reported in the FAO database. This reconstruction exercise, with its explicitly stated procedures and assumptions and accounting all the sectors comprehensively, can serve as starting point to improve the quality of the data for Jordan, and for better management of its marine resources, which are under increasing pressure from fishing and other developments in the region.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the fisheries administration of Jordan for their collaboration. Our thanks goes to Izzat Feidi for reviewing the chapter. This is a contribution of Sea Around Us , a scientific collaboration between the University of British Columbia and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Tesfamichael, D., Govender, R., Pauly, D. (2016). Jordan. In: Tesfamichael, D., Pauly, D. (eds) The Red Sea Ecosystem and Fisheries. Coral Reefs of the World, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7435-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7435-2_7
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