The Coalition for Fisheries Transparency

Photo credits: EJF

The Challenge

Wild seafood is the world’s largest globally traded food commodity and the last food that humans still hunt on a global scale – yet so much about it remains in the dark. Lack of openness and accountability in fishery information, activities, and decision-making has enabled fisheries mismanagement; illegal fishing; human rights and labor abuses; unfair access to resources; and fraud and corruption.

The result is overexploited fisheries, jeopardized livelihoods, food insecurity in coastal communities, and threats to the safety and security of fishery workers. This opacity, in combination with complex and patchy international fisheries management systems, provides opportunities for bad actors to bypass rules that don’t suit them and allow actions like illegal fishing to continue unchecked.

The Solution - Transparency

Global transparency policies that reveal what is happening in and on our ocean are key to addressing these challenges at sea by underpinning effective governance. For example, information about who is catching what, where, when, and how should be freely available and directly accessible to all.

As a result, transparency enables all stakeholders to play a part in ensuring that fisheries are legal, ethical, and sustainable. This includes fishers, coastal communities, seafood buyers, governments, regional organizations, journalists and civil society organizations.

Without transparency, advances made in policy and enforcement are often fleeting— dependent on individuals and projects that come and go—and difficult to evidence up the supply chain.

The Coalition for Fisheries Transparency

Due to the global nature of fisheries, more can be achieved in advancing transparency when we collaborate. To support this cooperation, the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency is building a global community of civil society members that advocate for improved transparency and accountability in fisheries governance.

The Coalition serves as a platform for member organizations to collaborate on joint strategies and to coordinate their efforts, enabling them to maximize the impact of their advocacy work for fisheries transparency.

The ultimate goal of the Coalition’s efforts is to support NGOs in their advocacy efforts to governments to adopt fisheries policy principles, like those featured in the Coalition’s Global Charter for Transparency.

Who We Are

Members are at the heart of the initiative as they drive the Coalition’s work by identifying the challenges they face in advancing transparency in their regions and determining priority areas for projects.

Membership is composed of civil society organizations around the world that work on policy reform related to industrial fisheries and small-scale fisheries. A full list of members can be found at fisheriestransparency.net.

Leading the Coalition is a steering committee of NGOs, including

Advancing transparency through the Global Charter

Examples from around the world showcase strong fisheries transparency initiatives in various countries and regions. Despite these successes, gaps in the global implementation of transparency policies remain. To coordinate the efforts of civil society, the Coalition has developed the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency.

The Global Charter is a set of 10 transparency policy principles that serves as a framework for Coalition members and facilitates their cooperation on national and regional strategies, identifies and fills gaps, and ultimately, strengthens fisheries governance globally.

To develop the Global Charter into a set of principles that are effective as well as equitable for all involved in fisheries governance, the Coalition engaged in public consultation on the Charter in September to November 2022. The Coalition received input from a broad range of fisheries stakeholders, including industry, civil society groups, academics, small-scale fishery actors, and other interested parties.

The Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency: Policy Principles

The principles in the Global Charter are designed to be adopted by states into law and practice, thereby ensuring that information about vessels and fishing activity is widely available to support fisheries management measures that counter fisheries mismanagement, illegal fishing, and human rights abuses at sea.

While intended for the entire fisheries sector and readily implementable in industrial fisheries, the Coalition acknowledges that some principles require further adaptation before they can be effectively applied to all small-scale fisheries.

Principle 1

Require all fishing vessels, refrigerated transport vessels and supply vessels (hereafter ‘fishing vessels’) to obtain unique identification numbers, and also provide them to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Global Record, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs), and other relevant bodies.

All fishing vessels should have a unique number that stays with them throughout their lifetime and that is provided to a global record of fishing vessels. These numbers serve as a form of identification for the vessel that allows authorities to know about the history of the vessel and keep track of bad behavior.

Principle 2

Publish comprehensive and up-to-date lists of fishing vessel licenses (including key vessel information), authorizations, subsidies, official access agreements and sanctions (for fisheries and labor offenses), and also supply this information to the FAO Global Record.

This vessel information enables authorities to know where each vessel is allowed to fish and if they have committed previous offenses for which they have been sanctioned.

Combined with vessel tracking data, vessels can be monitored and punished for fishing in unauthorized areas and using illegal gear.

Principle 3

Make public the beneficial ownership of vessels.

Vessel owners are often protected from prosecution for engaging in illicit activity at sea by hiding their true identity from enforcement authorities and the public.

Stopping IUU fishing will require understanding, exposing and sanctioning beneficial owners — the vessel owners who control illicit vessels and ultimately profit from bad behavior at sea.

Principle 4

Stop the use of flags of convenience by fishing vessels by enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Article 91 requirement for a genuine link between vessels and their flag state, and prevent vessels from engaging in illegal fishing and associated crimes regardless of their flag, and punish the vessel(s) that do it.

Often, vessels will register to a country that minimally monitors their flagged vessels or limits enforcement of international fishing vessel regulations — these countries are known as ‘flags of convenience’ and allow vessels to continue their illegal fishing practices and avoid sanctions.

Principle 5

Require vessel position to be public by sharing Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data, sharing other non-public systems, or mandating Automatic Identification System (AIS).

Knowing where fishing vessels are located while at sea enables authorities to track vessels associated with illegal fishing, and to monitor for suspicious vessel activity.

Principle 6

Ban transferring fish between boats at sea

— unless pre-authorized -, carefully monitored and publicly logged.

The practice of transferring fish between boats allows fishing vessels to stay at sea for long periods of time — months to years — without needing to return to shore to drop off their fresh catch and often avoiding inspections. This practice enables vessels to keep crew at sea for extended periods of time, often against their will, without pay, and without the proper care.

To protect workers and ensure that the seafood being transferred is traced between boats, each transfer must be authorized, monitored, and logged.

Principle 7

Mandate the adoption of robust control systems that ensure seafood is legal and traceable from boat to plate, conforming to relevant catch management measures whose key data elements are made publicly available.

Countries must have a robust system in place for tracing seafood that follows products throughout each step in its supply chain — from boat to plate.

Gaps in the traceability system allow for seafood that was caught illegally to be slipped into the supply chain of otherwise legal product, making it impossible to know if the seafood product on the consumer’s plate was legally caught.

Principle 8

Ratify and comply with international instruments that set clear standards for fishing vessels and the trade in fisheries products, including FAO Agreement on Port State Measures, International Labour Organization (ILO) Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and ILO C188, and International Maritime Organization (IMO) Cape Town Agreement.

These international standards set standards to protect fish workers and stop illegal fishing.

Principle 9

Publish all collected fisheries data and scientific assessments in order to facilitate access to information for small-scale fishers, fish workers, indigenous communities, industry associations, and civil society in developing fisheries rules, regulations, subsidies and fisheries budgets, and decisions on access to fisheries resources.

Make these processes, policies, and decisions easily accessible to the public and enforcement agencies.

Access to information and the ability to participate in fisheries decision-making are key to ensuring equitable fisheries that do not prioritize industrial fishing vessels at the expense of small-scale fishers.

Principle 10

Collect and verify robust data on crew identification and demographics (including nationalities, age, race, and gender), contractual terms, recruitment agencies, location and means of joining vessels, and conditions on vessels, as well as publish this information in aggregate form.

Information about who, how, and why fish workers are aboard vessels is vital to stopping human rights and labor abuses on fishing vessels. This information allows authorities to monitor and ensure that vessel operators are not operating illegally or abusively.