April 18, 2017 — Banning transshipment at-sea—the transfer of fish and supplies from one vessel to another in open waters—is necessary to diminish illegal fishing, a team of researchers has concluded after an analysis of existing maritime regulations.
“This practice often occurs on the high seas and beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction, allowing ships fishing illegally to evade most monitoring and enforcement measures, offload their cargo, and resume fishing without returning to port,” explains Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies and one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s one way that illegal fish are laundered into the seafood market.”
“More significantly, transshipment at-sea can facilitate trafficking and exploitation of workers who are trapped and abused on fishing vessels because there is simply no authority present to protect those being exploited,” adds Chris Ewell, an NYU undergraduate at the time of the study and the paper’s lead author.
The paper, which appears in the journal Marine Policy, may be downloaded here.
In their study, the researchers focused on the regulation of transshipment, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines as the “act of transferring the catch from one fishing vessel to either another fishing vessel or to a vessel used solely for the carriage of cargo.”