Saving Seafood

US effort on transshipment, labor, and stateless vessels measures results in ICCAT action

January 25, 2022 — The annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) wrapped up on 23 November, 2021, with some notable decisions: a ban on retaining shortfin mako shark bycatch in the North Atlantic and an increase in the Western Atlantic bluefin tuna quota. There were also significant achievements at the meeting of the regional fishery management organization (RFMO) pertaining to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and labor conditions that received less coverage, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Communications Specialist Katie Wagner.

Wagner said unanimous approval is required for measures to be adopted at RFMOs, so compromise is required to enact any measure put before them. Nevertheless, the United States led an effort resulting in the successful adoption of an updated transshipment measure, Wagner said. The new ICCAT transshipment measure creates an ICCAT record of carrier vessels authorized to receive tuna and tuna-like species and other species caught in association with these fisheries in the ICCAT convention area. The also require an International Maritime Organization (IMO) number for inclusion on the authorized list of carrier vessels, use of a vessel monitoring system (VMS) for carrier vessels, and that all relevant information on transshipment activities be provided promptly to flag states, relevant coastal states, and the ICCAT Secretariat.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Report: Illegal Fishing Should be Major National Security Issue

November 17, 2017 — Illegal and unregulated fishing supports transnational crime, piracy, insurgency and terrorism and should be treated as a national security issue, a new report from the National Geographic Society and the Center for Strategic and International Studies says.

Although illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing provide pathways for a host of criminal activities, “it doesn’t have the consciousness of government imagination” not only in the United States but globally, John Hamre, CSIS chief executive officer said on Wednesday.

Active enforcement of exclusive economic zones and protected maritime areas is “largely the Wild West” in legal terms because one nation’s laws differ from another, said Gregory Poling, one of the report’s authors. Nations have not agreed-upon definitions of what is permitted even in protected maritime areas.

Transnational criminal networks become involved through the use of large fishing vessels staying at sea for a year or more, said Daniel Myers, of the National Geographic Pristine Seas project. In reality, “You have slave labor” working on these ships. Often a two-step “trans-shipping” system is used. In the first step, the smaller boats unload illegal catches onto a large mother ship. The mother ship, in turn, refuels and resupplies the smaller fishing vessels, allowing them to remain out from port for months and keep the crews working, often against their will.

Additionally, “you have illegal fishing boats used as cover for narco-trafficking,” Myers said. The stomachs of illegally-captured sharks or other fish are filled with cocaine. The results are profits from the illegal catch and the drug smuggling.

Read the full story at USNI News

Banning Transshipment at-Sea Necessary to Curb Illegal Fishing, Researchers Conclude

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.”

Read the full story at NYU

Hidden no more: First-ever global view of transshipment in commercial fishing industry

February 22, 2017 — Transshipment, the transfer of goods from one boat to another, is a major pathway for illegally caught and unreported fish to enter the global seafood market. It has also been associated with drug smuggling and slave labor. Illegal in many cases, transshipment has been largely invisible and nearly impossible to manage, because it often occurs far from shore and out of sight. Until now.

Today, with the release of our report, The Global View of Transshipment: Preliminary Findings, we present the first-ever global footprint of transshipment in the fishing industry. The report explains how data scientists from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch (a partnership of Oceana, SkyTruth and Google) analyzed Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships at sea to developed a tool to identify and track 90 percent of the world’s large refrigerated cargo vessels, ships that collect catch from multiple fishing boats at sea and carry it to port.

According to the analysis, from 2012 through 2016, refrigerated cargo vessels, known as “reefers,” participated in more than 5,000 likely transshipments (instances in which they rendezvoused with an AIS-broadcasting fishing vessel and drifted long enough to receive a catch). In addition, the data revealed more than 86,000 potential transshipments in which reefers exhibited transshipment-like behavior, but there were no corresponding AIS signals from . Brian Sullivan, Google’s lead for Global Fishing Watch, will present the findings at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Indonesia today. The report, along with the underlying data and our list of likely and suspected transshipments, will be freely available on our website, globalfishingwatch.org.

The global scale of transshipment and its ability to facilitate suspicious activity, such as illegal fishing and human rights abuses, is exposed in a complementary report being issued today by our partners at Oceana. The opportunity for mixing legal and illegal catch during the collection of from multiple fishing boats provides an easy route for illegal players to get their product to market. This obscures the seafood supply chain from hook to port and hobbles efforts at sustainability because it prevents an accurate measurement of the amount of marine life being taken from the sea.

Read the full story at Phys.org