The International Pole and Line Foundation (IPNLF) launched a new fishery information system (FIS) for the Maldives. This database will allow the Maldives’ one-by-one tuna fisheries to fulfil all the latest international traceability requirements with regards to catch and vessel reporting. The FIS was developed through generous support from the non-profit IPNLF and its members Marks and Spencer, J. Sainsbury and World Wise Foods. This backing also enabled the hiring of a database specialist to work full-time at the marine research center of the Maldives’ Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture (MoFA), along with staff involved in data acquisition and compilation. Work on the FIS began in July 2012 after the implementation of the EU regulation to prevent, deter and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing entered into force on Jan. 1, 2010. Together with the successful Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of the skipjack tuna pole-and-line fishery in 2012, this placed new demands on fisheries data capture in the Maldives. The skipjack fishery’s certification remains in place, but the yellowfin MSC approval has been suspended, however. These developments required the tracking and supply of new fishery information previously not collected. In order to fulfill these needs, the Maldives’ MoFA introduced logbooks and the requirement for fishermen to complete entries for every fishing trip, with this information going directly to the ministry. Because of the significant additional burden placed upon the logbook software that was in place at that time, the decision was taken to build a new system capable of meeting the fisheries’ needs for many years to come. Following four years’ development work, the catch statistics, licensing, catch certification, fish purchase and transfer modules for the new FIS are now complete and fully live, said John Burton, chairman of IPNLF and also the founder of World Wise Foods, in a statement. Crucially, as well as providing necessary assurances related to MSC certification, the data it provides is also sufficient for the reporting requirements of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, which is responsible for managing tuna and tuna-like species in the Indian Ocean and adjacent seas, he said. The FIS development work hasn’t stopped, it is being expanded to a second phase that includes automating catch reporting from fishing vessels, and we look forward to sharing details of that progress in due course, said Burton. The launch of the FIS follows a meeting that was held last month with all the major fish exporters from the Maldives to discuss its new modules and the new certification process, as well as a subsequent pilot trial of the certification process.