Assessment of demersal fish stocks in Ghanaian and adjacent waters
“This report forms part of work package RP3 – Integrated Evidence for Ocean
Management – as part of the Ghana Workplan. It contributes to deliverable 3.03
“Part I Fisheries data collation” and “Part II Inshore fish stock assessment”. The work
is based primarily on data collated by the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central
Atlantic (CECAF) and reported in FAO (2019) on demersal fish exploited by four
countries, including Ghana, in the Gulf of Guinea (Figure 1. 1). While RP3 is focused
on Ghana, the regional stock assessments supported by FAO define the stock area
as the “western” zone and include catches by Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Benin. The
assessments performed in this report therefore include data from this wider area.
However, within this assessment unit, Ghanaian catches dominate, and because
data are available by country and fleet it is possible to partition out the Ghanaian
component of the fishery. As is common in many stock assessment units throughout
the world, the boundaries of the assessment are somewhat arbitrary and may not
correspond to true biological units. As there is no biological data to define stock
identity the assessment unit as used by FAO is adopted here….”