May 2, 2017 — New research concludes that a total ban on the practice of transshipment on the high seas is necessary to help stop illegal fishing and reduce the human trafficking and labor rights abuses that often accompany unlawful fishing activities.
“Transshipping enables fishing vessels to remain at sea for extended periods of time,” Washington D.C.-based oceans conservancy NGO Oceana explains. “Fishing vessels and refrigerated cargo vessels rendezvous at sea in order to transfer seafood, fuel or supplies. While this transshipping practice can be legal in many cases, it also can facilitate the laundering of illegally caught fish, especially on the high seas and in waters surrounding developing and small island nations with insufficient resources to police their waters.”
As detailed in a report released last month, Oceana found that close to 40 percent of suspected instances of transshipping occur on the high seas — areas outside of any national jurisdiction, which make up about two-thirds of Earth’s oceans. Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, the high-seas regions of the Barents Sea, the national waters of Guinea-Bissau, and just outside the national waters of Argentina and Peru are reportedly the world’s chief transshipping hotspots.
Oceana’s report was based on an analysis of data collected by West Virginia-based environmental monitoring NGO SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, a partnership between Google, Oceana, and SkyTruth, which documented more than 5,000 “likely” cases of illegal transshipment and over 86,000 “potential” cases between 2012 and 2016.
In a paper published in the journal Marine Policy last month, a team of researchers make the case that a global ban on the practice of transshipment on the high seas is necessary in order to curb illegal fishing and human rights abuses in the global fishing industry.
“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,” Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University (NYU) and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement.