January 9, 2023 — More than 300 pounds of illegally caught fish were seized on Saturday off the coast of Texas, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Crews said they were alerted to three fishermen illegally fishing near Corpus Christi. They were caught 15 miles off the coast, which is when crews seized 350 pounds of red snapper and fishing gear.
November 10, 2022 — Canadian fishery officers participating in a multinational maritime surveillance mission have uncovered a number of violations on the high seas of the North Pacific, including incidents of shark fishing.
Dubbed Operation North Pacific Guard, the annual international law enforcement operation also included law enforcement officials from the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
November 3, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Illegal and inhumane working conditions in the seafood sector are not only devastating for the victims and their families, but also contribute to destabilization of maritime security and supply chains, as well as the degradation of fisheries and broader marine ecosystems. NOAA Fisheries recognizes the need to ensure that workers across the supply chain have access to legal, safe, and healthy working conditions.
The international framework to promote legal and safe conditions in the seafood industry is supported by the International Labor Organization, the International Maritime Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization. The United States is actively engaged in each of these organizations, promoting effective standards, such as transparent recruiting practices, fair wages, and occupational safety and health protection.
NOAA Fisheries, in cooperation with interagency partners, is advocating for the strengthening of global guidance on labor standards at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, including the development of guidance for industry to promote social sustainability across its supply chains. We are also leading, or are key voices, in discussions at regional fishery management organizations, including the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, to ensure that workers in members’ fleets have access to safe and legal working conditions, including ending forced labor.
NOAA Fisheries is part of a comprehensive U.S. Government effort to combat illegal labor practices, including forced labor, in fisheries, in concert with the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, and State. For example, we work with Customs and Border Protection and other agencies to support the identification of potential forced labor practices and violations aboard fishing vessels, as well as products that may have been produced using forced labor. CBP can subsequently prevent merchandise produced in whole or in part in a foreign country using forced labor from being imported into the United States.
The Maritime SAFE Act required the formation of an Interagency Working Group on Illegal, Unreported or Unregulated Fishing. The Sub-Working Group on Labor in the Seafood Supply Chain, including Forced Labor, was established in 2021 as a subsidiary working group to focus on labor concerns. The Sub-Working Group’s mission is to develop and facilitate a comprehensive U.S. government response to identify and address labor abuses, including forced labor, in the fishing industry. Currently, the Sub-Working Group is making progress on addressing recommendations from several reports to Congress. These include:
NOAA Fisheries recognizes the shared role of government and civil society in preventing illegal and harmful labor practices in the seafood supply chain, as well as promoting legal, safe, and healthy working conditions for workers in the fishing industry.
NOAA leads an initiative known as the Collaborative Accelerator for Lawful Maritime Conditions in Seafood (CALM-CS,and pronounced “calm seas”). CALM-CS brings together key voices from across the seafood sector to collaborate and accelerate progress on key initiatives so that all workers across the seafood sector have access to safe, healthy, and legal workplaces, from aboard vessels to on docks to shoreside processing.
NOAA and the U.S. government strongly value the importance of workers’ voices within these processes. We are committed to ensuring that this work is inclusive of workers and worker’s unions, and their perspectives.
Learn more about CALM-CS. We encourage participation from all stakeholders. You can request more information by emailing calm.cs@noaa.gov.
November 3, 2022 — In February 2019, the 60-meter-long South Korean fishing vessel Oyang 77 slipped into Argentinian waters and deployed its trawl nets, hauling in more than 140 tons of hake, skate, and squid. The ship did not have permission to fish those waters, according to Argentine officials, and to avoid detection the crew turned off a beacon that sends a vessel’s precise location via satellite to maritime authorities. But the coast guard caught the Oyang 77, confiscated the catch, and destroyed its nets.
Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to help authorities more easily decipher what vessels like the Oyang 77 might be doing when they go dark and whether they might be fishing illegally. The approach is already guiding some enforcement agencies in planning their patrols.
Illegal fishing accounts for hauls that are worth about $25 billion per year and include endangered species such as sharks. Some vessels have been caught with enslaved crews. Although there is increasing political awareness of the problem, governments have not taken enough action, says Rashid Sumaila, an ocean and fisheries economist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. “This paper is showing some of the possibilities that we can achieve,” says Sumaila, who was not involved. “I think there’s hope.”
November 3, 2022 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
The North Atlantic right whale is one of the world’s most endangered large whale species. The latest preliminary estimate suggests there are fewer than 350 individuals remaining, including fewer than 70 breeding females. The species has been experiencing an Unusual Mortality Event since 2017. NOAA Fisheries and our partners are dedicated to conserving and rebuilding their population, and NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement plays an important role. We enforce regulations designed to mitigate entanglement in fixed fishing gear and vessel strikes, two of the greatest threats to their recovery.
From November to July, multiple Seasonal Management Areas go into effect on the East Coast. Since 2008, these areas have protected right whales from vessel strikes in their feeding and calving grounds and on their migratory routes. During these times of year, most vessels 65 feet or longer are required to reduce their speeds to 10 knots or slower while transiting the designated areas.
NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement is charged with enforcing these regulations and helping the public comply with the rules. To enforce the speed rule, we deploy a number of technologies and strategies, including:
Thanks to our investigative work, NOAA has assessed $218,500 in penalties across 19 cases for violations during the 2021–2022 season. In addition to these cases, other speeding violations are being actively investigated and may be subject to potential civil penalties.
Beyond enforcement, we also provide the public with the information they need to comply with rules. Since November 2021, we have instructed hundreds of vessel owners along the Atlantic coast about the current vessel speed rule and the potential penalties for violations. In addition, reacting in near-real time and leveraging satellite-based technologies, we have sent more than 100 alerts to vessels operating in close proximity to right whales.
In 2021, NOAA Fisheries issued significant new regulations to address right whale entanglement in the Northeast lobster and Jonah crab fixed trap/pot fisheries. Since these were implemented in May 2022, our Northeast team, state, and U.S. Coast Guard enforcement partners conducted more than 110 lobster and crab pot/trap fixed gear-focused patrols. During those patrols, agents and officers collectively inspected more than 800 individual vessels. They found that more than 75 percent of vessels were compliant with the new regulations designed to protect right whales.
In the Southeast, longstanding gear regulations designed to protect right whales remain unchanged. In June 2022, we prosecuted a person for fishing crab pots without markings and weak links required to protect right whales. They were assessed a $5,500 penalty.
It will take everyone’s cooperation and contributions to save these endangered whales, and put them on a path to recovery.
November 1, 2022 — In a reminder that high-tech militaries are only as strong as their weakest supporting link, a long-standing cook shortage threatens to sideline the U.S. Coast Guard.
Newly recruited to the high-tech, great-power struggle in the Western Pacific, the Coast Guard is in a struggle for trained workers. But rather than focus solely on waging a bare-knuckle labor fight to keep elite operations specialists, electronics technicians, cyber operators, and other glamorous workers in the fleet, the Coast Guard is also paying big money to recruit and retain cooks, or, in Coast Guard vernacular, “culinary specialists.”
The Coast Guard’s cook shortage is a full-fledged readiness crisis.
November 1, 2022 — This summer, as China fired missiles into the sea off Taiwan to protest House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island, a much different kind of geopolitical standoff was taking shape in another corner of the Pacific Ocean.
Thousands of miles away, a heavily-armed U.S. Coast Guard cutter sailed up to a fleet of a few hundred Chinese squid-fishing boats not far from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Its mission: inspect the vessels for any signs of illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing.
Boarding ships on the high seas is a perfectly legal if little-used tool available to any sea power as part of the collective effort to protect the oceans’ threatened fish stocks.
But in this case, the Chinese captains of several fishing boats did something unexpected. Three vessels sped away, one turning aggressively 90 degrees toward the Coast Guard cutter James, forcing the American vessel to take evasive action to avoid being rammed.
“For the most part they wanted to avoid us,” said Coast Guard Lt. Hunter Stowes, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer on the James. “But we were able to maneuver effectively so that we were safe the entire time.”
Still, the high-seas confrontation represented a potentially dangerous breach of international maritime protocol, one the U.S. sees as a troubling precedent since it happened on the Coast Guard’s first-ever mission to counter illegal fishing in the eastern Pacific.
October 22, 2022 — Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is one of the greatest threats to ocean health and a significant cause of overfishing. It contributes to the collapse or decline of fisheries that are critical to the economic growth, food systems, and ecosystems of numerous countries around the world. It is also a global problem that disadvantages law-abiding fishers and seafood producers.
The U.S. Maritime Security and Fisheries Enforcement Act called for stronger federal collaboration to coordinate efforts to address this and other maritime related threats. Today, the Congressionally established U.S. Interagency Working Group on IUU Fishing, composed of 21 member agencies, released its wide-reaching National Five-Year Strategy for Combating Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing.
August 10, 2022 — In the deep Pacific Ocean, America’s four enormous Marine National Monuments are under siege by China. More than just ecological gems, the sprawling refuges are also underappreciated national security resources, offering quiet hiding places for America’s missile submarines, out-of-the-way testing-grounds, and training areas for various U.S. Defense Department assets.
In total, America’s deep-ocean National Monuments lay claim to almost 1.2 million square miles of pristine ocean, and China, as it pours billions of dollars into seizing much of the 1.4 million square mile South China Sea, is already looking to grab other unsecured Pacific territories, positioning to compromise the sanctity of American’s big Marine preserves. To prevent international encroachment, poaching and other sovereignty-degrading insults, America’s fragile Pacific frontiers need far more dedicated wildlife management and enforcement resources.
The current marine monument managers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with NOAA, are insufficiently resourced to manage over a million square miles of strategic ocean. Aside from bulking up their small law enforcement ranks, both agencies can use more funding for timely intelligence support, and procuring drones, helicopters, and some larger enforcement craft to better detect, track, document and then intercept and prosecute illegal activity in the deep Pacific.
July 26, 2022 — Regardless of prognostications of future conflict it is clear that the history of the 21st century will be written in the Indo-Pacific. Accordingly, as the United States steams into in an increasingly turbulent maritime security environment, it should not discount harvesting “easy wins” in the region. Compared to the marquee U.S. military installations at Diego Garcia, Yokosuka, or Guam, American Samoa is a U.S. territory that evokes images of idyllic island life rather than strategic competition.
However, by considering American Samoa through the lens of strategic competition, a military installation manned by the U.S. Coast Guard is an easy step to demonstrate commitment in the region that makes imminent sense for several reasons. Due to the sheer distances involved in the Pacific — the closest Coast Guard installations are from Hawaii (2,260 nautical miles) and Guam (3,120 nautical miles) — current sustained operations in region are necessarily expeditionary.
Establishing a Coast Guard installation in American Samoa would lengthen the reach of the Coast Guard’s highly capable Sentinel class cutters, galvanizing partnerships throughout the Southern Pacific. With increasing concerns surrounding illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing (IUUF), the law enforcement presence and know-how of the U.S. Coast Guard will be a boon to safeguarding erosion of geographic and economic sovereignty of island nations in the Southern Pacific.
This approach dovetails with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy, which calls for “Build[ing] Connections Within and Beyond the Region.” Notably, the U.S. Coast Guard is one of the few government agencies called out by name in the strategy. One of the great contributions and strengths of the Coast Guard are the multitude of unique service and agency relationships and bi-lateral agreements it shares with international partners. . Expanding Coast Guard presence in the Southern Pacific has the potential to enhance dozens of bilateral and multi-lateral relationships for the United States while bolstering maritime security in the region.