'It's not about hugging fish, it's about making sure they are there for the next generation'

Wild Crime speaks to Dr Sarah Glaser of WWF-US

Last month Wild Crime spoke to Dr Sarah Glaser. She’s the senior director of Ocean Futures, a really interesting programme operated by WWF-US that’s using data to try to predict the future of illegal fishing in our oceans and the potential flashpoints for conflict.

We had a fascinating discussion about illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. We talked about the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet (the largest fleet in the world), the work being done to tackle illegal fishing and how you, as a consumer, can make sure the fish you eat is caught legally.

Can you describe your work?

I'm a senior director in the oceans programme at WWF US. We're headquartered in DC. My role is to lead our fisheries and seafood engagement work.

I have a team that works on seafood markets. So we work with companies that import seafood and retailers on the ways that they can source in more responsible and sustainable ways. And the ways that they can use their portfolio and where they source from to make a difference in policy.

I have another team working on global tuna policy and regional fisheries management organizations, so taking a global perspective on how countries can come together and implement international policy and international management in a way that’s science based.

So a lot of issues that all involve marine fisheries and how consumers consume fish.

What problems does IUU cause?

IUU fishing has been around for a long time. In the 1970s or so, it was really the focus of the scientific community who said illegal fishing, but particularly unreported and unregulated fishing, was making it difficult to take accurate, scientific stock assessments.

Scientists and those charged with managing the fisheries were trying to get an accurate count of how many fish are in the water and then how many fish were being taken out of the water [in order to work out] what is the optimal yield that a fishery should produce. Those models were getting messed up because we didn't have accurate counts of how many fish were being caught, and that discrepancy was millions of metric tons. So a lot of scientific studies in the 1990s were showing that that was causing us to be inaccurate about our scientific assessments of how many fish were left in the ocean. So that was how IUU fishing came to the fore and became known as a big problem.

Much more recently, there's a focus on criminal convergence. So the way that IUU fishing enables and facilitates other crimes. Wildlife trafficking is one of them. Also human trafficking, smuggling, drugs and guns. So the convergence of crimes, particularly out on the open ocean where it's much easier to perpetrate those crimes and enforcement is much more difficult, has become a focus.

And then there's also the sustainability and environmental consequences. If you can't manage the fishery, then it oftentimes is unsustainable, and the fish that are caught illegally sometimes make it into legal markets. That's actually one of the major problems. But the issue for sustainability is if you're willing to break the law in one case, you're oftentimes willing to break the law in multiple cases. So not reporting bycatch of endangered species, using illegal fishing gear, fishing when the season is supposed to be closed, all of those kinds of things are put in place so that there is conservation of the species, so that future generations have fish.

What are the differences between illegal fishing and unregulated fishing?

They manifest themselves very differently, and the solutions to those problems are also very different.

With illegal fishing, there is a definition that is for the most part, used around the world, and that definition is fishing that violates the laws of the waters in which a vessel is operating. Flag states [where the vessel is registered] also require vessels to follow their own laws. So there are a variety of different ways that vessels can break the law.

Then there are some international treaties which have various different levels of voluntariness to them. So anything in violation of the law is illegal fishing, and that's the kind of fishing that never makes it onto the books. It enters illegal marketplaces. It facilitates crime. I do think that that's probably the most concerning. It's much more likely that illegal fishing is going to have spillover concerns, say, for maritime security issues, because vessels are fishing in places they shouldn't be and not following the rules. So they're much more likely to either act aggressively. Let's say a patrol vessel comes to inspect, they might act evasively or aggressively.

Or they will operate in a manner where they will race to fish – come in and fish as fast as they can and then get out of there. That has really serious consequences for small-scale fisheries. In this case, a lot of illegal fishing can be attributed to foreign fishing vessels that are legally in the waters. Maybe they're behaving illegally, or maybe they're entering into waters that they don't have access rights to causing pretty serious concerns for the domestic fisheries.

Unregulated fishing is fishing that occurs in waters that don't have regulations to support sustainable fisheries management. And when I say sustainable fisheries management, I don't mean I love to hug fish. I mean that we want fish to be there for the next generation. That's where these scientific optimisation models come into play.

We're really trying to optimise for economic yield, for human yield, and then fishing in a way that fish start to reproduce faster. And so these models are really trying to make sure that there are plenty of fish to feed the world.

Unregulated fishing is really important, because seafood is the number one globally-traded food commodity. Fish is being caught thousands of miles from where it’s consumed. If you don't have good regulation in all places of the world then consumers don't know what's on their plates, right?

What does IUU fishing look like?

There is huge, distant-water fishing by nations with industrialised vessels that can stay out at sea for over a year. They have small vessels feeding large vessels with a huge refrigeration system. Those fleets pay a lot of money for access to exclusive economic zones. The biggest fleets are China, Taiwan, Spain and France. The EU has a distant water fleet, and Russia from time to time.

The truth is that the biggest problems are because of the countries with the most boats. So China has the world’s biggest fishing fleet and so their vessels have a much larger footprint around the world. Industrial fishing vessels catch a ton of fish, and then their beneficial ownership is extremely opaque, and because they can stay out at sea for a very long time, those vessels also are much more likely to have human rights and labour rights violations on board vessels. They have better technology. They have larger vessels. They can fish longer and harder, and then they leave, and then that depletes waters for small scale fisheries.

So that's one kind of illegal fishing. The other kind is prevalent in every single country around the world, including the EU and the United States, and that is illegal fishing by small-scale or artisanal fishing vessels. And those are domestic fishing vessels that just break the law because they can, just like we speed down the highway. The consequences tend to be much less dire because of the volume of fishing but the implications are really important for coastal health. We're talking about the health of inland ecosystems, and we're talking about local food security.

What are the main barriers to tackling IUU fishing?

It’s highly dependent on the context and the location but I think there's some really important big themes.