Annual Number of Fishers by State & Fishing Gear
Data as of 2025Annual number of fishers working on licensed fishing vessels by state, coast and fishing gear group.
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How is this data produced?
Data on fishers in Malaysia is compiled by the Department of Fisheries (DOF) from its licensing records. A fisher is counted when he or she works on a fishing vessel licensed by the DOF; the count covers both local and foreign fishers. Accordingly, people fishing from unlicensed boats or from the shore, including those fishing for personal consumption, are not included in this data, nor are inland (freshwater) fishers.
It should be noted that W.P. Kuala Lumpur and W.P. Putrajaya are excluded from the data as they do not have coastlines. Classification by coast and state follows the fisheries district in which the vessel is licensed. Each vessel is classified under a single fishing gear group, being the main gear it is licensed to use, and its fishers are counted under that gear group.
What caveats I should bear in mind when using this data?
Some gear groups (kenka nets, fish aggregating devices, marine culture systems, crab traps and anchovy boilers) are reported separately only from 2006. For 2024 and 2025, only the total number of fishers by state is available, as the Department of Fisheries now publishes the breakdown by gear group for local fishers only.
Metadata
Dataset description
Annual number of fishers working on licensed fishing vessels by state, coast and fishing gear group.
Variable definitions
- Date
- Coast
- State
- Fishing Gear
- Fishers
Name in Dataset | Variable | Definition |
|---|---|---|
date (Date) | Date | The date in YYYY-MM-DD format, with MM-DD set to 01-01 as the data is at annual frequency |
coast (Categorical) | Coast | The coast where the fishing vessel is licensed; either all coasts ('all'), the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia ('east'), west coast of Peninsular Malaysia ('west') or Borneo ('borneo') |
state (Categorical) | State | The state where the fishing vessel is licensed; one of 14 states (excluding W.P. Kuala Lumpur and W.P. Putrajaya, which do not have coastlines), 'All States' for a coast's total, or Malaysia. Johor is a part of both the east and west coast data. |
gear (Categorical) | Fishing Gear | The fishing gear group of the licensed vessel, as classified by DOF, or 'total' for all gear groups |
fishers (Integer) | Fishers | Number of fishers (persons) working on licensed fishing vessels |
Last updated:
10 Oct 2026, 22:57
Next update:
N/A
Data source(s)
- Department of Fisheries
URLs to dataset
License
This data is made open under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). A copy of the license is available Here.
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Data
Full Dataset (CSV)
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Full Dataset (Parquet)
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Code
Connect directly to the data with Python.
# If not already installed, do: pip install pandas fastparquet
import pandas as pd
URL_DATA = 'https://storage.data.gov.my/agriculture/fishers.parquet'
df = pd.read_parquet(URL_DATA)
if 'date' in df.columns: df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'])
print(df)Sample OpenAPI query
The following code is an example of how to make an API query to retrieve the data catalogue mentioned above. You can use different programming languages by switching the code accordingly. For a complete guide on possible query parameters and syntax, please refer to the official Open API Documentation.
import requests
import pprint
url = "https://api.data.gov.my/data-catalogue?id=fishers&limit=3"
response_json = requests.get(url=url).json()
pprint.pprint(response_json)
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