Capture Production by Country:

Fisheries production has been trending upwards in the tropics, but decreasing elsewhere

Global fish production peaked in 2016, with capture fishery production relatively static since the late 1980’s.

Challenge to Sustainable Fisheries: Transshipment of Catch at Sea; recent findings from Boerder, et al.

A major challenge in global fisheries is posed by transshipment of catch at sea from fishing vessels to refrigerated cargo vessels, which can obscure the origin of the catch and mask illicit practices. Transshipment remains poorly quantified at a global scale, as much of it is thought to occur outside of national waters. We used Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracking data to quantify spatial patterns of transshipment for major fisheries and gear types. From 2012 to 2017, we observed 10,510 likely transshipment events, with trawlers (53%) and longliners (21%) involved in a majority of cases. Trawlers tended to transship in national waters, whereas longliners did so predominantly on the high seas. Spatial hot spots were seen off the coasts of Russia and West Africa, in the South Indian Ocean, and in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Our study highlights novel ways to trace seafood supply chains and identifies priority areas for improved trade regulation and fisheries management at the global scale. (Boerder et al., Global hot spots of transshipment of fish catch at sea, Sci. Adv. 2018; 4 : eaat7159 25 July 2018 )

A Tale of Tuna:  An albacore’s journey to the supermarket

1.  Fishing vessel fishes for 2-3 weeks

2.  Vessel meet a “reefer” (refrigerated cargo ship) on the high seas to off-load

3.  Reefer returns to port (about once a month) to land the transshipped tuna

4.  Whole fish is processed into “loins”(a cut, normally of uniform thickness, with no taper and no bones*)    and shipped in sealed containers to canning facilities in the United States, which takes 4-8 weeks

5.  Reprocessing and canning occur over another 4 weeks

6.  Distribution to retail within 2-12 weeks

• Total time from sea to shelf:  18-35 weeks
• Travel distance from sea to shelf:  average 17,000 km (13,000-20,000km, excluding traveling on the fishing boat and transport to final retail

         * http://www.jjmcdonnell.com/product-information/loin-prime-cut

9.  57% of managed tuna stocks are considered to be at a healthy level of abundance, 13% are overfished, and even those that are not overfished show slight declines in biomass over time

10.  Oceanic sharks, of which 44% are threatened, spend a great deal of time in the high seas, where shark fishing is largely unregulated and unmonitored

11.  Only six countries (China, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Spain, and South Korea) accounted for 77% of the global high-seas fishing fleet and 80% of all AIS/VMS-inferred fishing effort

12. Of these six countries, five (excluding Indonesia) account for nearly two-thirds (US$4.9 billion) of the global high-seas fishing revenue (US$7.6 billion)

13.  Without government subsidies, high-seas fishing at the global scale would be unlikely (Source 9-13:  Sala, et al., The economics of fishing the high seas, Sala et al., Sci. Adv. 2018;4:eaat2504 6 June 2018)

14.  The fraction of fish stocks that are within biologically sustainable levels has exhibited a decreasing trend from 90.0% in 1974 to 66.9% in 2015 (FAO)

15. In 2015, nearly 60% of marine stocks were maximally sustainably fished

16. The percentage of stocks fished unsustainably varies considerably globally

17. Productivity and stock status vary greatly among species. Of the ten species with the largest landings between 1950 and 2015, 77.4% were fished within sustainable levels in 2015–better than average for all stocks

18. In 2015, 43% of principal tuna species were fished unsustainably

18. The world’s marine fisheries had 33.1% of stocks classified as overfished in 2015

19. Progress towards global sustainability is uneven; overcapacity and stock status has worsened in developing countries, while management and stock status in developing nations has improved

#14-19 Source:  FAO. 2018. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018 – Meeting the sustainable development goals. Rome. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing

Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a significant global problem jeopardizing ecosystems, food security, and livelihoods around the world.

(Pramod, et al., Estimates of illegal and unreported fish in seafood imports to the USA, Marine Policy 48 (2014) 102–113

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2014.03.019)

1.    Estimates of IUU extent by country and region have revealed substantial IUU world wide between 13% and 31% of reported catches, and over 50% in some regions. This illegal catch is valued at between $10 and $23.5 billion per year.  IUU fishing distorts competition, harms honest fishermen, weakens coastal communities, promotes tax evasion, and is frequently associated with transnational crime such as narcotraffic and slavery at sea.

2.  The highly internationalized seafood supply chain feeding imports into the United States and other major markets is one of the most complex and opaque of all natural commodities. It involves many actors between the fisherman and the consumer, including brokers, traders, wholesalers and other middlemen, often distant from the consumer markets they supply.

3.  IUU in the USA

20–32% by weight of wild-caught seafood imported by the United States in 2011, with a value between $1.3 billion and $2.1 billion (or 15–26% of total value of wild-caught seafood), were from illegal and unreported (IU) catches. This trade represents between 4% and 16% of the value of the global illegal fish catch and reveals the unintentional role of the USA, one of the largest seafood markets in the world, in funding the profits of illegal fishing.