Small-scale subsistence village fisheries is an essential sector for food security in Vanuatu both in terms of the number of people and the tonnes of fish involved. Very little was known about these fisheries until the early 1980s–published data on this topic are scarce and not very recent, i.e. travelogue documents (ship stopover reports, colonial administrator mission reports, sailors' log records, and scientific mission reports), ethnologists' and geographers' monographs on separate villages or islands, missionaries' diaries, and national and regional summary reports. In these documents, only a few paragraphs or lines are devoted to fisheries–generally simple descriptions of fishing vessels, gear, or techniques. There is almost no quantitative data available. This situation prompted the Vanuatu Fisheries Department and ORSTOM to draw up a fisheries questionnaire, which was included in the agriculture census conducted by the Planning and Statistics Office from July to November 1983. Five topics were covered: the fishermen, fishing fleet, fishing gear, yields, and use of the fishing products. The household was selected as the elementary statistical unit for data sampling on production and consumption patterns. Overall, 130 villages (16%) on 26 of the main islands of the archipelago were surveyed. In each village, 10 households were sampled, for a total of 1 347 households, i.e. 7% of the rural population in Vanuatu.

      Household equipment rates were determined on the basis of the number of fishing devices and boats owned. When the household only owned one fishing device or one boat, the equipment rate was equated with the percentage of households owning this equipment in the whole control population, i.e. represented by the entire coastal population. This was determined on the basis of the results of censuses of the Vanuatu population conducted in 1979 and 1989, of populations in 1983 and 1993, years when the agricultural censuses were not known. As the population growth between 1979 and 1983 and between 1989 and 1993 was not therefore taken into account, the control population was underestimated along with the household equipment rates. Calculating the equipment rate in terms of fishing gear (contrary to fishing boats) only takes the population of fishermen into consideration. As this parameter was not assessed in the 1993 agricultural census, the coastal population was used as the control population. This equipment rate calculation is a general parameter involving two variables: the per-household number of fishing devices of the same type, and the percentage of these owner households in the coastal population.

      In terms of its coverage and thoroughness, this census represented an important Pacific Islands event, especially as very little accurate statistical data is available on small-scale village fisheries in this region. A census update was carried out in 1993. The sampling procedure and questionnaires were similar to those of the initial censuses (Marshall, 1986, 1993). The results enabled us to draw up 10-year review of the small-scale subsistence village fisheries situation in Vanuatu.