Notes from the Global Joint Tuna RFMO Longline CPUE Technical WorkshoP In Japan

As you read this, I'm in Yokohama (Japan), at the first Global Joint Tuna RFMO Longline CPUE Technical Workshop (12 to 16 October). WCPFC Project 122a supports it, and Japan's Fisheries Research and Education Agency hosts it; it brings together the people who build the longline abundance indices for bigeye, yellowfin, albacore, and bluefin across all the tuna RFMOs. Serious stock assessment modellers: this is serious maths and programming.

I was asked to open Session 3 on operational information and industry insights, which I take with honour and trepidation… I’m a proud fisheries scientist, but I'm definitely not a modeller/ stock assessment specialist

Some of you will remember that back in June I asked for help understanding a new longline manoeuvring pattern showing up in tracking data. Between some replies and a long dive into one vessel's observer report, I now have a much clearer picture, and it became the backbone of my presentation. So consider this a report back.

When the line never comes out of the water

Everything in CPUE rests on the logsheet: who the vessel is, its licence, its operations, its gear and its catch, one column per set. The historic Japanese series that underpins every longline index was built on a simple unit: one straight set, one soak, one haul. On a tracking map that looks like tidy parallel lines.

What we increasingly see today looks more like someone scribbled boxes all over the chart. In the observer report I studied, the mechanics were clear. Set #xxx put out 320 baskets. The captain stopped hauling at basket 170, the mainline was cut, an AIS buoy was left on the unhauled 150, and Set #xxx+1 was spliced onto that free end. The set never fully comes out of the water. The observer journal even records the setting type: the big sets that get split are "horseshoe"; the routine 160-basket sets are "straight line".

Why do it? Nobody confirmed to me that it is about fuel, and anyone who has fished knows that when you are on fish, fuel is not what keeps the skipper awake. My reading is simpler. The straight set is also a search tool: it covers ground, soaks, and tells you where the fish are. Once you know, you stop searching and start working the patch, folding the line back on itself so the hooks stay where the fish are. On these vessels, it wasn't satellite wizardry either, just fishing where they last caught fish plus the odd radio tip. Gear de-confliction on crowded grounds probably plays a part too, and the mix will differ between fleets.

And it is not one flag. I showed tracks from different Asian fleets, sometimes the same company running both patterns side by side, and Spanish swordfish boats in the eastern Pacific doing their own version.

What fisheries biologist actually do!

Why a stock assessment scientist should care

The effort isn't missing; it's mis-partitioned. Hooks set under one set get hauled inside the next set's hauling operation, so their catch lands on another set's logsheet page. The recorded start and end positions don't bracket the gear actually fished. And the carried-over baskets aren't rebaited, so by the time they come aboard, they have soaked 24 to 48 hours on their original bait. The trip total is fine; the "set" is no longer a coherent fishing unit, and a single soak time per set misstates both the effort and the soak covariate.

Then there is hyperstability. A vessel that reliably finds and saturates a hotspot can hold its catch rate steady while the stock declines. Above all there is continuity: if the meaning of "a set" shifts underneath a 70-year index, that is a change in the data, not in the fishing

None of this needs exotic fixes. Recording set type (straight scouting set or reset cycle), deriving effective hooks and per-segment soak time, rebuilding the geometry from high-resolution tracks and haul timing, and putting targeting and vessel or operator effects into the models would all help.

The water you can't see

Hooks between floats (HBF) is the standard proxy for hook depth. In still water, a deep set at HBF 15 puts the mid-basket hooks around 220 m. Add a 1.5-knot current and drag flattens the catenary; the hooks can rise 50 to 100 m, lifting them out of the depth band they were meant to fish. HBF tells you the depth the skipper intended, not the depth he fished.

Current also shapes the bait plume. Fish can't tell where the bait is from smell alone; they swim upstream into the odour. Slack water means no plume and few fish find the bait. Strong current means a narrow plume and gear gets lifted. Moderate current is where the money is. Even a rough estimate of current at setting depth would help the models.

Then bait, where there are as many truths as fishermen. Squid for yellowfin, saury, sardine or mackerel for bigeye, and for albacore size matters more than species: much over 120 g and it gets stripped rather than swallowed. The vessel I studied ran 7 milkfish, 4 chub mackerel and 4 mackerel scad per basket, with live milkfish near the floats. That is a lot of catchability hiding behind one number on a logsheet.

And then the crew

SPC's 2024 overview has a number I can't stop looking at. In 1991 to 1994, about 5,130 longliners in the WCPO soaked some 420 million hooks. In 2024, about 2,158 vessels soaked roughly 666 million. That is about 82,000 hooks per vessel then and 309,000 now, nearly four times as many.

Monofilament and Lindgren-Pitman spools, which came through Hawaii in the late 80s and 90s, explain the climb into the 2000s. I don't think they explain the second climb, which lines up with the growing use of foreign crew. If the deck technology has plateaued and you want more hooks in the water, you work the people longer.

For the trip I studied, I pulled every first- and last-radio-buoy timestamp for setting and hauling out of the observer journal (with Claude doing the tedious bits). On fishing days, the crew averaged 21 hours of setting and hauling, with a median of 22.5, and 90% of days between 20 and 24 hours.

That counts only buoy-to-buoy windows, not the gaps in between. A crew member's handwritten account says the same: hauling from mid-afternoon through the night and straight into the next set, at a fixed day rate, sometimes with only four hours of sleep, then again. The target mattered more than their health.

The effort creep literature talks about gear, technology and skipper skill. I haven't found it talking about crew hours, yet labour is an input, probably the cheapest one to stretch. Whether that belongs in a CPUE model I'll leave to the clever people in the room. I'm just an ex-fisherman who got carried away by university.

Many thanks to Paul Hammer and Simon Hoyle for inviting me to the workshop, and to Russell Dunham, Robert Lee, HoTu Chiang, Malo Hosken, and Bill Holden for sharing their opinions.

And if you have seen this on deck and have a different opinion, my inbox is open because learning when one is wrong is the way science advances.

Our new HS transhipment Study in the WCPO. Part 2: Hardship, ownership, and who pays

In Part 1 I went through the distance test from our new paper with Starboard and MIMRA (WCPFC-TCC22-2026-DP06).

The short version: across 1,277 high-seas events by six carriers between 2020 and 2026, 41% fail a simple test: whether a port was at least as close as the carrier, and that share hasn't budged in six years. This second part targets the two limbs of the impracticability test: economic hardship and the vessel's historical mode of operation.

If fuel mattered, fuel prices would show

The hardship argument, when it is made at all, is basically about fuel: the extra miles to a port multiplied by what fuel costs. If that logic actually drove decisions, vessels would tranship closer to their grounds when fuel is expensive and wander further when it is cheap.

We matched monthly Singapore MGO prices against the monthly median impracticability ratio over 65 months. The Spearman correlation was 0.111 (p = 0.377). At a one-month lag, it was 0.033; at two months, 0.003. We also tried three- and six-month rolling averages, dropped SEISHIN as the most influential carrier, and used raw distance to the transhipment location instead of the ratio. Nothing. And the direction, weak as it is, runs the wrong way round.

There is a fair caveat here, and we put it in the paper. Singapore MGO is probably not what these fleets pay. Most longliners bunker at sea, the flag states involved subsidise their distant-water fleets' fuel, and China is a documented buyer of discounted Russian crude. Fuel bought at sea, subsidised and outside anyone's tax base, does not track the Singapore spot price.

But notice which way that cuts. If these vessels pay less than the benchmark, the cost gap between meeting a carrier and steaming to a port is narrower than any market-rate calculation suggests. That weakens the hardship argument; it does not rescue it. Which is why one of our recommendations is that anyone claiming hardship should disclose actual fuel costs and the government support behind them.

The carrier's bill nobody counts

The test only looks at the longliner. But a high-seas transhipment needs a carrier out there too, and that carrier is not idling for free, nor cheap to run.

Alongside a longliner at sea, the carrier holds its heading against wind and swell on the main engine, while cranes, hydraulics, generators and refrigeration all keep running. Roughly, half the fuel goes to position control and half to auxiliaries. For MV BADARO, with a 4,175 kW main engine, we estimate around 4 t a day for positioning alone, rising to 6 to 8 t a day with refrigeration and hydraulics. At August 2026 VLSFO prices, that is about US$5,000 to US$6,800 a day. At anchor in a port, the main engine is off.

We then took one TAIHO MARU deployment apart in detail. It left Kaohsiung on 9 September 2025, spent 50 days at sea doing 42 likely transhipments with 30 fishing vessels (plus four inferred ones), called at Majuro for one hour and 39 minutes, and arrived in Shimizu on 8 November.

TAIHO MARU vessel track, 5 September to 8 November 2025, segmented by activity. Blue: transit to and from northeast Asia. Green: positioning within the transhipment operating window (speed > 3 knots), including repositioning between transhipment hotspots. Dark red: TS/loitering (speed ≤ 3 knots). Dashed segments indicate AIS reception gaps interpolated as straight lines. Red triangles indicate FFA-designated transhipment ports. The dotted line marks the WCPFC high seas boundary.

The positioning and transhipment work amounts to roughly 3,590 NM of equivalent steaming under main engine. A direct route from Kaohsiung via Tarawa and Kiritimati to Shimizu is 9,165 NM, within 13 NM of the transit it actually sailed. Calling at those two Kiribati ports instead would have kept the transit essentially unchanged and cut total fuel by around 28%.

I find it hard not to smile at the fact that the vessel already stops in Majuro on the way home to drop the IATTC observer. Just not long enough to do anything that a port call is actually for.

The test, as written, ignores all of this because it applies only to the fishing vessel. That makes some sense when carrier and longliner belong to different businesses. It makes much less sense when they belong to the same one, which brings me to the network.

Not geography, commerce

Carrier-and-fishing-vessel relationships follow national and commercial lines. DONG HRONG 899 transhipped with Chinese Taipei-flagged vessels in 130 of 136 partnerships, PINGTAIRONGLENG2 with Chinese vessels in 91 of 98, and MV BADARO with South Korean vessels in all 32. None of that is explained by where the fish are.

The ownership data (matched for 69% of fishing vessels, with Chinese Taipei the weakest spot, either because ownership is atomised or because the data is thin) shows two ways of organising the same activity.

The first is vertical integration. Pingtairong Ocean Fishery owns PINGTAIRONGLENG2 and 11 of the fishing vessels that regularly tranship with it. Dongwon Industries owns MV BADARO and six of its partner vessels. In both cases, an owner moves catch from its own longliners to its own carrier on the high seas.

The second is the opposite. Korean groups such as Sajo Industries (14 vessels across two carriers), Dong Won Fisheries (nine vessels, three carriers) and Silla (eight vessels, three carriers) spread their fleets across several carriers, including non-Korean ones like TAIHO MARU. SEISHIN works as a shared hub, taking vessels from Korean, Chinese and Chinese Taipei owners without belonging to any of them.

Now think about the second limb of the test, which asks whether port transhipment would force a significant and substantial change to the vessel's historical mode of operation. If you own both ends of the transfer, the supply chain is your own design, and you can redesign it. If you shuffle your fleet between carriers from trip to trip, you are already changing your mode of operation all the time. Neither looks like a fixed, externally imposed constraint, which is what that limb assumes.

Why carrier-based monitoring cannot keep up

The same structure is a monitoring problem. 176 fishing vessels, 36% of the network, transhipped with more than one carrier, and two Chinese Taipei vessels, SING MAN YI NO3 and NIAN SHENG NO168, used four of the six. Catch from a single longliner can enter several carrier logistics chains, none of which sees the others.

Carrier size matters too. MV BADARO, the biggest at around 4,600 GT, has the longest median event at 8.9 hours, while DONG HRONG 899, at about 499 GT, sits at 4.2. Smaller carriers produce lots of short, interrupted encounters, which tells you something about how much fish actually moves and how hard it is to verify.

And then there are the odd ones. A PINGTAIRONGLENG2 event with its sister vessel PINGTAIRONG89 in December 2024 lasted 104.7 hours. That is not a transhipment; that is a residency.

What a port call actually costs

None of this means port use is free or simple. Back in 2019 I wrote about the factors behind the choice of transhipment port for purse seiners, and the same drivers apply to longliners: licensing conditions, distance to grounds, services, medical facilities, flights, the safety of the anchorage, the quality of the agents, how reliably the line agencies turn up, and access to shore for the crew. And yes, weak port state oversight acts as a perverse incentive for some skippers.

A port call does not come with one fee. It comes with somewhere between 30 and 50 separate charges from port authorities, border agencies, fisheries and monitoring, and the agent who bundles them. For a 70 m fishing vessel transshipping 920 t over five days, our estimates per visit range from about US$1,975 in Rabaul to US$12,404 in Funafuti, with Tarawa, Pohnpei and Majuro around US$5,000 to US$5,500.

Set that against a carrier burning US$5,000 or more a day holding position at sea, and against the fishing vessel's own detour. The numbers are not the wall they are often made out to be.

There is a real equity issue inside those charges, though. Many are flat per call. A 350 GT longliner pays broadly the same customs, immigration, sanitation and boarding transport costs as a 5,500 GT carrier, despite being less than a fifteenth of its size. Scaled fisheries transhipment charges could help, but with care. Six years of data show incentives alone have not moved fleet behaviour, and Pacific countries cutting their own charges unilaterally may end up losing more than they gain.

What we suggest

The minimum step is the one the Commission has owed itself since 2012: every impracticability determination should be backed by evidence. Paragraph 34 of CMM 2009-06 lets a member determine impracticability for its vessels and paragraph 35 makes it name them, but nothing says what the determination must rest on. Beyond that, we suggest:

• Require disclosure of actual fuel costs and government fuel support when hardship is claimed, and assess hardship across the supply chain, including the carrier's costs, wherever the same owner controls both vessels.

• Establish an independent high-seas transhipment observer programme, as already operates in IOTC, ICCAT and IATTC and as was recommended in 2024. Carrier-level coverage cannot follow vessels that move between carriers, and 36% of them do.

• Consider scaled fisheries transhipment charges as a complementary incentive for port use, recognising that the fixed charges fall hardest on smaller longliners.

The paper's metrics are reproducible and can be applied vessel by vessel as new data comes in. The carrier and flag combinations where the ratio sits consistently above one are already identifiable, which gives members a natural starting point for scrutiny, if they want one.

To finish

The exemption was meant to be the exception. When it covers almost everyone, it is no longer an exemption; it is just the rule with extra paperwork, and in this case, not even much paperwork. The eastern hotspots show there is a legitimate core to the impracticability argument, and nobody is asking boats 1,600 NM from Avarua to sail in. But for the rest, the tracks are clear: ports passed, carriers met, and the costs borne by the island states that did not get the call.

As in 2024, I'm quite proud of this work, not only for the results but because a fisheries administration and a technology provider did the analysis together, rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

The full paper, with all the figures, the network graphs and the data annexes, is on the TCC22 meeting page as WCPFC-TCC22-2026-DP06

Our new HS transhipment Study in the WCPO. Part 1: two years on and the ports were still passed

Two years ago I wrote about the framework we developed with Starboard and MIMRA to evaluate the impracticability exemption for high-seas transhipment in the WCPO. We called it a proof of concept, and said we fully expected practitioners to poke holes in it and help us refine it. Well, nobody poked very hard, the intersessional working group that was supposed to fix CMM 2009-06 was disestablished in 2024 with little to show for it, and the longliners kept meeting carriers on the high seas pretty much where they had before.

Hotspots of high-seas transhipment events recorded by six carrier vessels in the Convention Area, May 2020–March 2026 within 20°N/S (n = 1,644 events). Eight local density maxima (C1–C8) are identified and labelled. Red triangles indicate suitable regional transhipment ports.

So we went back to the data. The Marshall Islands submitted the follow-up to TCC22 in Pohnpei as WCPFC-TCC22-2026-DP06, High-seas transhipment in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean: fleet structure, vessel economics, and the impracticability assessment. MIMRA and Starboard Maritime Intelligence prepared it, with Moritz Lehmann, Beau Bigler, and me as authors, and Sharks Pacific and MIMRA commissioned it. Sara Nix and Sam McGovern at C4ADS ran the centroid distance calculations and pulled the ownership data, and Viv Fernandes kept us all coordinated.

The paper is long, so I split this into two posts. This first one is about the distances. The second one is about the economics, who owns what, and what the Commission should do about it.

A quick reminder of the problem

Under CMM 2009-06, transhipment at sea by anything other than purse seiners is prohibited unless the flag state determines that it is impracticable for its vessels to operate without it. The interim test has two limbs: in-port transhipment would cause significant economic hardship, and it would force a significant and substantial change to the vessel's historical mode of operation. Paragraph 37 required the Commission to adopt proper guidelines by 2012. It is 2026, and they still don't exist.

The test was written for vessels genuinely fishing far from any suitable port. In practice, it became the default justification for most high-seas transhipment in the region, determined by the flag state itself against no evidentiary standard. I have been going on about this for years, most recently on the due diligence that should happen before a transhipment at sea, and doesn't and on the awkward numbers in the WCPFC 2025 MCS reporting.

What is new this time

The 2024 study covered 27 carriers from May 2020 to November 2023 and only used events of five hours or longer. This time we went narrower and deeper: six carriers, 1,644 events and 486 fishing vessels, from May 2020 to March 2026, on the high seas within 20 degrees of the equator.

The six were chosen for event volume and to cover the flags that do most of this work: DONG HRONG 899 (Chinese Taipei), PINGTAIRONGLENG2 (China), SEISHIN and MV BADARO (South Korea), and FULL KUO SHIN and TAIHO MARU (Panama, with beneficial ownership in Chinese Taipei and Japan). Five of them were among the eight central carriers we identified in 2024.

We also added some new layers. We kept the short encounters (under five hours) and stratified by duration instead of excluding them. We built a network analysis with beneficial ownership from S&P Global's MIRS. We compared carrier size with transhipment duration, tested whether fuel prices affect where vessels tranship, and measured actual track lengths for six fishing vessels and one carrier to check the centroid-based metric against real miles sailed.

High-seas transhipment network in the WCPFC Convention Area (May 2020 – March 2026), showing carrier vessels (diamonds) and fishing vessels (circles). Node size is proportional to total cumulative transhipment duration. Edge width is proportional to cumulative transhipment duration per carrier–fishing vessel pair, and colour identifies theflag state

The distance test

The logic is simple. For each event, we find the fishing centroid, the weighted centre of all fishing since the vessel's previous transhipment or port visit. We then divide the distance from that centroid to the transhipment location by the distance to a suitable port.

The port distance is measured two ways: from the centroid to the nearest suitable port, and as the vessel's closest approach to any suitable port within two weeks either side of the event. We use whichever gives the higher ratio, so any port opportunity the vessel actually had, from the grounds or along its route, counts against the claim. A ratio below 1 means the carrier was closer than any port. A ratio above one means a port was at least as accessible as the spot the vessel chose.

The ratio could be calculated for 1,277 events:

Summary of impracticability tier classification for all transhipment events and shorter encounters, based on the conservative ratio (the greater of the centroid-based and vessel-track-based port distance ratios). Clearly impracticable events have a ratio below 0.75, indicating the transhipment location was substantially closer to the fishing grounds than the nearest suitable port. Marginal events (ratio 0.75–1.0) fall within a zone of approximate equidistance where best-practice port use could reasonably be expected. Events with a ratio of 1.0 or above are classified as not impracticable, as a suitable port was at least as accessible as the transhipment location. Events with a conservative ratio above 3, where the transhipment location was more than three times further from the fishing grounds than the nearest suitable port, are classified as strongly not impracticable

So a bit over half the events look genuinely impracticable on distance. That is nothing, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But 41% are not, and in 242 events the vessel went more than three times as far to meet the carrier as it would have gone to reach a port. Those are the cases where economic hardship is hardest to argue with a straight face.

The result holds for every one of the six carriers, and it is almost identical for proper transhipments and for short encounters. It is not one rogue operator, one flag or one patch of ocean. SEISHIN stands out: the median ratio for its longer transhipments is 2.35, meaning the typical vessel meeting it travelled more than twice the distance it would have needed to reach a port.

Where it happens

The events cluster in eight hotspots, and they split neatly into two groups.

The three eastern ones, between 133 and 147 degrees west, sit 837 to 1,600 NM from the nearest port that can host a longline transhipment. There the exemption is defensible on its face, and that is the kind of fishing the test was written for. I have no problem saying so.

The other five are a different story. They lie within about 550 NM of Kiritimati, Honiara, Kosrae, Kavieng and Funafuti. Those ports, and the countries behind them, carry the cost of the practice: forgone charges, services never bought, and the monitoring and catch verification that a port call would have delivered to the region.

Counting the actual miles

The centroid ratio is a straight-line proxy. We chose it because it is cheap to compute, easy for an analyst to verify, and it survives the AIS gaps that plague fishing vessel records. To check it against reality, we picked six fishing vessels flagged to Chinese Taipei, South Korea, China, Japan and Vanuatu, chosen for lots of events and few AIS gaps, and measured 17 trips between transhipments.

The trips ran from 14 to 148 days and from 2,152 to 22,155 NM. And that is only the regional part, excluding the roughly 9,000 NM to and from home ports in Northeast Asia. Yet in the week before transshipping, nine of those 17 trips brought the vessel within a suitable port less than 10% of the trip's track length, and five within less than 5%.

One example: PANALOX505 sailed 15,143 NM before meeting MV BADARO in June 2023, and in the final week passed within 257 NM of Funafuti. When you have just sailed fifteen thousand miles, a 257-mile detour is not an economic hardship. The ports were not out of reach. They were passed.

Six years, no movement

The Convention requires members to encourage in-port transhipment, and CMM 2009-06 expects them to progressively reduce reliance on the exemption. If that were happening, the ratio would be drifting down over time. It isn't.

A linear trend on the log-transformed ratio across all 1,277 events gives a slope of +0.018 per year (p = 0.513, r² below 0.001). Quarterly medians are just as flat. The smoothed curve rises slightly around 2021 and 2022, then comes back down, but it shows no clear trend.

The only seasonal signal is March, the one month where the median event sits above the equidistant line. It shows up for SEISHIN, TAIHO MARU and MV BADARO alike, so it is not one carrier's quirk. We don't know the mechanism, and fleet-wide scheduling is the obvious suspect. If anyone who knows the trade better has an explanation, I'd be glad to hear it.

So: six years of tracks, same behaviour. The framework has not corrected itself, and nothing in the data suggests it will.

In Part 2 I'll get into why the economic hardship argument looks even thinner once you factor in how these fleets buy fuel, what the carriers burn, and who owns both ends of the transfer, and what we think the Commission should do.

Beyond the Ban: Rethinking Bottom Trawling and Seabed Carbon

The debate over bottom trawling's impacts on seabed carbon has intensified recently. Policymakers and environmental advocates often paint the issue in stark terms: bottom trawls disturb the seafloor, release carbon, and therefore must be restricted or banned entirely. It's a compelling narrative. It's also incomplete.

Conceptual examples of marine habitats illustrating potential combinations of organic matter (OM) lability, deposition rate and trawling disturbance.

A recent paper, “Rethinking the impacts of bottom trawling on seabed carbon: Biogeochemical mechanisms, vulnerability and long-term climate consequences” in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Justin Tiano and Emil De Borger cuts through the oversimplification to reveal something far more interesting (and actionable) about how we should approach this problem.

The Real Problem with Simple Solutions

Here's the uncomfortable truth that Tiano and De Borger set out: not all carbon in the seabed is equally vulnerable to trawling, and not all trawling impacts are equally harmful to the climate. Worse, protecting areas solely because they contain labile (easily degradable) carbon might distract us from protecting areas that matter more for long-term climate mitigation. This matters enormously if we're serious about effective marine policy.

The authors synthesise a decade of research showing that bottom disturbance creates what we might call 'competing climate effects.'When trawl gear scrapes across the seafloor, it does several things simultaneously: it resuspends organic matter into the water column, mechanically mixes sediments, and redistributes material. Each process has opposing effects on carbon cycling across different parts of the water-sediment system.

Take resuspension. When reactive organic carbon is stirred up from the seafloor into the oxygenated water column, it mineralises more rapidly, releasing CO₂. That's real. But here's the wrinkle: much of this carbon would have been degraded relatively quickly anyway, even without disturbance. In other words, trawling may be accelerating a process that was already going to happen. Distinguishing between carbon genuinely diverted from long-term burial and carbon simply undergoing mineralisation on a slightly faster timescale is crucial—and context-dependent.

The Mechanism Question: Exactly What is Trawling Doing?

What I find most valuable about this paper is its careful dissection of the mechanism. The authors identify three primary physical disturbance pathways: erosion and resuspension, mechanical mixing, and redeposition. Each operates differently and depends heavily on context.

Erosion and resuspension increase mineralisation in the water column but typically reduce it in the sediment itself, because you've removed the reactive organic matter and the benthic fauna that would otherwise degrade it.

Mechanical mixing creates a temporary oxygenation spike, and field experiments show it returns to baseline within hours. Redeposition can either enhance mineralisation or promote burial, depending on local hydrodynamics and sediment characteristics.

The crucial insight: these effects operate on different timescales and depend on sediment type, hydrodynamic regime, and benthic community composition. A process that's inconsequential in a naturally dynamic sandy system may be significant in a stable, muddy depositional environment. As usual, one size absolutely does not fit all.

The Management Challenge: High Reactivity vs. High Burial Potential

Here's where Tiano and De Borger identify a genuine management problem. Recent vulnerability assessments have highlighted areas rich in labile (highly reactive) carbon as priorities for protection because they're at higher immediate risk of CO₂ release. That sounds logical, but from a climate mitigation perspective over decadal timescales, it may be misguided.

The authors argue that depositional zones—often characterised by lower organic carbon reactivity—may be more important for long-term sequestration. A low-energy, muddy fjord sediment receiving terrestrial material might show lower organic matter lability than a productive coastal area, yet provide far greater climate benefit if protected, because its burial efficiency is higher. You're protecting carbon that will genuinely remain sequestered for centuries, not carbon that would have degraded anyway within a few years.

This creates a genuine tension in management strategy. Efforts to reduce near-term CO₂ emissions by protecting areas rich in reactive organic carbon may not align with efforts to protect the habitats that offer the most durable climate benefits. In some contexts, a depositional area receiving substantial labile organic inputs, for instance, the objectives might align. In others, they diverge sharply, forcing a choice.

Why Context Specificity Isn't a Cop-Out—It's Essential

The paper's central recommendation will frustrate those seeking simple policy solutions: effective seabed carbon protection requires region-specific assessments that identify and prioritise habitats with high burial potential, alongside ecological and fisheries factors, rather than blanket trawling bans or uniform effort reductions.

I understand the frustration. Blanket bans are simpler to implement and communicate, but they're also blunt instruments. A ban that protects low-value sandy systems while allowing continued disturbance of high-burial-potential muddy habitats is worse than useless; it's actively counterproductive.

The paper makes it clear: coarse-grained, sandy environments are typically dynamic, carbon-poor, and characterised by low long-term burial potential. Trawl-induced resuspension in these settings enhances mineralisation in the water column but has minimal impact on climate-relevant burial. Fine-grained, muddy, low-energy depositional environments have higher organic carbon densities and are far more important for long-term burial. These habitats genuinely matter for climate mitigation, and they're also often the ones experiencing deeper gear penetration and slower benthic recovery.

This distinction should inform policy. Protecting the muddy depositional zones makes climate sense. Banning trawling in sandy areas makes significantly less sense from a carbon perspective, though it might make ecological sense for other reasons.

The Perspective Question: Keep First Things First

The paper concludes with something I think is genuinely important: seabed carbon protection can support climate mitigation, but it must remain secondary to the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel emissions. This isn't hedging or political calculation. It's a matter of scale.

Even if we implemented the most ambitious seabed carbon protection strategy globally, its climate impact would be dwarfed by the consequences of continuing to burn coal, oil, and gas at current rates. Seabed carbon protection should be pursued, but as part of a coherent ocean governance strategy that includes fisheries management, ecosystem conservation, and related measures. It should never become a substitute for decarbonisation.

Moreover, the paper flags legitimate scientific uncertainties that persist regarding long-term carbon burial disruptions on centennial timescales, the relative importance of disturbance-induced versus natural remineralisation, and the role of benthic fauna in mediating recovery. These uncertainties call for caution, but they also call for caution against carbon credit schemes linked to trawling restrictions until the scientific basis is more robust.

Moving Forward: Science-Based, Context-Specific Management

What does this mean for policy? It means moving beyond simple narratives and investing in region- and habitat-specific assessments. We need to identify which areas are most important for long-term carbon burial and protect them accordingly, not only as part of carbon policy but also as part of a broader ecosystem-based management approach. We need to consider the livelihoods of fishing communities, the state of benthic ecosystems, and climate objectives together, rather than in isolation.

It means acknowledging that a high-burial-potential, muddy area receiving low-lability terrestrial organic matter deserves protection, even if its surface carbon isn't obviously 'labile'. It also recognises that blanket trawling bans in sandy systems may deliver negligible climate benefits while imposing real costs.

And it means insisting that seabed carbon protection, important as it is, cannot and must not become an excuse for avoiding the primary climate imperative: ceasing to emit fossil carbon into the atmosphere.

The Tiano and De Borger paper calls for intellectual honesty about complexity. In fisheries governance, as in climate policy, that honesty often costs us the comfort of simple solutions. But it's the only path to effective management.

Representing MIMRA at the FAO PSM Strategy Working Group

I'm in Madrid this week at the 3rd FAO Port State Measures Strategy and Monitoring Working Group. I'm representing the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority (MIMRA), which has really capable people who should be here- people with genuine knowledge of the country's specific challenges, enforcement gaps, and policy needs. But they're tied up in a regional WCPFC meeting and doing the work in Majuro, where vessels don’t stop coming because there is a meeting… So I show up with the support of NZ MFAT and FAO.

This is the real cost of international governance work that few people talk about outside closed meetings: if you're not in the room, you don't get to explain your position. You get explained about.

The Capacity vs. Representation Dilemma

My approach to my job has always been rooted in the principle that my job is to support the capacity of the people who make decisions for their own countries, not to suggest decisions for them… that is what colonialism did…. So I deeply believe sustainable governance comes from technically strengthening local expertise and institutional memory, not from relinquishing agency to external consultants.

But international meetings operate on a different logic. The people in the room shape the conversation. The people not in the room get discussed, assumed about, and often misrepresented… not out of malice, but simply because absence leaves a vacuum that others will fill.

So here I sit, trying to walk a line between effective representation and inappropriate substitution. It's uncomfortable, but I like to think it's helpful.

What's Actually on the Table

The meeting runs through 1 October, and the agenda is substantial. We're working through the Status of the PSMA and outcomes of the Fifth Meeting of the Parties—a critical overview of where the agreement sits institutionally and what priorities emerged from the most recent full meeting.

But the real meat is in what comes next: a serious examination of the sustainability of the PSMA's operation, with conclusions and recommendations from a dedicated Task Force. This is not administrative housekeeping. This is about whether the architecture meant to prevent IUU fishing at port is working as designed, and what structural changes may be needed.

Alongside that, we're reviewing operational updates to the GIES, the Global Information Exchange System. GIES is how port states share data on transhipments, landing notifications, and vessel movements. It's the developing nervous system of modern port state measures. If GIES isn't working smoothly, nothing else works smoothly.

Then there's a separate strategy document specifically aimed at improving PSMA’s effectiveness. This isn't theoretical. It asks, 'What's not working, and how do we fix it?

We have the technical working group reports from Jeju (June 2026), output tables from regional coordination meetings worldwide, and the full terms of reference for what we're actually supposed to accomplish. When you walk into a room with all of this documentation, the expectation is that you've done your homework.

The Room's Gravity

Port State Measures are experiencing a significant moment. Genuine momentum is building behind the PSMA. The strategy working group is tasked with thinking through how port state control can better serve while working around the accepted ineffectiveness of not just flag state control but the broader architecture of fisheries governance, particularly around IUU fishing, transhipment oversight, and market-based measures.

These are complex issues that require sophisticated voices from small island states. The Marshall Islands has real experience with these challenges. Foreign vessels landing fish, transhipment logistics, the pressure of monitoring operations in one's port… these aren't abstract policy matters to MIMRA. They're operational realities that shape the institutions' viability.

When MIMRA isn't represented, does the discussion account for that reality? Or does it drift toward the concerns of countries with larger fishing fleets and more bureaucratic capacity? The discussion doesn't need to be unfair to end up skewed. It just happens naturally. And when decisions about GIES architecture or sustainability measures are made without island nation voices in the room, the consequences hit those nations hardest.

The Real Issue Behind the Room

What bothers me most isn't having to represent MIMRA in their absence. It's what their absence signals about the system itself.

The regional meeting pulling MIMRA's attention is real and legitimate. Pacific island nations have to manage multiple urgent governance streams with limited staff. This isn't apathy or neglect; it's the reality of international governance infrastructure that assumes more institutional capacity than exists.

But when that happens, when actual decision-makers can't afford to be present, what fills the gap? Consultants. Advisors. People like me. And while I try to bring genuine insight about MIMRA's specific context, the fact remains: I'm making judgements on their behalf that only they should make… The fact that they trust me to do this is both an honour and a huge responsibility.

The Uncomfortable Necessity

So here's the honest tension I sit with: I'll be in meetings over the next few days where I'll need to speak clearly about PSMA sustainability, operational realities of GIES implementation, and what the Fifth Meeting outcomes mean for us. I'll advocate for perspectives that matter to MIMRA and similar nations, ensuring that island nation realities aren't erased from discussions about global port state architecture.

I'll need to do this well, because it's necessary, and the alternative, a voiceless and unheard MIMRA, is worse and does not help anyone.

But I'll do it, knowing that this arrangement is a symptom of a broader problem: developing effective fisheries governance requires presence and engagement that small island states are structurally disadvantaged in providing. Building capacity means not just training programmes and technical assistance, but also fixing the underlying economics that make it so expensive to maintain sufficient talent in the office and sustain continuous international engagement.

Being able to rationalise and write about it may help me, but it does not fix the problem.

Thirty years in Rome: farewell to Blaise Kuemlangan

One of the nicest moments of COFI a couple of weeks ago happened after hours, at the retirement party for Blaise Kuemlangan, who is leaving FAO after 30 years in Rome.

This was Blaise's last COFI, and also the first for Melvin Silk, the MCS supervisor at MIMRA, who was the Marshall Islands head of delegation; I like to think the mana passed on. As one good man of the Pacific leaves the international arena, another one joins it.

Blaise has represented the Pacific, and he has also given a great deal to the wider global community. Zita and their children supported him throughout, and what they achieved together shows real collaboration and dedication. It takes a remarkable person to do that job in a foreign land for so long, giving help and advice with steady commitment and goodwill.

I met him on my first job as a consultant when transitioning from fisheries in 1998, while he was doing some work in Tonga, and he was a reference for all of us in Rome; in fact, once I got my position at FAO HQ, he was my first point of reference… always with a smile and good advice.

Most of his work was legal, and in fisheries, that is where things either hold up or fall apart. He spent years in FAO's Development Law Service, helping countries write and update their fisheries and aquaculture laws so their obligations existed in national law and inspectors and prosecutors had something solid to work with. He was deeply involved in the legal side of the fight against IUU fishing, especially in helping countries incorporate the Port State Measures Agreement into domestic legislation. A lot of the national laws I work with in the region have his fingerprints on them somewhere, even if his name isn't on the cover page.

FAO and Rome will feel the gap left by this smiling Manusian, after a three-decade legacy. His work on international fisheries governance, legal frameworks and capacity building has made things stronger for Papua New Guinea, for the Pacific and beyond.

Many Pacific Islanders will miss having Blaise and Zita in Rome, and so will I… They are the best unofficial ambassadors the region could have had.

Thank you, Blaise Kuemlangan, for your friendship, service, and commitment to Pacific communities. Enjoy the new chapter.

I was told once that I am a “big” friend of the Pacific, but only when I see myself in pictures. I think that is “big in the Godzilla sense” more than in terms of my relationship with the region, which is over half my life!!

I’m just a giant!

Certifying the law instead of enforcing it

I get notifications when papers I published get quoted, and only sometimes do I really get to read them, yet this one caught my eye as it supported a private certification, which is one of my nemesis initiatives; I never liked them, and I never will

The paper is Elegbede et al. (2026), "Voluntary sustainability standards and industrial fisheries: Roles of Friend of the Sea certification on occupational safety and working conditions in Nigeria, Gulf of Guinea" (Marine Policy 195, 107289). I

ts headline is that crew in the one FOS-certified trawling company in Nigeria are much better off than crew in two uncertified companies. They have more safety gear (98% vs 75%), access to health personnel (100% vs 17%) and training (98.5% vs 47%). The authors conclude that FOS "functions as a complementary governance tool" and argue for "hybrid governance approaches that combine statutory frameworks with sustainability standards".

Regular readers know where I stand. for example I wrote in 2021 that private labour certification of fishing vessels is ineffective, conflicted and undermines the institutions that should be doing the job. In 2023 I went further and called ecolabels and labour certification agents of neo-colonialism.

So I am not a neutral reader here, but I want to be fair to the authors, as they are local researchers who went out and talked to more than 400 industrial fishers and 17 key informants. That is real fieldwork in a sector where almost nobody collects data on crew conditions, and it deserves respect.

My home in the waters of the Gulf of Guinea

My problem is not the effort. It is what the evidence can support, and more importantly what the policy conclusion does to the one thing that would actually help all Nigerian fishers: laws that are applied.

What FOS actually asks for

Start with Table 2 of the paper, the FOS social accountability criteria. There are four essential requirements: comply with national law and ILO standards on child labour; pay at least the legal minimum wage; give workers access to healthcare and emergency services; and apply the safety measures "required by law". SA8000 or equivalent are only recommended.

So FOS's labour standard is, almost word for word, "obey the law of the country". It adds nothing beyond Nigerian law. It simply sends a private auditor to check whether a company complies with legislation the Nigerian state already has. Table 1 of the same paper lists that legislation: the Labour Act, the Factories Act, the Employees Compensation Act, the Merchant Shipping Act, the NIMASA Act, STCW-F, and the FAO/ILO/IMO Code of Practice for fishing vessels. The authors are honest that the laws exist and that the problem is enforcement.

That is exactly my point. If the finding is that a company follows the law when someone checks, the lesson is not that we need more private checkers. The lesson is that we need the state to check more thorougly.

And the paper shows the state can: in the certified company, the paper says, checks are carried out "by designated onboard safety officers in collaboration with FDF inspectors and third-party FOS auditors", and FDF officers brief crews before trips. The Federal Department of Fisheries shows up when a big exporter with an EU market to protect wants it there. It does not show up for the small operators, where one of the uncertified companies recently had a capsizing with 12 crew rescued by the navy.

What the paper describes is a two-tier system. One large export company, with more than 70 trawlers and the resources to pay for certification, gets gold-plated compliance checking. Everyone else gets nothing. Certification did not create that inequality, but it formalises it and makes it look like a solution.

What the data can and cannot say

I would not normally go through the methods of a paper in a blog post, but here the conclusion depends so heavily on the numbers that it is worth doing.

One company is not a treatment effect. The comparison is one FOS-certified company (the largest in Nigeria and West Africa, 70+ vessels) against two much smaller ones: one with five vessels and one whose main business is packaging, storage and export. There is no before-and-after data and no comparison with uncertified companies of similar size or market. The company was certified because it is large, capitalised and exporting. Those are the same reasons it can afford EPIRBs, a clinic partnership and nurses on standby. The authors acknowledge this as a limitation on generalisability, but it is more than that: you cannot separate the effect of certification from the effect of being that company.

Zero is not a believable number on trawlers. Of the 198 certified crew surveyed, zero reported an injury from inadequate safety measures, zero reported ever being exposed to unsafe conditions, and 100% reported access to health personnel. I have spent a lot of my life on and around fishing boats and trawlers specially, in fact recentloy I spend time on a trwler in Guinea Bisseau.

On a fleet of 70 tropical shrimp trawlers, "never exposed to an unsafe condition" is not a safety outcome, it is an answer. Surveys like this ran with company approval (the ethics section says the companies approved the research) and were administered in the workplace. Crew know who their employer is and who pays for the certificate. That does not mean anyone lied on purpose, but results of 0% and 100% should have made the authors much more cautious, not less.

The regression is upside down. The multivariate model uses certification status as the dependent variable and safety conditions as the predictors. So the paper reports that "lack of training access" is associated with a lower "probability of being FOS-certified". But certification is not something a fisher has a probability of. It is a property of the company they work for, and every respondent in the certified group works for the same company. The model basically predicts which company someone works for. It says nothing about whether certification causes better conditions, which is the question the paper asks. The model is also described as ordinal when the outcome is binary.

The conclusions don't match the results. In the regression, access to health facilities is not significant (p = 0.755), yet the conclusion attributes lower injury rates to "guaranteed access to medical facilities and emergency services". The conclusion also says both groups "reported access to basic safety equipment", which sits awkwardly with Finding 1 on safety equipment being "the most fundamental divergence". And small things matter: the text gives the uncertified sample as n = 206, while the table and response rates imply 218.

The data comparacion over over long timeframe. The fieldwork was done between June and December 2019, and the demographic figure is marked as previously published in a 2025 One Health paper by the same group. Seven years is a long time in a sector that the paper itself says went from about 40 companies to 12.

None of this means the certified company isn't a better employer. It probably is. It means the paper shows that a well-resourced exporter treats its crew better than two small operators. It does not show that FOS certification is why.

Why this matters: certification as a substitute for legislation

My main concern is not the statistics. It is what happens to the policy conversation when papers like this conclude that voluntary standards "operationalise" safety that the law requires but the state does not enforce.

Look at the gaps the paper itself lists. The Sea Fisheries Act of 1992 is "widely regarded as outdated". ILO C188 is "pending ratification". Inspection capacity is limited and coordination between NIMASA and the Federal Department of Fisheries is fragmented. Every one of those is a job for government: update the fisheries law, ratify C188, give labour and fisheries inspectors the mandate and resources to go on board, and make labour conditions part of the licence.

The authors' own recommendations go this way too: mandatory safety audits for all vessels and occupational health services "mandated for all industrial fishing operations, in line with ILO C188". Those are good recommendations. But the paper's framing ties them to certification, and the conclusion people will take from the abstract is "certification works where the state doesn't".

This paper's message is useful to three groups, and none of them is fishers. The certifier gets evidence for its value. The certified company gets a reason to say "we are already audited" when a new law or licence condition is proposed. And the government can point to a certified flagship exporter and say the sector is moving in the right direction, while pressure for ratification and reform eases.

This is what I mean when I say private certification delays the legislation that is needed: not because anyone plans it, but because it takes the urgency away. The 70-plus certified vessels have a private safety net. The rest of the fleet, and the artisanal sector that is much bigger than the industrial one, still has only a law nobody enforces.

We have seen what works instead. In the Pacific, FFA members put labour standards based on C188 into the Harmonised Minimum Terms and Conditions for foreign fishing vessel access, so they apply to every licensed vessel, not only to the ones whose buyers care.

New Zealand dealt with the foreign charter vessel scandal by making its own labour law apply on board, not by asking a certifier to look. And the market lever the paper credits for bringing FOS to Nigeria, access to the EU, is shifting from private labels to public rules: the EU Forced Labour Regulation, the corporate sustainability due diligence framework, and in the US, withhold release orders under Section 307.

If market access is what motivates a Nigerian exporter to treat crew properly, that motivation can be written into import conditions and supported by state-to-state capacity building, without a private intermediary charging fees to verify compliance with Nigerian law.

The money is also worth thinking about. What does one company pay each year for FOS audits? I don't know the figure for this case, but I do know what a fisheries or labour inspector earns in the region. Money spent on private verification of public law is money that did not go into the institution that should be doing the verifying, and that institution is the only one that can reach the whole fleet.

Bottom line

I welcome more research on crew conditions in West African fisheries, and I hope this team keeps working on it. But the honest reading of this paper is not that voluntary standards improve safety. It is that Nigerian law already requires everything FOS checks, that the state can enforce it when it chooses to, and that it currently chooses to only where an export certificate is at stake.

The policy answer to that is not "hybrid governance". It is ratifying C188, updating the 1992 Act, funding inspection, and making labour standards a condition of every fishing licence. Certification that makes those steps feel less urgent is part of the problem, however good the intentions behind it.

The unglamorous infrastructure: why GLOBEFISH deserves your attention, and donor's money

I first met Shirlene Anthonysamy when she was at INFOFISH in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. I was asked to train on post-harvest handling of tuna in India, and INFOFISH was one of those organisations that everyone in the fish trade world knew about, but few outside it had ever heard of. That is a pattern in this business. The institutions that actually make international fish trade work are almost never the ones that get written about. As a matter of fact, everyone knows about the Tuna Conferences in Bangkok every two years, but not everyone knows they would not exist without INFOFISH and Shirlene’s incredible work ethic. I was very, very lucky to be an invited speaker there for over a decade.

Shirlene is now the Fishery Officer coordinating FAO GLOBEFISH in Rome, which is the logical next step in a career that has been spent on the same question from different chairs: how do you get accurate information about fish markets into the hands of the people who need it, particularly when those people are not the ones who can afford to buy it? 

We have stayed friends across 19 years, and I have watched her do this work long enough to feel comfortable saying it matters. So when the GLOBEFISH team put out their contributor brief and their youth initiative concept note, I read them properly.

What GLOBEFISH actually is

GLOBEFISH was established in 1984, which makes it older than most of the regulatory architecture it now reports on. It sits inside FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division and plays a central role in COFI’s Sub-Committee on Fish Trade. It is a multi-donor funded project, not a core-funded programme, which is an important distinction I will come back to.

What it does is unglamorous and essential. It compiles, analyses and publishes information on prices, trade flows, markets and regulatory developments in fisheries and aquaculture. Price monitoring. Supply and demand analysis. Import notification tracking. Food safety regulation overviews. Trade agreement summaries. Country briefs. Tools that help an exporter work out which Harmonised System code actually applies to their product, which sounds trivial until you have watched a consignment sit in a port because someone guessed wrong.

All of it is free. Every publication, every dashboard, every tool. That is the entire point.

The asymmetry problem

Here are three numbers from the GLOBEFISH one-pager that are worth sitting with.

Thirty-six per cent of global aquatic animal production was traded internationally in 2024. That is a sector with extraordinary exposure to market shocks, because more than a third of what gets produced has to cross a border and satisfy someone else’s rules before it becomes income.

Two hundred and thirty countries and territories traded aquatic products in 2024. Every one of them has its own import requirements, its own documentation, its own interpretation of what constitutes acceptable evidence of legality and safety.

Per capita aquatic food availability in Africa in 2023 was 9.1 kilograms, compared with a global figure of 21.3. Africa exports a great deal of fish. Africa eats comparatively little of it.

Put those together, and you get the structural problem that GLOBEFISH exists to address. Market knowledge is not distributed anything like as evenly as fish is. A large European importer has analysts, legal advisers and consultants on retainer, and knows exactly what a new EU non-tariff measure means for its supply chain within days. A processing cooperative in a coastal town somewhere in the Pacific or West Africa finds out when its container is rejected.

I spend a lot of my working life in the space between those two realities. Most of the compliance failures I see don't result from anyone deciding to cheat. They are the result of someone not knowing, because nobody told them, because the information existed but sat behind a paywall or in a language they do not read or in a regulatory database designed for lawyers. Information asymmetry is not a market inefficiency in this sector. It is a trade barrier, and it hits hardest the operators everyone claims to want to support.

The four areas

GLOBEFISH organises its work around four thematic areas, and they map fairly neatly onto the problem above.

Market intelligence for equitable trade covers price monitoring and supply and demand analysis, the material that lets a small exporter know whether the price they are being offered is reasonable. Regulatory intelligence covers food safety rules, non-tariff measures, trade agreements and import notification systems across the major markets. Capacity development covers training and technical assistance for governments and small-scale actors. Data and knowledge for policy covers the statistical and methodological contributions that feed into the intergovernmental processes where the rules are made.

The 2026 to 2027 work plan adds a centralised Market Hub for practical regulatory compliance information, and expands the price monitoring dashboard to cover North America, Africa, Latin America and Asia. If you have ever tried to reconstruct a regional price series from scratch, you will understand why this is more significant than it sounds.

The partnership model is also worth noting, because it is the reason I have a personal stake in this. GLOBEFISH works with the regional market information network, INFOFISH, INFOPESCA, INFOYU, INFOPÊCHE, INFOSAMAK and EUROFISH, alongside Codex, WTO, WCO and UN ESCAP. That network turns a Rome-based analysis into something usable in Kuala Lumpur, Montevideo, Abidjan or Casablanca. Shirlene came up through that network, and it shows in how the project is run.

The youth question

The other document GLOBEFISH has put out is a concept note for a youth-focused initiative, and I want to take it more seriously than the usual youth-engagement boilerplate deserves.

The underlying problem is real, and I see it everywhere I work. The fisheries and aquaculture workforce is ageing. The pipeline of people coming into the technical and regulatory side of the sector is thin. Rural-to-urban migration pulls young people away from coastal communities, and the careers that do exist in the sector are largely invisible to anyone who hasn't grown up in it. Ask a twenty-year-old what jobs exist in the fish trade, and they will say fisher or maybe processor. They will not say traceability analyst, market intelligence officer, certification auditor, cold chain logistics specialist, food safety regulator or fisheries economist. All of those are real jobs. Most of them are short of people.

The proposed activities are sensible rather than flashy: youth-friendly publications that simplify GLOBEFISH analysis without dumbing it down, a webinar series covering market transparency, aquatic food fraud, traceability and certification, storytelling and interviews with fishers, young entrepreneurs and women leaders in the sector, national surveys to establish where young people actually sit in the value chain, and outreach through World Ocean Day, FAO Open Days, the World Food Forum and university programmes. They have already run a capacity development programme in Thailand on post-harvest fisheries that included a half-day session with around 200 university students on non-obvious career paths, plus a Discovery Station at the World Food Forum and activities at the 2026 FAO Open Day.

The target range is 14 to 35, in and out of formal education. I like that it isn't restricted to students, because many of the people who need this most are already working somewhere in the chain and have no idea there is a route upward.

Why this needs money

Here is the part that made me want to write this.

GLOBEFISH runs on voluntary contributions, at an indicative level of USD 1 to 5 million. For a project that has been operating since 1984, serves over 200 countries and territories, and gives everything away free, that is a remarkably small number. I have seen single consultancies cost a meaningful fraction of it.

The economics of a global public good are awkward. Because the output is free, no user has an incentive to pay for it, and because it is analytical rather than visible, it does not photograph well for an annual report. Nobody cuts a ribbon on a price dashboard. But the counterfactual is worse than it looks. If GLOBEFISH stops, the information does not disappear. It goes private, and it gets sold to whoever can pay, which means the asymmetry I described above widens rather than narrows. The people who lose access are precisely the small-scale operators and developing country agencies that the rest of the development architecture spends far more money trying to help.

So this is my modest pitch. If you work for a donor agency, a ministry, a research institution or a company that benefits from independent market intelligence, GLOBEFISH is one of the better value propositions in this sector.

The contact is Shirlene (ShirleneM.Anthonysamy@fao.org). Work with her, and you may stay friends for 19 years, as we have.

Disclosure, as always: Shirlene is a long-standing friend, and I have no financial interest in GLOBEFISH. I am writing about it because good people support good people. I

Sources: FAO GLOBEFISH one-pager (CE1259EN/1/08.26), the Contributor Information Brief, and the youth-focused initiative concept note.

Equity is in the text. Getting it out of the text is the problem.

Let me start with two disclosures.

First, Bianca Haas is a friend. We have talked about fisheries governance in enough places that I cannot pretend to read her work as a neutral party. The second disclosure is closer to envy than to conflict of interest: I do not know how she publishes at the rate she does. Paper after paper, peer-reviewed, on topics that actually matter, while the rest of us are still deciding whether we have time to turn a good idea into a draft. So when a new one lands in my inbox, I read it, partly out of loyalty and partly out of professional curiosity about where she finds the hours.

The paper is "Equity in the contemporary oceans governance framework: a stocktake of UNCLOS and its implementing agreements", by Bianca Haas, Frances Anggadi and Jeonghee Lim, published open access in International Environmental Agreements in August 2026.

I read it just after a week of sitting through a COFI session in which one large country delegation spent its time surgically removing the words fairness, equity, inclusion, and climate change from anything they could reach. Bracket by bracket. Paragraph by paragraph. Reading the two back-to-back was strange.

The paper was refreshing. The memory of the meeting was infuriating. Both feelings are, I think, correct.

What they actually did

The method is simple in the best sense of the word: easy to describe and likely tedious to execute.

They took Nathan Bennett’s six dimensions of ocean equity, designed for local and national contexts, and adapted them to international legal text. Recognitional equity, which is whose rights, values and knowledge get acknowledged at all. Procedural equity, which is who gets to participate in decisions. Management equity is who holds leadership and authority. Distributional equity, which is who gets the benefits and who carries the harms. Environmental equity, which is how environmental benefits and burdens fall across stakeholders. And contextual equity, which is whether the text acknowledges the broader conditions that enable or undermine all of the above.

Then they went through UNCLOS, the 1994 Agreement, the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, and the BBNJ Agreement, article by article (including the preamble and annexes), and asked a yes-or-no question for each dimension against each article. They split the work, then cross-checked each other’s samples to blunt the effect of individual bias, which is the right instinct given that what counts as equitable is not a value-free judgement, and they say so openly in the methods.

This is not a glamorous exercise. It is the legal equivalent of a port inspection: you open every hold, and you write down what you found rather than what you expected to find. I have a lot of time for that.

What they found

The headline is that equity has become steadily more visible across the four instruments. BBNJ has by far the highest proportion of articles engaging at least one equity dimension, with recognitional equity showing up in around 39 per cent of articles and procedural in around 29 per cent. UNCLOS and UNFSA sit much lower and look broadly similar.

Recognitional equity is the dimension used most across all four texts, followed by procedural. That ordering is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is not neutral. Recognising that a stakeholder exists is the cheapest thing a treaty can do. Letting them into the room is more expensive but still survivable. Giving them a share of the benefit, or relieving them of a burden, is where the money is, and distributional equity is exactly where the counts thin out.

The stakeholder analysis makes the same point from another direction. UNCLOS recognises three categories of affected stakeholders: developing states, landlocked states and geographically disadvantaged states. UNFSA adds coastal fishing communities, artisanal fishers, small island developing states, and women fishworkers, which for 1995 was genuinely ahead of its time and which anyone who works in the Pacific will recognise as the textual hook that much later work hangs from. BBNJ is broader again: small island developing states appear most, then Indigenous peoples and local communities, then developing states, then least developed countries, coastal African states, archipelagic states, developing middle-income countries, and explicit attention to gender balance.

And then there is the finding that I keep coming back to. Across all four instruments, over decades of negotiation, they could not find a single provision that engaged management equity as they defined it, meaning leadership in and authority over management activities held by the affected stakeholders themselves. Not one. They are appropriately modest about this and suggest it may be a limitation of their interpretation, or a sign that management authority is a national rather than international matter. Both are fair. But from where I sit, having spent most of my working life around coastal states trying to convert paper rights into actual control over the fisheries in their own waters, the absence reads as a finding rather than an artefact.

As a coastal state, the international framework is comfortable acknowledging you, moderately comfortable letting you speak, and structurally silent on letting you run the all thing.

The 1994 Agreement, or why I stopped feeling refreshed

The part of this paper that should be compulsory reading is the discussion of the 1994 Agreement, because it takes the comforting story of progress and puts a hole in it.

On the raw percentages, the 1994 Agreement looks fine. Higher proportion of articles touching recognitional and procedural equity than UNCLOS or UNFSA. But it has ten articles plus an annex, so percentages of a very small number do a lot of work; more importantly, the substance runs the other way.

The authors walk through it. UNCLOS Annex III Article 5 originally envisaged mandatory transfer of seabed mining technology to developing states and the Enterprise on fair and reasonable terms. The 1994 Agreement removed that and replaced it with the open market. UNCLOS Article 155 guaranteed a Review Conference after fifteen years of commercial production to ask, among other things, whether the system had actually delivered equitable sharing of benefits to developing states. The 1994 Agreement removed the guarantee. Production ceilings, subsidies, the reserved area system, economic assistance to land-based producer developing states: all weakened or gone, with commercial interests correspondingly elevated.

The original Part XI was negotiated in the era of the New International Economic Order, and the drafters wrote substantive equality into it. As Surabhi Ranganathan puts it, developing states appeared to have won. Which is precisely why it was reopened and renegotiated. The common heritage of mankind is still there in the text, and it is still the part of UNCLOS with the highest absolute count of equity references in this study, but its practical expression was hollowed out by the very instrument that made the Convention acceptable to the industrialised world.

So the authors' conclusion is not that equity advances over time. It is that equity has become more visible and more diversified, while its distributive content has not been strengthened to any comparable degree. Uneven layering is their phrase. I would put it less politely. The language of equity expanded at roughly the rate at which it stopped costing anyone anything.

Why I was infuriated, and why the paper still helps

Which brings me back to the FAO COFI meeting room. Watching a delegation strip fairness, equity, and climate out of a text is depressing. They fight over that language because language is the raw material from which obligations are later built, and they know it better than most of the people defending it. Arvid Pardo said international law does not exist in a vacuum, that it reflects the beliefs and perceived interests of the most influential states at any given time. The authors quote him. He was right in 1984 and he was right in that room.

What this paper gives the rest of us is a baseline. If you want to argue that the framework already obliges something, you now have a systematic, article-level map of where equity actually sits in the four instruments that matter, rather than a general sense that it is in there somewhere. That is useful in negotiations, and it will be more useful in litigation, particularly now that the ICJ has treated equity as a guiding principle for interpreting other rules of international law in its climate advisory opinion.

The obvious limitation is one the authors name themselves: this is a study of text, not of practice. A yes against an article tells you the hook exists, not that anyone has hung anything on it. The implementation question is the whole ballgame, and it is the next study, and I hope somebody does it before I retire.

Given Bianca’s output, it will probably be out by March.

Haas, B., Anggadi, F. & Lim, J. (2026). Equity in the contemporary oceans governance framework: a stocktake of UNCLOS and its implementing agreements. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-026-09735-y. Open access, so there is no excuse.

My name in a Oxford University Press Handbook... of all places

Life has handed me plenty of surprises and honours. Some from inside my own field, some from outside my world entirely. When in 2017, Gilles Hosch and I published a technical book with FAO on seafood traceability and catch documentation schemes, I wrote then that my eyes went teary when I saw my name on one of those green books.

I need to explain this part a bit… as you are all painfully aware from reading these blogs, being dyslexic and writing are not good bedfellows.

Back in my school days, if you didn’t write well, you were “dumb”… even though many of my marks were good enough because I love reading, had a good memory, and liked science. Still… that “dumb” brand was (still is) a hard one to walk away from, and it was part of why I turned to fishing and physical work.

And maybe because of that “fisherman thing”, where we push the limits and react to authority just because we are told that we can’t (or are not good enough) to do something… is that I never gave up on learning; I guess it is my nature to give things a go, just because I know I'm not good at them... 

This week, the Oxford Handbook of Human Rights at Sea came out, edited by professors Irini Papanicolopulu and Anna Petrig… and I wrote chapter 47 on Fisheries and Aquaculture.

I never would have seen this one coming… As far as I can tell, I'm the only one of the over 50 authors who isn't a legal academic. So when the editors invited me, I assumed someone had made a filing error. I said yes before they could check.

The connection goes back to the Rhodes Academy of Oceans Law and Policy, where I spent time in 2022 as one of the very few people in the room who was not a lawyer. That was the point, for me. I spent all my working years inside UNCLOS right from when it entered into force, without ever seeing the whole architecture laid out by the people who argue it for a living, and Irini and Anna were both part of that faculty.

I suspect I was memorable there mostly for having been a fisherman and framing things from the boat up, not the other way around. Apparently that didn't count against me, since a couple of years later the invitation to write this chapter arrived.

I owe my life to fishing. It paid for my studies and gave me a life I could not have imagined. Writing about fishers' labour rights at this level, as the only non-academic, was daunting. The gap between what the instruments promise and what a deckhand experiences is the whole point of the chapter

My chapter runs 27 pages and is mostly about fishers. Not about fish, not about supply chains, but about the people who catch the fish and who are consistently the least represented voice in the rooms where their conditions get discussed. Inadequate training, forced employment, unpaid or underpaid wages, and a jurisdictional muddle that lets everyone point at someone else. A small part of the chapter deals with gaps in potential aquaculture operations in the EEZ and high seas.

I walk through who is actually responsible. Flag States have obligations under UNCLOS and mostly fail to meet them. Coastal States have started filling the gap inside their EEZs, as the FFA has done through its Minimum Terms and Conditions, though that stops at the high seas boundary. Port States can inspect against the ILO Work in Fishing Convention, up to a point. Market States can close their door to vessels using slave labour, but only their own door, and only vessel by vessel. States whose nationals crew these boats struggle to reach the crewing agents, who are usually somewhere else. The WFC is a good instrument, but ratification numbers are low. The Cape Town Agreement and STCW-F aim at safety and training and lack teeth. Among RFMOs, only WCPFC has adopted a crew labour standards measure so far.

I also say plainly what I think about private certification in this space. It is not a substitute for ratifying, implementing and enforcing the law, and there is a decent argument that it is neo-colonial: it casts fishers as subjects in need of rescue, paints developing States as incapable, and sets up private jurisdictions with no statutory body behind them..

The fishers I have worked alongside for over 40 years are among the most resourceful, resilient and generous people I have met. What they need is respect, fair rules and fair pay. Not pity.

The book is £175 / €245, so it is not a beach read. But it exists, and my name is in it, and I’m so incredibly stoked about it.

Good data, awkward numbers: the WCPFC 2025 MCS reporting and how far we still are on high seas transhipment

The WCPFC Secretariat has published its annual monitoring, control and surveillance report covering 2025 activities, this time with dashboards alongside the reports. Eleven of them: the Commission VMS, the Regional Observer Programme, high seas boarding and inspection, port inspections and port state measures, transhipment reporting, the Record of Fishing Vessels and charter notifications, the Eastern High Seas Pocket and the other high seas pockets, the WCPFC and IATTC overlap area, administration of the data access rules, and performance of the e-reporting and e-monitoring standards.

Let me start with the good part, because it deserves it.

This is real transparency, and it is a change. For years, if you wanted to know how much high seas transhipment was actually happening in this ocean, you went hunting through the meetings portal, found a PDF with the number buried on page 14 of an annex, and hoped nobody had revised it since.

Now there is a dashboard. You can open it on your phone in a workshop. A coastal state fisheries officer, an NGO analyst, a journalist, and a consultant can all argue from the same published numbers instead of anecdote and general vibes. Anyone who has sat in a TCC session where two people quote different figures for the same thing knows why this matters.

So credit where it is due. The Secretariat has done the unglamorous work of turning compliance paperwork into something a normal person can look at. That is not a small thing, and it did not have to happen.

Now the awkward part, which is what the numbers actually say.

The legal starting point almost nobody honours

CMM 2009-06 is still the operative transhipment measure. It has been in force since February 2010 and every attempt to revise it since 2017 has bogged down. Paragraph 34 is the one that matters: high seas transhipment is prohibited, unless the CCM has determined that it is impracticable for its vessels to operate without it, and has notified the Commission accordingly.

Read that again. Prohibited, with an exception for impracticability. Not a permission you apply for, not a default operating mode. An exception.

Now look at the 2025 record. Of the 3,143 vessels on the Record of Fishing Vessels, 56% hold a high seas transhipment authorisation. That is roughly 1,760 vessels pre-authorised to do the thing that the measure says is prohibited unless impracticable.

Of those 1,760, only about 28% actually transhipped on the high seas in 2025. Around 495 vessels did the thing; roughly 1,265 were authorised for it and did not need it.

That gap is the whole story. If the impracticability test were being applied vessel by vessel, as the measure contemplates, you would expect the authorised number and the active number to be reasonably close. They are not. The authorisation has become a field that gets ticked when a vessel is entered on the Record, kept live in case it is ever useful. It is not a reasoned determination that this vessel, on this fishery, genuinely cannot get to a port.

I am not saying flag states are acting in bad faith. I am saying the test has quietly stopped being a test.

The numbers themselves

In 2025, there were 888 reported high-seas transhipment events. That is about 60% of the 2019 peak of 1,469 events, and the downward trend is genuinely encouraging.

But be careful about celebrating a declining number in a self-reported dataset. A drop in reported events is consistent with reduced transhipment. It is also consistent with the same amount happening and less of it being reported, or with fleet consolidation, or with more of it moving into EEZs and ports where different rules apply. The dashboard tells you what was declared. It cannot tell you what was not.

Longliners are the overwhelming bulk of the vessels involved, which surprises nobody who has spent time on this. The purse seine side of high seas transhipment was effectively closed years ago and it stayed closed. Longline is where the problem lives.

Thirty two hulls

Here is the figure that stopped me. Of the 495 vessels involved in 2025 events, 463 were offloading and 32 were receiving.

Thirty two.

The entire high seas transhipment problem in the largest tuna fishery on earth passes through 32 receiving vessels. That is a number you could assign to a human observer. That is a number you could put cameras on, with a budget that would not embarrass anyone. That is a number you could require to carry a functioning, tamper-evident e-monitoring system as a condition of being on the Record at all.

We do not have a scale problem here. We have a will problem. Every time somebody says independent monitoring of high seas transhipment is too hard or too expensive, hold up the number 32.

The observer question, again

I wrote back in 2022 about the case for an independent high-seas transhipment observer programme, and I would like to report that things have moved forward. They have not moved much.

The 2025 ROP figures show 669 observer trips: 518 purse seine trips covering 20,532 sea days and 11,944 sets, and 151 longline trips covering 8,414 sea days and about 10.4 million hooks. Purse seine coverage is approaching full monitoring. Longline sits at the historical sampling level of around 5 %

More to the point, the Secretariat's own assessment is that observer reporting is currently insufficient for full independent verification of transhipment, and it flags that cross-observer arrangements compromise the data's independence. That is a polite way of describing something I have heard about from the deck for years. If the observer on the carrier is placed, paid, fed and housed through arrangements that run back to the operator, and if the same person is expected to report on the vessel hosting them for weeks at a time in the middle of the ocean, we should not be surprised that the reporting has a particular flavour to it.

There is another number in the ROP data worth chewing on. Observers recorded transfer or transhipment infractions on 8 purse seine and 38 longline observations in 2025, which the report scales up to something in the order of 760 incidents fleet-wide. If I am reading the scaling correctly, that is a lot of unreported transfer activity hidden behind a compliance record showing 24 cases filed under CMM 2009-06 since 2016.

Twenty-four cases. Ten years. Somewhere north of ten thousand declared events, plus everything that was not declared. Mostly for failing to carry an observer or filing the declaration late. That is not an enforcement record. It is a rounding error.

The port side is not picking up the slack

Paragraph 35(a)(v) of the measure requires CCMs that authorise high seas transhipment to submit a plan explaining how they will move towards port-based transhipment. It is a reasonable idea. Fish that cross a wharf can be counted, sampled, inspected and cross-checked against a landing record by a person standing next to it.

So how is that going? As of March 2026, eleven CCMs have notified designated ports under CMM 2017-02. Several CCMs are outside both CMM 2017-02 and the FAO Port State Measures Agreement. And in 2025, 413 inspection reports came in against 816 automated notifications since April 2024, so roughly half the notified arrivals generated no inspection report at all.

The report is also honest about something that matters in this region: inspection standards must not put disproportionate administrative and financial strain on SIDS ports. Correct. And that is precisely the point. You cannot tell coastal states to absorb transhipment into their ports as the safer option, and then hand them the full cost of doing it properly, and then treat a missing inspection report as their compliance failure. Port-based transhipment is only the better option if somebody funds the port.

Where this lands for a coastal state officer

This is not abstract for me. I had this issue last week when one of my former trainees at a PIC fisheries authority in the region was dealing with a version of the same scenario: two longliners, neither licensed here, both on the Record with high seas authorisation, catch taken on the high seas, transhipped vessel-to-vessel somewhere out there, now alongside, asking to unload for export. Is it legal, and do we release it or hold it?

To answer that, the officer has to rely on a transhipment declaration filled in by the people who did the transhipping, an advance notification from the same source, and an observer report whose independence the Commission's own Secretariat says is compromised. Then they have to make a decision that has real consequences for a real operator, on a wharf, that afternoon.

That is the coastal state carrying the risk for a system it does not control and did not design. The published data helps because, at least now, the officer can check whether declarations were lodged at all and whether the flag state has an impracticability notification on file. That is a genuine improvement on last year. But greater visibility into a weak system does not make it strong.

What would actually move it

None of this is new, and none of it is complicated:

• Make the impracticability determination mean something. A reasoned, published determination, renewed annually, vessel by vessel, rather than a permanent field on the Record.

• Put independent monitoring on the 32 receiving vessels. Human observers, e-monitoring, or both, funded through a levy on operators rather than by the vessel being observed.

• Join up the four datasets. The declaration, the VMS track, the observer report and the port landing record should be reconciled as a matter of routine, not as a special analysis when somebody complains. The Secretariat is already detecting spatial anomalies by comparing declarations against VMS positions, which is exactly the right instinct. Make it standard, and publish the reconciliation rate.

• Fund the port option properly, so that moving transhipment ashore is an offer to SIDS rather than a cost transfer.

• And publish the paragraph 35(a)(v) implementation plans, alongside what they have actually achieved.

I would like to be surprised.

Anyway…

I don't want to end sour, because I can write any of this only because the Commission published the numbers. Five years ago this post would have been opinion with three footnotes. Today, it is opinion-anchored to a public dashboard, and anyone who thinks I have read it wrong can go and check.

This is what transparency is for. It may not fix the problems. It just makes it much harder to pretend the problem is not there.

As always, happy to be corrected.

Sources:

• WCPFC, Latest MCS data covering 2025 activities: https://www.wcpfc.int/monitoring-and-evaluation/latest-mcs-data-covering-2025-activities

• Annual Report on Transhipment Reporting dashboard (WCPFC-TCC22-2026-RP03)

• Annual Report on the Regional Observer Programme dashboard

• Annual Report on Port Inspections and Port State Measures dashboard

• CMM 2009-06, Conservation and Management Measure on the Regulation of Transhipment: https://cmm.wcpfc.int/measure/cmm-2009-06

Advancing Electronic Monitoring in Taiwan’s Distant Water Longline Fisheries

Ocean Outcomes just published "Advancing Electronic Monitoring in Taiwan's Distant Water Longline Fisheries", a report they commissioned Marine Change to research and write. Roderic Hodges led the technical work, and I joined as a contractor in October 2025 during a visit to Taiwan; I then provided the Zealand and Australian case studies, part of the cost analysis, and the section on whether insurance could ever be a reason for an owner to want cameras onboard.

Why Taiwan, and why now

Taiwan is one of the biggest distant-water fishing flag states on the planet. Around 900 tuna longliners across the WCPFC, IOTC, IATTC and ICCAT convention areas, fishing year-round, resupplying and transshipping at sea, with some trips documented as lasting up to three years. Nearly 700 of those are small-scale longliners in the WCPFC area alone.

That profile is brilliant for catching tuna and terrible for traditional MCS. Observers need berth space that small longliners don't have, schedules that align, and a port call at a convenient point. Add the safety and welfare issues on long trips, which the region has learned about the hard way, and you get the numbers: in 2023 Taiwan's observer coverage by days at sea was 11.5% for the large-scale fleet and 6% for the small-scale one. That is the gap EM is meant to fill.

Taiwan is not starting from zero, and that is underappreciated outside the country. They mandated CCTV on tuna longliners years ago, partly for human rights reasons. They have had e-logbooks since 2014 and 2015 with daily transmission and hourly VMS, a 24/7 Fisheries Monitoring Centre since 2017, and the Overseas Fisheries Development Council (OFDC) already integrated into the electronic reporting and verification architecture.

What they have is not EM, though, and the report is blunt about that. The CCTV records to an onboard drive physically pulled off the vessel, often long after the fishing happened, and the footage carries no timestamp, no position and no vessel identifier in the stream. Without that metadata, you cannot cross-check video against a logbook entry or a VMS track, which is the entire point. It is video, not evidence.

What can New Zealand and Australia show?

I got involved in those chapters because I know both systems reasonably well, and because they are the two jurisdictions that have taken EM furthest with fleets a Taiwanese official can look at without laughing.

New Zealand is instructive for its timeline rather than its technology. The legal basis, the Fisheries (Electronic Monitoring on Vessels) Regulations, was set in 2017. The decision to install electronic monitoring on up to 300 vessels came in 2021. Rollout began in August 2023; surface longliners became mandatory in January 2024, and bottom longliners in March 2025. Roughly eight years from the legal instrument to the coverage of a fleet segment, in a country with a small fleet, strong institutions, and a single centrally procured provider. By September 2025, the programme had monitored more than 64,000 fishing events, with in-house MPI analysts reviewing about 31% of them.

Australia's approach is different. AFMA first looked at EM in 2005, following sea lion interactions, and made it mandatory in 2015 for about 75 vessels, ten years and many pilots later. Phase 1 was a single vendor that handled the review and submitted compliance reports to the regulator. In 2022, AFMA announced Phase 2, a standards-based multi-vendor model in which the agency sets the specs, type-approves vendors, owns the national data repository, and brings the review in-house with CSIRO support on the AI side. To do that, they invested AUD 20.1 million over four years in data and IT capacity, plus another AUD 10 million in 2025.

Put those side by side, and the message for Taiwan is not "buy cameras". It is that EM at scale is an institutional build with a technology component, and the institutional part is what takes years. Even the EU's core EM requirement, set out in a Control Regulation in force since 2024, does not take effect until 2028.

There is one genuine difference for Taiwan that neither NZ nor Australia has had to address. Both those fleets come home often enough that data can be transferred via hard drives or cellular networks. Australian operators post the encrypted drive to AFMA within 24 hours of the first landing each month. You cannot do that with a vessel out for eighteen months. Taiwan has to transmit by satellite, which changes the cost structure entirely.

The money side

Everyone wants to talk about cameras. Cameras are the cheap part.

Across New Zealand, Australia, the US and Scotland, EM hardware costs roughly USD 8,000 to 10,000 per vessel, with a working life of three to five years in saltwater. Annualised, that is about 10% of total cost. Implementation, excluding hardware, runs USD 12,000 to 14,000 per vessel per year, and administration clusters tightly at USD 3,200 to 3,700 across all four countries.

Then you add the satellite bill, which Taiwan alone has to pay. A camera at 1080p and 5 to 10 fps generates around 40 GB of compressed video per day when running continuously. Strip out dead time with activity detection, and you cut that by 60%. Drop to 720p and file sizes fall another 70%. That lands at about 5 GB per camera per day, roughly 20 GB for a four-camera array. Transmit only the 20% you intend to review, and you are at about 120 GB a month, which fits a 250 GB plan at USD 600 to 1,000 a month at today's indicative OneWeb tariffs, before bulk discounts.

Add it up, and you get total operating costs of roughly USD 20,000 to 29,300 per vessel per year, with review and transmission as the dominant drivers. For a 900-vessel fleet, that is real money, and it is far better to have that argument now, with numbers on the table, than halfway through a rollout.

The 20% review rate matters here, and I pushed for framing it as a baseline rather than a ceiling. MSC “scientists” have settled on 20% as a workable minimum for high seas fisheries. AFMA audits 10%; the US Western Central Pacific programme targets 25%; New Zealand reports 31%. It is high enough to be taken seriously and low enough to be affordable at fleet scale. Because the full record stays on the vessel's drive, you can always escalate on a risk signal.

Insurance, a generally hard-to-cost incentive

The insurance idea is one that I’ve been going on for a while, and I went into it hoping for a stronger answer than I found.

These vessels carry three broad layers of cover: crew, hull, and third-party liability. For crew cover, EM could improve the evidence available for an injury, a medical evacuation, a wage dispute, or an allegation of abuse, which would help with claims handling. But crew premiums are driven by injury incidence, medical costs, fatigue and the operator's labour practices, not by whether there is a camera on deck. For hull, the TFA subsidy is NTD 6,000 (USD 190) for 20 to 50 GT vessels and NTD 8,000 (USD 250) for 50 to 100 GT vessels, so for a small-scale longliner, there is almost nothing left to save.

Third-party liability, the P&I layer, is where video has the greatest potential. P&I covers crew injury or death, pollution, collisions and wreck removal, and footage can establish causation, show whether procedures were followed, and refute false claims. Commercial trucking has already gone there, with insurers offering around 5% discounts for video telematics.

The honest conclusion, though, is that the first benefit is insurability, not price. EM helps a vessel demonstrate it is monitored, documented and less exposed to undisclosed IUU, casualty or labour risk, which improves access to cover in supply chains where buyers are nervous. Premium reductions only follow once insurers accumulate claims experience linking EM to lower loss frequency. That will take years, and I would rather say so than sell a saving that does not yet exist.

Where this leaves Taiwan

The report is deliberately not advocacy. It does not tell TFA what to do. It lays out the decisions, the trade-offs in each, and the cost of the choices.

My own view is that Taiwan is in a better starting position than most assume. The e-logbook and VMS architecture are already in place for EM to be indexed against, and OFDC already handles the technical plumbing. Over half the fleet has voluntarily wired its CCTV to satellite because owners find it useful for running their vessels, which shows the fleet management incentive is real, not theoretical. NTOU has a domestic EM unit priced at around USD 6,000, which is being piloted on 10 vessels, and TFA started a small subsidy in July 2025.

The pieces are on the table. What is missing is the multi-year decision on how they fit together, and everyone who has done this well started that conversation earlier than they felt comfortable.

If you are interested not only in EM but also in Taiwan as the small giant in world fishing, the Ocean Outcomes (O2) report is a critical read, and I’m very thankful to Marine Change for the opportunity to be involved, and to O2 not only for the funding but, most importantly, for the unique work they have been doing there.

——

Ho-Tu Chiang

The best part of this job had nothing to do with bandwidth or levies. People who know me know I like people’s stories

Back in 2023 I got a message from Ho-Tu Chiang, a former Taiwan coastguard officer doing postgraduate work on IUU fishing. He had found my blog and told me my writing and general attitude to life had nudged him towards fisheries sustainability, working with Ocean Outcomes to help industry improve compliance. I was moved by it, and told him I hoped we would work together one day.

Two years later, I was in Taiwan working with him on this study. He turned out to be exactly what I suspected from that first message: a top professional and a good man, and the person who made the local access, the industry conversations and the translation of all this into a Taiwanese policy context actually work. Taiwan is a hard place to build trust with industry on regulatory issues, and from day 1 I could see he had done that.

It reinforces the thing I keep saying and will keep saying. Good fisheries are more about good people than about fish, or cameras, or satellites.

Lack of capacity is not a side issue; it is the issue

I have said this many times in person and in presentations: for me, the key challenge in our region's fisheries is not IUU fishing. It is building capacity, attracting and retaining capable people, bringing in a diversity of backgrounds and ways of thinking, and making room for new ways of working things out… IUU fishing is downstream of that. It is a symptom we have chosen to treat as the disease, mostly because it is much easier to fund a patrol boat, an app or a "workshop" than it is to fund a career.

Planning the day and doing the job alongside, not from a workshop room

So I was happy to see a new paper come out in Fish and Fisheries that says this properly, with references, in a journal that the people who write funding strategies actually read. "Lack of Capacity: The Not-So-Hidden Factor Undermining Fisheries Governance" is by Bianca Haas at ANCORS in Wollongong, Transform Aqorau at Solomon Islands National University, and Mitchell Lennan at Aberdeen. It is open access, which matters because a paper on the capacity of developing coastal states that sits behind a USD 40 paywall would be a bad joke.

Full disclosure, I know Bianca and Transform well, and I respect them both a lot. Transform's contribution to the region over the last three decades needs no introduction from me (yet I still enjoy reading this blog), and Bianca has been doing careful, unglamorous work on RFMO performance for years. That said, I would be saying the same things about this paper if I had never met either of them, or if the work I did wasn’t referenced by them.

The central claim

Their argument, boiled down, is that capacity is not a peripheral implementation issue that you tack onto the end of a management measure. It is a core determinant of whether that measure is effective, and whether it is equitable. Unless coastal developing states have sustained scientific, legal, technical, institutional and financial capacity to participate meaningfully in RFMOs, adopting conservation and management measures and international agreements does not translate into outcomes. You get compliance ratings instead of compliance.

I like that they split the problem into technical and structural. The technical side is the one everyone talks about: weak data collection and reporting, thin scientific expertise, limited stock assessment capability, MCS gaps, difficulty meeting reporting requirements. That is the side that workshops aim at.

The structural side is the one nobody funds: high staff turnover, small domestic budgets, weak institutional memory, legal frameworks that cannot domesticate an RFMO measure, and no ability to sustain participation across five or six international processes at once. As they put it, training individuals produces limited long-term impact unless you also invest in institutions, career pathways, domestic legal implementation and stable financing.

That distinction explains many failed projects I have watched over the years. You can train someone brilliantly and still get nothing because the system they return to cannot retain what they learned.

Capacity is power

The example they use to make this concrete is the IOTC allocation negotiation, and it is a good one. Historically, catch has been attributed to the flag state regardless of the waters from which it came. Some coastal members are challenging that, arguing that fish taken inside their EEZ should be attributed to them. The current approach favours well-developed fishing nations and undermines the rights of the state whose fish they are.

Now, here is the point. To challenge that allocation approach, you need technical, legal, economic, and negotiation capacity, all at once, sustained over the years it takes. Since 2011, in this case. If you do not have that, the rule stands and continues to take value from your waters every year it remains in effect.

So capacity is not a nice development add-on for a report's annexes. It is the thing that determines who gets the fish. Arvid Pardo (the “father of UNCLOS ") said in 1984 that international law reflects the beliefs, needs and perceived interests of the most powerful states of the time, and the paper is right to quote him. RFMOs were designed by people who had lawyers. That is not an accident, and it is not ancient history; it is being renegotiated right now.

The bit I want to shout about

They write about the balance between staff turnover, knowledge retention and career development. Junior staff are rotated through departments; they get trained and then leave. The reasons given for high turnover are job dissatisfaction, poor compensation, and a lack of career path. As I said many times, “we expect excellence, yet we pay mediocrity”

Let us be honest about what that means in practice. We, as an industry, expect excellence from our regulators. We want the analyst who can read a stock assessment properly, the officer who can run a boarding by the book, the lawyer who can hold their own against a delegation with three counsel behind them, the person who can tell whether a transhipment declaration is nonsense. We want them incorruptible, available at 3 am when a vessel comes in, and up to date on a legal framework that changes every year.

And then we, collectively, create the conditions in which those people are paid a fraction of what their skills are worth. Less than a coordinator at the cannery. Much less than a manager at the company they're inspecting, or what a consultant like me gets paid to fly in and work with them.

The best-trained fisheries officer in the room is also the most poachable person in the room. Industry hires them, because industry can. A donor project or an international organisation hires them at three times the government rate to do work about their own country. Or they simply leave the sector, because their partner would like to see them and they would like to own a house. Then we run another training for the replacement, and we call that capacity building.

You cannot pay someone poorly, rotate them out of the job just as they get good at it, and then complain in a compliance committee that the country has a capacity problem. That is not a capacity problem; it is a design choice, and we are all part of the design.

What actually works

The paper is not just complaining, which I appreciate. It points at what works, and the pattern is consistent: long-term, relationship-based, country-driven.

At the individual level, it is not only postgraduate scholarships, useful as those are. It is practical skills: negotiation, chairing and facilitating meetings, scientific writing, fisheries economics, and mentoring.

Shadowing an experienced negotiator, taking the rapporteur role, leading a side event. Confidence and strategic thinking, so a delegate speaks in plenary rather than sitting quietly with the right answer in their folder. The FFA negotiation training, with built-in mentoring, is cited as being in the right shape.

At the national level, they highlight long-term embedded advisors rather than short technical missions, because an advisor who is there for years builds trust, understands the institutional constraints, and provides continuity when staff turnover occurs.

The example they use is the offshore fisheries advisor position that New Zealand funded at MIMRA in the Marshall Islands for six and a half years (with 3 more running now), with Majuro port cited by FAO as a best-practice example, and MIMRA taking the global Stop IUU Fishing award in 2023.

Of course I have a personal interest to declare there, since this was (and still is) my job. And I will say what the paper is too polite to say: nothing I did in those years would have worked without the MIMRA leadership and the people who were already there, the ones who stayed there, and the new ones who came. My contribution was continuity: a lot of the MCS work is about routines, and given those routines time to produce results, creating trust in what is done, and trust takes time… hence six and a half years is the point. Nobody funds six-and-a-half-year projects anymore; they fund 12-month projects with a 24-month logframe.

At the regional level, their comparison table across the five tuna RFMOs is worth the download on its own. Support exists everywhere, but it is uneven, mostly short-term, and mostly aimed at narrow technical functions: one workshop, one project. Almost nothing addresses domestic implementation, inter-agency coordination, legal drafting, staff retention, or sustained engagement in negotiations.

And now, more homework

Then there is the load coming. Climate change is going to shift tuna eastwards out of Pacific EEZs and into the high seas, which turns every allocation and access question into a harder one, and BBNJ arrives with a whole new set of processes to attend. The paper treats both as complementary sources of capacity support, and Part V of BBNJ is genuinely promising, particularly because Article 42.3 says capacity building should be country-driven, participatory, and gender-responsive, which is the correct instruction.

But be realistic. We are adding two more agreements to fisheries departments that already cannot cover the meetings they have, with the same five people. If the capacity support does not arrive faster than the obligations do, we have made things worse while feeling good about ourselves.

The authors also make the point, quoting Harden-Davies, that the term "capacity building" itself assumes an unequal relationship and can be read as patronising. They are right. And I've written about the colonial nature of my job and my problems with “Aid” myself, which could lead to another series of blog posts… I remind people very often of Francis Hezel's words, in his seminal book “Making sense of Micronesia” (2013): “Changes may have to be made, as they must in any culture, but we outsiders should at least understand some of the broader contexts of Island culture before we begin leading the charge for change according to our own formulas”

Read the paper. It is short, it is open access, and it says out loud what a lot of us have been talking about among ourselves, normally behind a beer. Capacity is not the soft part of fisheries governance. It is the whole game, and the people who do it deserve to be paid like it.

Haas, B., Aqorau, T. and Lennan, M. (2026) Lack of Capacity: The Not-So-Hidden Factor Undermining Fisheries Governance. Fish and Fisheries. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.70114

Back to FAO Rome, with a different hat

From the 7 to the 11 September, I'm going to be Rome for the 37th session of the Committee on Fisheries, working as technical support to the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority. 

Seventeen years ago I worked in that building as a fisheries officer. I left in 2009 and wrote a blog about why (one of my first ones on another platform). So walking back into the COFI plenary room as a delegate of a member state instead of an officer or a consultant will be interesting and some way of closing the circle.

Fisheries fun

So let me use this post to explain what COFI actually is, what the paperwork looks like, and what it feels like to come back from the other side.

What COFI is

The Committee on Fisheries is a subsidiary body of the FAO Council. The FAO Conference set it up in 1965, and it meets every two years. It is the only global intergovernmental forum where countries sit down together to deal with fisheries and aquaculture. That sentence gets repeated a lot in FAO material, and it is easy to skim past, but it is true, and it matters. There is no other room like it.

COFI does two things. It leads negotiations on international agreements on fisheries and aquaculture and issues global recommendations and policy advice to governments, regional fishery bodies, civil society, the private sector, and the wider international community. Over the years, it has produced binding agreements and non-binding instruments that changed how the sector works, mostly in the direction of resource sustainability and biodiversity conservation.

If you work in fisheries, you already live inside things that came out of that room. The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. The Port State Measures Agreement. The Voluntary Guidelines for Catch Documentation Schemes. The Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment. The Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, and so on…  Every one of them started as a draft, that then got discussed by FAO officers, then go trough a expert cosnsultation, then a technical consultation and along the proces a poing in the  COFI agenda, where it gets argued over line by line, and finally may end up as something a port inspector in Majuro or a fisheries officer in Honiara now has to apply on a Tuesday morning.

That is the thing about COFI. It looks like a conference. It is actually the upstream end of the work most of us do downstream.

The paperwork, and why it matters

COFI runs on documents, and there are three kinds. 

Working Documents are the core official papers, prepared by the Secretariat to guide the Committee's deliberations. Each one is tied to an agenda item. They provide context, an overview of FAO's work in that space, and a summary of the key issues, options, and recommendations for Members to consider. These are the ones intended to support negotiation and formal action. If you only have time to read one category, read these, because these are the ones that turn into decisions.

Information Documents are supplementary. They sit behind the Working Documents and go deeper on a specific topic. They are not up for negotiation, and nobody is going to endorse them. Their job is to inform. Very often they hold the detail that the Working Document had to compress into a paragraph, so if a Working Document says something that will land on your country, the Information Document is where you go to find out how hard.

Session Background Documents are broader context and reference material for the session as a whole. Useful, occasionally very useful, but not the thing you build a position on.

For a small delegation, this hierarchy is a matter of survival. A big delegation reads everything, with a person per agenda item and a capital behind them sending instructions. A Pacific island delegation may be two or three people covering an agenda that runs from aquaculture to fisheries subsidies to climate adaptation. You cannot have the capacity to deal with all of them with the same attention. You triage, identify which lines actually touch your country, and focus your preparation there.

That triage is a lot of what I'm there for. Read the papers, find the parts that land on RMI, work out what they mean in practice for a country with the world's busiest tuna transhipment port and an administration of a dozen people, and turn that into something the delegate can say in two minutes with the microphone on.

Coming back

I first walked into FAO because of FAO. I was trained by a Fisheries Department programme as an 18-year-old fisherman in Argentina. That training gave me knowledge, but more than that, it gave me a start. Years later, I got a job there, replacing one of the people who had trained me, which felt like closing another circle. I still think FAO changes people's lives more reliably than it changes the world, and I have no standing to complain, because it changed mine twice.

Then I quit, after a bit over a year, having been picked from more than 100 candidates for the post. People found that hard to understand at the time (and so did I). It was a well-paid job with diplomatic status, real research freedom, and Rome outside the window. Rome is one of the most beautiful cities in history, and I loved it. But she asks a price, and I was not willing to keep paying it.

The reasons I wrote down in 2009 have not changed much on rereading. Some of it was family. I'm a village boy, and I wanted my kids to grow up somewhere small, walking home along the beach, in a place where, if they got into trouble, almost anyone they ran into would try to help. Some of it was me. I grew up in a society where personal effort alone did not cut the cake, where who you knew mattered more than what you did, and I had spent years in rebellion against exactly that. I did not want to hand it to my children as normal. New Zealand let a 29-year-old with 300 dollars in savings start again without anyone asking which party he belonged to or which school he went to. Those are the values I wanted them to know still exist somewhere, and those values are not the ones that guide Italy… as much as I love the country.

I also wrote at the time that FAO Fisheries was a good old solid boat, the only one of her kind, but one that burns a lot of fuel just to stay afloat, and that the responsibility for that lies with the skipper. Seventeen years later, I would not change the metaphor much. She is still the only boat of her kind, which is precisely why the state of her engines is everyone's problem and not just FAO's.

What I took away was better than what I gave up. I worked alongside some genuine popes of very specific corners of fisheries. I found my tribe: transient, borderless, mixed origins, doing for a living things most people do not know anyone does. And I proved to myself that you can get somewhere on your own terms, without a tie, without diplomatic language, without powerful recommenders, as long as you are consistent and you treat people with respect. That is not a small thing to learn.

Twenty years of paperwork coming back around

The odd part of reading the COFI 37 papers has been how much of the agenda I have already met somewhere, at an earlier stage of its life.

My relationship with the institution is now about twenty years old (2208), and at that time I i evaluated the operational impact on the initial text of what became the Port State Measures Agreement. Then, as a consultant, I drafted the initial text of the Catch Documentation Scheme guidelines and then sat in on the expert consultations that turned it into something Members could adopt. I was in the expert and then technical consultations for the Transhipment guidelines. I drafted the initial text of the guidance on social responsibility in fisheries and aquaculture value chains, which the Sub-Committee on Fish Trade has now consolidated into a single document and is moving towards finalisation. I led the writing of the end-to-end traceability guidelines. And right now I'm working on the draft of the voluntary guidelines for fisheries access agreements, which appears in the COFI 37 papers as work FAO has started and will bring back to a future session. And i wrote a couple of books for them that condiment al lot of the issues being discussed.

So several items on this agenda are, in a very direct sense, drafts I once had in front of me on a screen, now grown up and being discussed by 190-odd countries. Nobody's name is on any of it, which is exactly how it should be. Text that survives that process no longer belongs to whoever typed the first version, and that is the point.

Still. As someone who sees themself as an ex-fisherman who got carried away by education and works independently as a 1-man band…. I’m quite proud of my relationship with FAO

The other side of the table

So the interesting part of September, for me, is the change of seat.

When you sit on the Secretariat side, you write the papers. You choose the framing, decide what goes in the Working Document and what gets pushed to an Information Document, and draft the suggested action the Committee is invited to take. You are trying to be even-handed across 190-odd Members, which in practice means the text ends up general enough that nobody objects.

When you sit behind a country's nameplate, you have to live with the result. General text is not neutral. A recommendation written to suit everyone tends to suit the countries with the administrative capacity to implement it, and quietly burden those without. 

A capacity development programme designed in Rome is delivered in Busan, Malta and Vigo, and the numbers show how much of it has ever reached the Pacific. None of that is malice. It is just what happens when nobody in the room says the specific thing out loud.

Which is the job. Not to make noise, but to put the specific thing on the record, in two minutes, with the facts straight. Majuro handles more tuna transhipment than any port on earth. RMI ratified the Port State Measures Agreement in 2024. Tuna biomass is projected to move east out of Pacific island zones as the ocean warms, taking access revenue with it. Those are facts, and facts said plainly into a microphone in that room have a way of turning up in text two years later.

I got a good reference and an open door when I left in 2009. I never went back through it as a staff member. Going back through it as technical support for a Pacific island member country is, I suspect, closing another circle in my sunset years that allows me to see issues from many sides, something I consider a blessing life gives me.

Tagging on a borrowed boat

In my last post on the SC22 outcomes, I wrote about tagging and about SC asking SPC to convene a technical workshop in 2027 on the use of tagging data in regional assessments. Tagging is a vital tool in the stock assessment toolbox. The results always matter, even when they do not go the way scientists would like. Continuity is fundamental.

Yet every few years, the same conversation comes back around, dressed up in the language of efficiency, with the Scientific Services Provider asked to explore options to improve cost efficiency in the tagging programme. The answer tabled at SC22 (WCPFC-SC22-2026-SA-WP04) is polite, thorough, and, if you read it properly, quite blunt. There is nothing left to trim. The only cost that scales is charter days, and cutting charter days is cutting the science.

source: https://www.spc.int/spc-tuna-tagging

I want to talk about why that matters, because tagging is one of those things everyone agrees is important, though few can say exactly why. And then about the part everyone silently agrees we need, but nobody wants to pay for: a dedicated research vessel.

What tagging actually is

A tag is a small piece of numbered plastic pushed into the back of a skipjack that has been caught, brought aboard, measured, marked and returned to the water in a matter of seconds.

On its own, it is worth nothing. What makes it worth something is that months or years later that fish turns up in a purse seine set, goes into a well, gets landed, goes through a cannery, and somebody on the line notices the tag, reports it and gets a reward. That is the whole trick. A release event, a recapture event, and the distance and time between them.

From that pair of dots you get things you cannot get any other way. How fast fish move between areas. How many die of natural causes rather than fishing. How quickly they grow. How big the population is. Catch data cannot tell you any of that; it only tells you what was caught. Tagging is the one method that measures these things directly instead of inferring them.

It also gives you an estimate of fishing pressure that does not depend on the catch-and-effort data the industry reports about itself, and an estimate of abundance from sources other than CPUE. That matters enormously in a fishery where FAD use has quietly rewritten what a unit of effort even means.

Since 2006, the Pacific Tuna Tagging Project has been the primary source of data on skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye in the WCPO. It feeds MULTIFAN-CL. It feeds SEAPODYM, which is how the region generates its climate projections of where the tuna will be in 2050. It underpins the skipjack management procedure, the harvest strategy that took the Commission the better part of a decade to agree.

Take the tagging away and, as Table 3 of the paper spells out, the skipjack management procedure needs redeveloping, the monitoring strategies for all three species need redeveloping, and the skipjack assessment starts to lean on historical tagging data from a climate regime that no longer exists.

That last point is the one that should worry people. Old tagging data does not just get less precise. Under a shifting ocean, it gets wrong, and it gets wrong in a direction we cannot see.

The numbers, since we are talking about efficiency

WCPFC puts in roughly USD 790,000 a year. That is not what the programme costs. Between 2022 and 2025, non-WCPFC sources covered about 63% of core activity, so every Commission dollar pulled in another USD 1.70 of work aimed at Commission priorities. Over the life of the project, WCPFC has contributed just under USD 6 million since 2006. SPC's own non-WCPFC projects total USD 16.8 million, Korea USD 2.7 million, and PNG USD 1 million. Seventy-seven per cent of the lifetime cash has come from someone other than the Commission.

And that co-finance is not free-floating. It is attached to WCPFC being in the room. Donors and cooperating members fund this because it is the regional tagging programme bearing the Commission's name. Reduce the Commission's share, and you do not save your share. You lose a multiple of it.

The activities are interlocking:

• You need the cruises to plant the tags and release the tagged fish.

• You need the recovery network, rewards, and training for observers and port staff to get tags back.

• You need tag-seeding experiments, in which known tags are introduced into the system without the finders knowing, to determine what proportion of recaptures are actually reported. Without a reporting rate, the recapture numbers mean nothing.

• You need the data curation and analysis to turn any of it into something an assessment can use.

Drop one and the others stop producing useful information.

Then there is what it would cost not to have it:

• USD 1.3 million a year to replace the tagging data with alternative sources for harvest strategies, assessments and climate projections

• USD 100,000 a year for the specimen bank samples

• USD 250,000 to redevelop the skipjack management procedure

• Roughly USD 1.6 million a year of knock-on cost to at least nine other WCPFC projects

The only genuinely scalable cost is charter days, currently around 60 a year. Fewer days mean fewer tags, which lead to noisier estimates of movement, mortality, and abundance, feeding into weaker assessments and less reliable climate projections. How much weaker it would be would require a large simulation exercise to quantify, which would itself be costly.

And those cruises are not just tagging cruises any more. They are the only regular at-sea sampling platform in the region. Otoliths for ageing, growth and microchemistry. DNA biopsies for close-kin mark-recapture and epigenetic ageing clocks. Blood for reproductive biology and heavy metals. Stomach contents for the microbiome work. Fat content for condition time series. All of it rides on a platform already paid for, at marginal cost. Kill the charter, and every one of those projects has to go and find its own boat.

So the efficiency question has already been answered, several times over, by the accounts. This is one of the cheapest things the Commission does, and one of the few where the money visibly multiplies.

A fisherman always talks about boats

The proposed terms of reference state that tagging cruises are anticipated on either the NFD pole-and-line vessel Solomon Searcher or the multipurpose vessel Gutsy Lady 4, with alternates as availability allows. That sentence is doing an enormous amount of load-bearing work.

There is a reason it has to be pole-and-line. You cannot tag out of a purse seine brail. You need fish coming aboard one at a time, hooked, barbless, landed on a mat, handled for seconds and put back over the side alive and in good condition. Pole and line is the only commercial method that delivers that at scale, along with the live-bait operation that brings the school up and holds it there. The entire mark-recapture dataset that the WCPO assessments rest on exists because a couple of pole-and-line boats in the Solomons and elsewhere are still fishing.

And that fleet is not in good health. Pole-and-line has been shrinking across the Pacific for forty years, squeezed out by purse-seine economics, bait supply problems, crew costs, and the simple fact that it is labour-intensive in a world that keeps trying to be less so. What is left is a small number of ageing hulls kept going by operators whose business case has nothing to do with science. Nobody is building new pole-and-line vessels for the WCPO. Nobody is maintaining them to a research standard, because why would they? They are maintained to keep fishing, for as long as fishing pays, and no longer.

So the regional tagging programme, and through it the skipjack management procedure, and through that a fishery worth billions a year and a large share of government revenue in several PNA members, is underwritten by charter availability on a dwindling fleet of old commercial boats in a fishery that is on its way out. When a charter falls over, the science schedule bends around it. And the paper is clear that sporadic field operations make the whole supporting apparatus, the technicians, the recovery officers, the seeding programme, harder and more expensive to keep alive.

We have built a lifeline out of someone else's spare capacity.

Which brings me to “the boat”

SPC has a proposal on the table for a purpose-built Pacific fisheries science vessel. It is 48.6 metres long, has more than 6,000 nautical miles of range, and draws under 3.5 metres, so it can actually work in the region's shallow ports. It is diesel-electric, with room for whatever comes next: laboratories, acoustics, a hydraulic crane, mid-water trawl capacity, small boats for coastal work, and 26 people on board. The rationale is stark. The vessels previously used for this work are being decommissioned due to their age; here is a solution.

source and details: https://fame.spc.int/ecosystems-and-marine-biology/pacificsciencevessel

I should declare an interest. I began as a fisherman, and when I went to university to study fisheries, I paid for it by spending years crewing on research vessels. I collected data for my thesis and for other scientists while standing watch. I was a scientist and a deck officer at the same time, so I know what a research vessel is worth from both ends.

Which means I also know the arguments against capital investment. A vessel is a capital item, and capital items are politically harder than recurrent line items. Somebody has to crew it, dry-dock it, insure it and fill it with fuel. Regional bodies have owned ships before, and it has not always ended well.

But investment in science is long-term, and you do not see gains in the short term. Look at what countries in the region actually spend. New Zealand, a small agricultural country currently run by a government that invests minimally in science, still puts NZ$250-300 million of public money a year into agri-food science. Australia, a much bigger economy, invests around A$1.2 billion.

On fisheries specifically:

• New Zealand: NZ$22.3 million a year on fisheries science, roughly half Crown-funded and half recovered from industry, with two offshore research vessels and small inshore craft

• Australia: A$33 million a year through FRDC, plus A$49 million a year to run the Marine National Facility, with 15 to 20 vessels across the Commonwealth and the states

• Japan: 7 fisheries research vessels plus 2 training vessels, the largest being Koyo-maru at 2,352 tonnes, run by an agency with 10 institutes and 968 staff, including 541 researchers

• Korea: 13 research vessels operated by NIFS alone

These are only the countries I could find figures for. The point is that every serious fishing nation in this region owns fisheries research vessels and has the institutional experience to run them. The Pacific does not.

Furthermore, I would argue that a research vessel for SPC is a better investment than the Guardian-class patrol boats that Australia has already deployed in the region. Those cost around A$16 million per hull, with 22 delivered to 13 recipients, 30-year sustainment behind them, and they appear to go to sea for about 40 to 60 days a year. Over a 30-year life, that is roughly 1,200 to 1,800 sea days per vessel. For comparison, Australia's own RV Investigator costs about A$163,000 a sea day and is considered underused at 200 days a year.

A research vessel that actually goes to sea 200 days or more a year delivers more time on the water per dollar than a patrol boat managing 40 to 60. And it produces the stock assessment data that the enforcement effort is supposed to be protecting. The patrol boat programme bought the platform that ensures presence. Nobody wants to buy the platform that ensures the science.

The options are simple. Either we keep renting time on boats we do not control, from a sector we know is contracting, at a price that only goes one way as the fleet thins, with no ability to schedule the science around what the science needs. Or we build a dedicated vessel that does more than tag: acoustic biomass work, coastal surveys, seafloor mapping, ecosystem sampling, and the training of Pacific Island scientists at sea, which is the part nobody costs and everybody needs. It shows up after a cyclone. It carries the flag of a region that owns two-thirds of the world's tuna and currently cannot independently go and look at it.

Tagging continuity is not a nice-to-have in the science budget. It is the sensor on the most valuable renewable resource in the Pacific, and the entire signal chain currently depends on whether an old pole-and-line boat is free next April.

Fixing the charter line item was never the real question. The real question is whether the region's fishing powers and donors are willing to pay for and own the platform on which their own future depends, or whether we keep renting it from a fishery that is quietly closing down around us.

SC22 in Apia: what the Scientific Committee actually decided

The Scientific Committee of the WCPFC met in Apia from 11 to 19 August, and the outcomes document is out. It runs to a few hundred paragraphs across almost 100 pages, so full respect to the group that made it! Not sure if anyone one ever reads it completely! It is very dry reading; most paragraphs begin with the institutional language of "SC22 noted" or "SC22 recommended", and, like all such documents, it buries the interesting parts in careful language.

Conceptual model of north Pacific albacore biology and population dynamics.

I did not read it all, partly because much of it went over my current level of scientific knowledge, yet I have areas of interest, and this document will be the basis for the advances that can be made… so here is what I take from it.

The bigeye assessment was the best one ever produced, and the meeting could not agree on it

SPC presented a new bigeye tuna assessment. SC22 called it the most scientifically advanced assessment of the stock developed to date, and commended the openness and reproducibility of the process, which let member scientists engage with the model as it was being built rather than argue with it afterwards. That is real praise, and not the sort you usually see in these documents.

Then it could not agree on the answer.

The disagreement concerns which set of model runs best describes stock status. When you build an assessment, you do not produce one model; you produce a grid of them, each with different assumptions about the things you cannot measure. Some members preferred a grid of 80 models that keeps both options on one uncertainty axis: the treatment of tag reporting rates during the mixing period. Others preferred a grid of 34 models that keeps only one of those options, and thought it more defensible.

Both grids give the same qualitative answer. The stock is not overfished and is not subject to overfishing, and recent biomass is slightly below the 2012 to 2015 average the tropical tuna measure uses as its objective. What differs is the risk. Grid 1 puts the chance of being below the limit reference point at 18.6 per cent and the chance of fishing mortality above FMSY at 24.1 per cent.

Grid 2 puts them at 23.6 and 29.2 per cent. Five percentage points on the risk of breaching a limit reference point is the kind of number that decides an allocation argument, which is why nobody was in a hurry to concede. There was even a proposal to weight the two grids 60/40 rather than treat them equally.

Underneath it sits tagging. SC22 identified tag mixing and the possible overdispersion of tag recaptures as the outstanding uncertainties that must be resolved before consensus can be reached. So the Committee asked SPC to convene a technical workshop in 2027 on how tagging data are used in regional assessments, with the results feeding into the next bigeye assessment in 2029 and an independent peer review of that in 2030. Meanwhile, the formal advice reverts to SC19, and SC22 had to note that the SC19 assessment contained an error in model specification and should be read with caution. That is an uncomfortable place to be, and everyone in the room knew it.

The yellowfin assessment did not fare better, for a duller reason. It arrived too late for members to review properly, so adoption was deferred to SC23, with a list of items to address, including whether the model's spatial structure is distorting the growth estimates.

The tagging programme produced mixed results. SC22 endorsed its workplan and indicative budget to 2029, noted the revised terms of reference, and stressed the importance of tag seeding. It also told SPC to strengthen the paper before FAC20 and the Commission by linking each activity to a management issue and making the value-for-money case explicit. Given that the bigeye stalemate turns on how tagging data are handled, asking for a better argument is fair enough. It does leave SPC defending a programme whose data the meeting could not agree on how to use.

The important line is buried in the BigEye section

Two sentences deserve more attention than they will get. SC22 agreed that the lack of consensus should not delay the bigeye management procedure, because the Commission's consideration of the procedure depends on the estimation method rather than on acceptance of the latest assessment. And it noted that, within the harvest strategy framework, management advice should come from adopted procedures, while assessments primarily serve to monitor and review those procedures.

That is a restatement of what the Commission is becoming. For twenty years, the annual argument was about the assessment because it produced the advice. Under harvest strategies the advice comes from a rule agreed in advance, and the assessment becomes a diagnostic tool. Whether members behave that way is another question, but the principle is now on paper.

You can see it working already. The South Pacific albacore management procedure ran for the first time and produced an actual number: 56,096 tonnes, applying to longline and troll fisheries south of 10 degrees south, excluding the EEZs of Tokelau and Tuvalu. No debate about the assessment, just the output of an agreed rule. The skipjack monitoring strategy also found nothing preventing the skipjack procedure from operating.

Bigeye is not there yet. The operating models were revised, the estimation method was accepted in principle, and the candidate procedures now sit on something called a nuclear grid, which sounds alarming but is a table of combinations of longline catch and FAD closure periods that reach a given target. Some members think the candidates do not reflect what was agreed at the first bigeye management workshop, particularly on how catch limits and FAD closures sit alongside the exemptions in CMM 2025-02. SC22 has requested a two-day special session alongside the Commission meeting in Port Vila to sign off on the operating model grid.

Yellowfin gets no procedure of its own and will be managed implicitly through the skipjack, bigeye and albacore rules, which is a bet worth watching, especially since none of the current bigeye candidates reaches the interim yellowfin target.

The northern stocks are in good shape

North Pacific albacore is virtually certain, above 99 percent, to be neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, with spawning biomass around 60 percent of the unfished level and fishing intensity below target for six years running. Pacific blue marlin sits at the same place relative to MSY-based reference points, and the ISC noted that the stock might support somewhat higher removals.

SC22 did not simply pass that on. It pointed out that terminal-year status is less certain than the headline probabilities suggest, that the assessment relies on biological parameters sampled almost entirely in the North Pacific for a fish assessed as a single Pacific-wide stock, and that southwest Pacific sample holdings are close to zero.

Given how much blue marlin matters to coastal longline and sport fisheries in the islands, it recommended caution about any catch increase. The Committee read the number, then the fishery, which is what you want it to do.

The unpretentious decisions that will matter

Data work moved forward in ways nobody will notice for years. Cannery receipt data, Project 114, gets a workshop later this year and an extension to 2027, aimed at using cannery weights to correct logbook data (this, for me, is a key issue that, if we could get right, plus the transhipment scales, could give us the real numbers in under- or misreporting). Size data submission gets a formal proforma and a traffic light system for spotting sampling gaps, with an explicit instruction that the thresholds are not to be used for compliance.

On monitoring, SC22 told the Commission plainly that coverage of at least 10 per cent of longline effort is needed for reasonably good bycatch estimates of common species, and more than that for turtles and cetaceans. It also linked electronic monitoring to the increased longline bigeye limit under CMM 2025-02, noting that some members may use EM to meet the coverage requirement.

On FADs, the Committee agreed a stepwise introduction of biodegradable drifting FADs is technically feasible, while recognising that material supply chains make this disproportionately costly for atoll states and SIDS. On loss and abandonment, it prioritised prevention and shore-based recovery, noted that many strandings originate outside the region, and recorded that several members believe the cost of recovery should fall on those who benefit from the fishery (which has been my posture for years)

Climate ran through the meeting. SC22 noted with concern the record global ocean heat content in 2025 and the eleven warmest years on record, and asked that ecosystem indicators be reported in a way that separates short-term variability from long-term trends from plain changes in fishing behaviour.

SC22 also noted the growing use of AI tools to access WCPFC scientific information, and the risk that, without a well-curated source, these tools may return material that is simply wrong. It recommended the Commission discuss whether it needs a policy on AI access to its information. That is the first time I have seen an RFMO put that on the record.

Marine pollution, and the limits of what the SC could say

The gear that fisheries lost got a proper airing, and most of what the Committee said concerned what it does not know.

On abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear, SC22 recommended that the Commission strengthen observer monitoring across longline observer programmes, including through electronic reporting and observer training, and encourage more members to participate. Only 13 members monitor it at present. Some members want the data recorded in standardised fields rather than free-text comments: whether gear was abandoned, lost or discarded, why, and how much, down to mainline and branchline length and the number of floats and beacons.

Then the honest part. SC22 advised that the scientific value of extra reporting stays limited while longline observer coverage remains as low as it is, and it recorded that it did not have the information to advise on which lost gear poses a significant risk of ghost fishing or to navigation. That is precisely the judgement the draft measure wants from it. Underwater noise and greenhouse gas emissions were parked as needing more science and as having management implications that are better handled at TCC, and the Committee suggested a three-year review period once the new measure is adopted.

Doing less, on purpose

The most consequential decision may be procedural. SC22 agreed a three-year process to prioritise its own work: the assessment schedule this year, the harvest strategy work plan next year, and conservation measure reviews in 2028. Assessments for stocks that have passed peer review may now alternate between full benchmarks and lighter updates. The shark measure review is proposed for deferral to 2028. The long-running effectiveness analysis of the tropical tuna measure is recommended for discontinuation, since monitoring strategies will do that job once the procedures are running.

There was even a suggestion to swap the timing of the Commission and Scientific Committee meetings so assessments arrive with time to be reviewed. Given that yellowfin was deferred this year for exactly that reason, it is not a silly idea.

SC23 is in Pohnpei, 10 to 18 August 2027. Solomon Islands have offered to host in 2028.

What it adds up to

The science is in better shape than the consensus process around it. An assessment can be the best ever produced and still fail to be adopted, because adoption is a political act and the numbers in dispute are the ones that translate into catch. The harvest strategy framework is meant to take that pressure off the assessment, and this year gave the first real sight of it working for albacore and skipjack while bigeye stayed stuck in the old pattern.

The other thing I notice is a committee that has started saying no to itself. Deferring items, dropping an analysis, spacing out assessments, asking for a prioritisation process. Some of that is good discipline. Some of it is a body admitting it has more work than it can do, which is worth saying out loud rather than discovering later through another late assessment.

The due diligence that should happen before a transhipment at sea, and doesn't

FAO has recently published Implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment: 1. A guide for fisheries managers (Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries No. 15, Suppl. 1, Rome 2026). It is the operational companion to the Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment (VGTS) that COFI endorsed back in 2022, and it was written by Shelley Clarke and Esther Boy Carmona, with contributions from Giuliano Carrara and Glenn Quelch, and technical backstopping from Matthew Camilleri and Alicia Mosteiro.

I have to declare my bias upfront. I have known Shelley for a long time, and I admire her work more than that of almost anyone else operating in this space. She is one of the very few people who move comfortably between science, policy, and compliance reality, and who does not let any of the three off the hook. When she puts her name to something, I read it properly rather than skimming the executive summary, and this one repaid that.

And it repaid it for a very specific reason. This is the first document I have read that explicitly places the required due diligence on the flag States of both the fishing vessel and the carrier before the transhipment takes place on the high seas. Not after. Not at the port of landing, when the fish is already mixed in a hold with the catch of eleven other vessels. Before.

What the guide actually says

The architecture is built around what FAO calls critical tracking events and functional requirements, borrowed from the catch documentation scheme guidelines of 2022. Fish get an identity (V1, V2 for the vessel and its authorisations, C1, C2 for the catch and the legality of its capture), and those assurances then have to survive the transhipment event (T1, T2, T3) and the landing (L1, L2, L3).

The point the guide hammers home, and that I think is the real contribution, is that these things are linked. If the species verified at landing is not the species declared at catch, then C1 fails, and if C1 fails then C2 or V2 may fail too, because the gear may not be capable of catching that species, or the vessel was never authorised for it. And if C1 and C2 fail, then T2 and T3 fail with them. One broken link and the chain is not a chain.

So who is supposed to hold that together at sea? The guide is unambiguous. Before acknowledging and confirming that a transhipment event can proceed, the flag State of the donor vessel must verify, for the current fishing trip, compliance with the applicable CMMs, compliance with MCS measures, VMS reporting, and regular reporting of catch and effort. And it says this in a sentence that should be printed on the wall of every fisheries administration:

It is important that this confirmation be based on sources of information that are independent of the operator's own declarations.

The listed sources are VMS, observer reports, inspection reports from port and coastal States, and surveillance reports from sea or air patrols. Then there is a checklist (Table 3) that is genuinely usable. Is the vessel identity aligned with your own register? Is the fishing authorisation in force during this trip. Which species are authorised, is there a quantity limit, is there a prohibited species in the fishery, what area, what gear. Are the reported quantities coherent with the timing and the authorised gear? Is the VMS track coherent with the gear, judging by speed and pattern? Is there any unjustified zero-speed gap near a receiving vessel that is not authorised? Is there satellite imagery to cross-check?

The carrier side is not left out either. In the authorisation stage, before any specific event, both flag States are expected to do their own due diligence on their vessels: IMO number where eligible, a functioning approved VMS, inclusion in the flag State's observer programme for transhipments with 100 per cent coverage for receiving vessels, entry in the FAO Global Record and in the relevant RFMO authorised vessel lists. And there is a step in the flow, step D, that I had not seen articulated anywhere before: a pre-arrangement between the flag State of the donor vessel and the flag State of the receiving vessel, to confirm that both are actually operating in conformance with the VGTS and that information exchange protocols exist between them before their vessels ever meet.

The guide is honest about the one gap it cannot close on its own. The VGTS requires confirmation of each event from the donor vessel's flag State, but not from the receiving vessel's flag State. The authors work around it as far as guidance allows: nothing precludes the receiving vessel's flag State from withdrawing the transhipment authorisation after a pre-notification if risk assessment and due diligence reveal evidence of IUU fishing or breaches of the conditions.

Now the reality

None of this is happening at the moment, and I say that as someone whose job for the last twenty-odd years has been to look at the logistics and paperwork these operations generate.

What happens in practice on the high seas is a notification, generally 24 or 36 hours in advance depending on the RFMO, that is treated as an administrative formality rather than as a trigger for verification. The guide notes politely that several RFMOs require 24-hour advance notification and that this "may not support effective MCS". I would put it less politely. Twenty-four hours is not a verification window; it is a courtesy.

And in the vast majority of cases nobody at the donor vessel's flag State opens the VMS track and asks whether it is coherent with the gear and the catch, because either the capacity to do that does not exist, or the vessel is flagged somewhere that has no interest in asking.

The carrier side is worse, because the flag States of the reefer fleet are, with few exceptions, not fisheries administrations in any meaningful sense. They are registries. Asking a registry to perform pre-arrangement with another flag State, to run an observer programme with 100 per cent coverage on its carriers, and to cross-check pre-notification positions against VMS and surveillance data is asking for a function that, in many cases, has never existed.

Where 100 per cent carrier observer coverage exists, it exists because an RFMO imposed it through a regional observer programme, not because a flag State decided to exercise due diligence.

So the honest reading of this guide is that it describes a system that almost no one is running, and that is exactly why it is useful. Until now, when I asked who is responsible for confirming that the fish going over the rail has legal provenance, the answer was a shrug and a gesture toward the port State, three weeks and 4,000 miles later. This document says: it is the flag State of the donor vessel, before the event, on independent evidence, and here is the checklist. That is a benchmark. Appendix 1 is literally set up as a benchmarking table so you can compare your national procedures against it.

A few other things worth your time

The container work in section 4.1.3.3 quietly closes a hole I have been complaining about for years. Because the VGTS finally defines a landing, moving unlanded fish from a vessel into a container is a landing, so it needs a landing declaration meeting VGTS Annex II, and the PSMA Article 3(1)(b) container exemption only applies if that declaration exists and shows port State measures were applied. The old trick of calling it a "transit activity" and letting the receiving port assume that fish in a box must already have been landed no longer has cover.

The weight chapter is unglamorous and important. Estimates at sea against verified weights at landing, processed weight rather than live weight in the declarations, conversion factors that need official definition, ice percentages, and a margin of tolerance typically around 10 per cent. The mass balance logic in Figure 18, where a donor vessel's reported catch has to reconcile with the sum of what each receiving vessel actually landed across different ports, is the check that would catch most laundering. It only works if everyone weighs and classifies the same way, which is the guide's real ask.

And the force majeure section deserves a read, because falsely claiming distress is the obvious route to transhipping into a carrier that would never have been authorised.

None of this is binding. It is guidance on voluntary guidelines. But it names the responsibility precisely, and gives the people who want to do the job a defensible set of steps. That is more than we ever had

FAO. 2026. Implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Transshipment. 1. A guide for fisheries managers. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries, No. 15, Suppl. 1. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ce0610en

The next generation reads the SW Atlantic fishing paralysis better than the present one

In April 2021, I wrote a blog called "The paralysis of any fisheries management initiative in the South-Western Atlantic". I started it by admitting that I'm not always keen to talk much about the situation down there. Being Argentinian by birth, a navy search-and-rescue swimmer cadet during the war, and a fisherman and fisheries scientist after that, I find that particular corner of the ocean is where my history and my profession pull in opposite directions, and where any attempt at nuance gets flattened by colonialism and geopolitics. 

fishing activity if the Argentinean EEZ and the mile 201from the 19 to the 21 August 2026 by starboard.nz

My argument is simple: that area is perhaps the last purely unregulated fishery in the world; an RFMO would fix a good chunk of that, and Argentina's refusal to be part of one, on the grounds that it would imply tacit recognition of Falklands coastal rights, is basically self-inflicted fisheries mismanagement with no real impact on sovereignty claims. Other authors have studied the issue and reached the same conclusion.

I got the expected mix of responses. Some quiet agreement from people in the industry, some very loud disagreement from people who read "RFMO" as "surrender". 

So I was not expecting much when five master's students from the Universidad de San Andrés got in touch a few weeks ago. They were working on a paper for their Elements of Public International Law course in the Master's in International Politics and Economics at San Andrés University and wanted to interview me about the blog entry and fisheries situation in the South-West Atlantic. 

I say yes to most of these requests because whatever I've achieved in life is thanks to many people who took the time to answer my questions… So I always pay it forward. 

After a really nice online talk with them, I was really happy they sent me the finished paper: five thousand words comparing the British licensing regime in the islands with the fishing at mile 201, and asking what each one actually does to Argentina's rights and obligations under international law.

I read it in one sitting... It is a serious piece of work, and more importantly, it is honest in three ways that the public conversation in Argentina almost never is.

They looked back at the 90s, when it worked

The first thing they do, and this is the part that impressed me most, is go back to what happened between 1989 and 2005 instead of starting the story at whatever outrage is currently on the news. 

The Madrid Joint Declarations of 1989 and 1990 created something genuinely clever: the "sovereignty umbrella" formula, under which both countries agreed that nothing done under the arrangements would be taken to affirm, support or deny either side's position on sovereignty or maritime jurisdiction. 

Under that umbrella, they set up the South Atlantic Fisheries Commission (SAFC)  in 1990; they exchanged scientific data; they ran joint research cruises (which I was part of in 1990 and 1991, working with scientists who then, years later, I worked with in New Zealand and the WCPFC); we talked then about Illex argentinus as a biological population rather than as a flag. 

Then it fell apart. The paper traces it carefully: the 1986 interim conservation zone, the 1990 outer zone, the 2005 shift from annual licences to 25-year individual transferable quota concessions available only to companies registered in the islands, the Argentine protest invoking Resolution 31/49 against unilateral modifications, and the fact that the Commission has not met since. 

In 2021, the islands offered holders another optional 25 years on top of licences expiring in 2031. So the horizon is now 2056, and there is no forum.

What the students understood, and what many much older people refuse to understand, is that the 90s prove that what everyone claims today is impossible is not impossible. It already happened. Argentina cooperated technically with the United Kingdom on fisheries for fifteen years without conceding one millimetre of its sovereignty claim, because the umbrella formula was designed precisely to make that possible. 

Their conclusion says it plainly: Argentina's own experience of cooperation in the 1990s shows it can be done without legal effect on the claim. That is not a young person being naive about diplomacy. That is a young person reading the record.

They refused the easy cliche

The second thing they got right is the one I care most about professionally, because it is the one that does the most damage.

Almost everything written in Argentina about mile 201 refers to it as illegal fishing. It is not. Beyond 200 nautical miles lie the high seas, and articles 116 to 119 of UNCLOS grant states the right to allow their nationals to fish there. A Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese squid jigger, sitting at 201 with a valid flag-state authorisation and reporting its catch to its flag state, is doing something legal. Perhaps uncomfortable, ecologically disastrous, economically infuriating, but legal.

The students consulted the FAO's 2001 IUU International Plan of Action definitions and rightly concluded that the one that fits is unregulated fishing: activity in areas or on stocks for which no applicable conservation measure exists. 

And then they say the quiet part out loud. The obstacle to regulating fishing at mile 201 is the absence of an RFMO. Not Chinese or Korean wickedness, not flag-of-convenience trickery, just the absence of an agreed set of rules.

This matters enormously and not just semantically. If you call it illegal, you have located the fault entirely outside yourself, and your policy options are patrol boats, outrage and victimhood. If you call it unregulated, the finger points at the empty chair, and the empty chair is one that Argentina has chosen not to fill. 

Precision here is the difference between a strategy and a grievance. There is plenty of genuinely illegal behaviour in that fleet when they conduct incursions into the EEZ (or in the alleged crewing situation on board). But the act of fishing at 201 is not one of them, and pretending otherwise has cost Argentina credibility in every multilateral room I have sat in.  

I also noticed something else. They cite the ITLOS Advisory Opinion 21 of 2015 on flag state due diligence, which is the obvious card to play, and then immediately tell you it does not quite fit, because that opinion concerned vessels inside the EEZs of the SRFC member states and not high seas fishing, so it works as a general standard by analogy and not as direct precedent. Politicians overclaim, and these students underclaim deliberately, and their argument is stronger for it.

They separated the two problems

The third thing is the paper's overall framing. The two cases look similar from a distance and are legally nothing alike. Licensing in the islands is a sovereignty dispute expressed through fish. Mile 201 is a high seas governance failure expressed through fish. 

Argentina has been treating them as one problem for two decades, and the result, as the students conclude, is that the protests have not changed the de facto situation on the islands by one inch, while the refusal to countenance an RFMO has left the highest concentration of distant water fishing vessels on the planet without any regional instrument at all.

They also do the homework on what exists elsewhere, based on my advice… Taiwan is participating in the WCPFC as a “fishing entity” under Article 1.3 of the 1995 Agreement, with full decision-making rights and no implications for statehood (I’m sure such a status could be of interest to the FIG; otherwise, their interest would be represented from London); furthermore, here in the WCPFC we have the Matthew and Hunter Islands, claimed by both France and Vanuatu… both parties work inside the WCPFC and the dispute stays untouched

Articles 74.3 and 83.3 of UNCLOS, which actively require states with overlapping claims to seek provisional arrangements and to avoid jeopardising a final settlement. All of it points the same way: international law has spent fifty years building tools for exactly this situation, and Argentina is choosing not to pick any of them up.

They are honest about the gaps on the Argentine side, too, which cannot have been comfortable to write about. As of August 2026, Argentina is still not a party to the Port State Measures Agreement, yet has passed Ley 27.815, approving accession to the PSMA (AMERP in Spanish). While it has signed, it has not ratified either the 1995 Fish Stocks Agreement or the BBNJ Agreement.

None of this weakens the sovereignty claim. That is the whole point, and it is the point I tried to get across in 2021. Fisheries management and sovereignty are separable; the work we did in the 90s proved they are separable, and every year they are kept fused, the squid gets scarcer, and everybody loses.

These five students worked that out on their own and wrote it down with their names on it. I'm cynical by default about this stuff, but that gave me more hope than anything I have read on the topic in years.

Personally, I'm painfully aware of the honest grievances behind the case made for the 649 who did not survive the 1982 war, and for the families of the estimated 500 who did not survive coming home and took their own lives since then. I served with three of them, and none of this is any consolation to those left behind. Nor is the bigger picture of the many thousands that died during the military dictatorship that led Argentina into that war…  Still, I keep coming back to the same position: fisheries management and sovereignty are separate issues, and I say that because I worked in the years when they were kept separate.

Source: Álvarez Peón, E., Lestani, N., Nizzo, C., Patane, B., & Zaffaroni Safar, M. (2026). Análisis comparativo del otorgamiento de licencias pesqueras en las Islas Malvinas y la pesca INDNR en la milla 201. Universidad de San Andrés, Maestría en Política y Economía Internacionales, Elementos del Derecho Internacional Público (Dr. Facundo Pérez Aznar).

What Ai.Fish has built, and why it matters for fishers

On my way back from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, I always have a overnight stopover in Honolulu, so I took up on an invite from Jimmy Freese from Ai.Fish, and we caught up for lunch and a few beers

Jimmy is an interesting character who sees fisheries from a different angle, and I always learn from people like him.

We had crossed paths at a few conferences, so it was good to see him at home. He was born and raised on Oahu, grew up surfing, and still surfs, so we have that in common, except he is about 10000 times better than me. But that is not really the point of mentioning it.

As a surfer myself, I get why he says the ocean is not background for him; it is context. When you spend that much time in and around the water, you start noticing what is in it. You pick up the small details that make big differences; you read the swell, the wind and the currents for what is coming, where to be and when, and which board to take.

So I really see his point when he says everyone looking at the same ocean is working from a different slice of it.

Fishermen talk about where the fish are and what the season looks like. Scientists talk about stock assessments and data gaps. Regulators talk about compliance. One activity, three groups, one ocean, three incomplete pictures.

That's the gap that Jimmy’s Ai.Fish, is built to close.

Let’s go back a bit… Ai.Fish is a Hawaii-based team Jimmy co-founded in 2019 with Justin Kay, whose background is in computer vision research, including automated salmon counting work at Caltech and ongoing AI-for-climate research at MIT. The wider team is small and distributed, spread across the US, Canada, Kenya, Spain, and Turkey. What they're applying that computer vision expertise to is electronic monitoring, or EM: cameras and sensors on commercial fishing vessels that record what happens on deck, so there's an independent record of catch and bycatch.

EM sounds simple in principle, and I have written a lot about it… But in practice, it has a bottleneck that anyone who has worked in fisheries management will recognise immediately. A single trip can generate hundreds of hours of footage, and while AI is helping, someone still has to watch it to confirm what the algorithm may pick up, frame by frame, to log species, count fish, and flag anything unusual.

That review bottleneck costs money and, in my view, more than anything else, is why EM adoption has lagged for years, despite pilot programs proving the underlying concept works.

But here's the part of the conversation with Jimmy that stuck with me most, because it's something I've argued for a long time from the policy side. Whenever you try to impose a monitoring system on fishermen, whether it's observers, logbooks, or EM, there is a “fisherman’s question” sitting in the back of their mind: “what's in it for me?”  You can explain compliance and sustainability all day, but if the system only extracts data from them and gives nothing back, it will always be resisted, or at best tolerated.

Ai.Fish's whole approach goes straight at that question.

If a vessel already has to run cameras and collect footage for regulatory purposes anyway, the marginal cost of also using that same footage to make the fishing itself better is close to zero. 

That's the insight. The same video that a reviewer uses to count and classify catch for a regulator can, in principle, answer the questions a fisherman actually cares about, in real time: where did I catch my biggest bigeye, at what depth/hook number, what was the water temperature, what phase was the moon in, what trolling speed was I running, what bait was on the hook, a picture of the fish (coloration),? None of that requires new hardware or a second monitoring burden. It's the same footage, mined for a second purpose.

Suddenly EM isn't just a science/compliance cost sitting on top of the trip; it's a source of operational intelligence the skipper can use to fish smarter next time out. Jimmy showed me their software called Tuna Insights, and you can see some of the screenshots below:

the info for the haul

the info for the basket

For companies that already have their own EM hardware or review software, Ai.Fish also offers an API, so the same computer vision models can be plugged in directly, without adopting the whole platform.

Another basket analysis

and the indiviusal fish at each hook with data on the position on the basket, the depth, the bait, etc that you used for example… for those most interested on the value chain than the fishing event… think the traceability value of this info.

As you see above, color matters as it's an indicator of how long that fish has been alive, etc. Any depredation, even one cookie cutter shark bite can bring down the prices and that's nice to know in real time when you're thinking about the economics of when one is thinking about their fleet and in 10 days you could have 100 or 200 sets depending on how many boats are monitored.

Beyond the software, they also run a services side: in-house video and image annotation (they say they've delivered millions of annotations), custom AI model development, AI strategy consulting, and cloud- and edge-based systems engineering for vessels that need onboard processing rather than a live connection back to shore.

Getting EM to a point where it's affordable and fast enough to deploy everywhere, not just in well-funded fisheries, is one of the clearest levers for making sustainable fishing verifiable at the scale at which the industry operates.

Jimmy frames the whole effort as building "the Fishery of the Future," which could sound like a slogan until you sit with him for an afternoon and hear how specific the thinking is: software built for the people who'll use it day to day rather than for engineers like him; EM review cheap enough to reach fisheries that could never afford a full observer programme; data that fishermen own and that still feeds securely into regional and international management; and real-time edge AI onboard that's reliable enough to trust without a shore connection.

What struck me most as I walked away from that conversation wasn't the technology stack. It was how clearly Jimmy has internalised the “fisherman's question” and built the answer into the product itself, rather than treating it as a communications problem to be solved after the fact. 

Seven years into this, he told me the work has only convinced him further that the ocean economy runs on better data than it currently has, and that the gap is closeable.

Having spent my career on the fisheries monitoring side of that same gap, I think he's right, and I think Ai.Fish is one of the more sensible attempts I've seen to actually close it rather than just talk about it, while helping fishermen fish better with a product generated and tailored to their own vessels.

On top of that is a really smart guy who is fun to talk to.

Just for the record, I have no commercial interest in Jimmy’s business… I just happen to believe that fisheries are made up of interesting people, and in the same way that I read a paper I find interesting and blog about it, here is a product I find interesting and blog about it!

What tuna tell us about the world's mercury levels

By far the most-read posts I have ever written are not about IUU fishing, licensing, transhipment or any of the topics I actually work on. They are the ones about mercury in tuna and where the fish was caught, the model of mercury distribution across the WCPO, and where the methylmercury in the ocean comes from in the first place. Almost a decade later, people still land on those pages. It still says something that more people worry about what tuna might do to them than about the legality of the catch or the working conditions of the crew that got it on board.

So when a paper on exactly that topic turns up on the agenda of the WCPFC Scientific Committee, which is meeting in Apia as I write this, I read it with more than professional interest. WCPFC-SC22-2026-RP-P35b-03, "Methylmercury and other pollutants studies in tunas", is presented by Anaïs Médieu, Valérie Allain, David Point, Anne Lorrain and colleagues from IRD, SPC, Toulouse, Université Laval and IFREMER. It is essentially a stocktake of eleven years of work, and it closes several of the loops I left open in those earlier posts.

A) Spatial distribution of tropical tunas analysed for mercury (coloured circles) and atmospheric mercury level observation sites (blue triangles). B) Temporal anthropogenic mercury releases from 1950 to 2010 by world region, from Streets et al. (2019a, 2019b). C) Temporal variability of mercury concentrations (Hg, mg/g) in tropical tunas: yellowfin (orange), bigeye (red), and skipjack (blue), from Médieu et al. (2024).

The database our observers built

For me, the 1st substantial fact to highlight is not the numbers about mercury. It is where the numbers came from.

The team assembled over 5,700 total mercury measurements in muscle tissue: 1,422 bigeye, 2,467 yellowfin, 1,003 skipjack and 900 albacore, from the Pacific (3,551), Indian (1,218) and Atlantic (1,023) oceans. That is the largest global dataset of mercury ever compiled for tropical tunas and albacore. A large share of it is due to the WCPFC Pacific Marine Specimen Bank, which has quietly been accumulating tissue samples collected by onboard observers and port samplers across the region since 2001.

Think about what that means. An observer trip out of Majuro or Funafuti, taking a muscle plug, conserving it, and filling in a label, is a node in a global mercury monitoring network. Their work is now being used in the first evaluation of the effectiveness of the UNEP Minamata Convention. Pacific tuna, and the people who sample them, are measuring the performance of coal plants and gold mining operations on the other side of the planet. I do not think we say that often enough when we talk about the value of observer programmes, and we should, because it is one of the few arguments for observer coverage that has nothing to do with compliance.

Where the mercury is, and why

The spatial picture confirms and sharpens what I wrote about in 2019. Standardised mercury concentrations in yellowfin, bigeye and albacore are higher around New Caledonia and Fiji than near the equator. Skipjack levels are 1.5 to 2 times higher in the northwestern Pacific than in the east, and 4 to 5 times higher than in the western central Pacific.

The driver is the combination of two things: how deep the species forages, and the biogeochemistry of the particular bit of ocean it forages in. Methylmercury is not evenly spread through the water column. It is produced by microbes down where oxygen is low and organic matter is raining down, so its concentration climbs with depth. The team compared measured seawater methylmercury profiles from the surface to 600 m against mercury in the blood and muscle of four tuna species with known, contrasting foraging depths. The relationship is clean and positive. Skipjack stay shallow and stay low. Bigeye work the deep scattering layer and pick up the load that lives there.

That is the mechanism behind the pattern, and it is why "big fish = mercury" is only half the story. Size matters, because bioaccumulation is the key mechanism, but a bigeye and a skipjack of the same weight are not eating out of the same place.

The northwestern Pacific skipjack signal is different again, and worth flagging. There, the elevated levels are attributed to proximity to anthropogenic sources, primarily fossil fuel use in Asia, superimposed on natural biogeochemistry. So we are seeing both the ocean's own plumbing and the smokestacks in the same dataset.

Fifty years of stubborn numbers

The temporal result is the one I would put in front of any policy person. The team compiled the longest time series of tuna mercury ever assembled, 1971 to 2022, and compared it to estimated regional atmospheric mercury emissions.

Outside the northwestern Pacific, tuna mercury concentrations have been essentially stable for fifty years, even though anthropogenic emissions have been falling in several regions. In the northwest they rose about fourfold in the late 1990s, tracking the rise in Asian emissions.

Stability sounds like good news until you understand why it happens. It is ocean inertia. Mercury emitted decades and centuries ago is still working its way through the water, and the fish are integrating that legacy, not this year's flue gas. Using a mercury circulation model, the authors show that even if emissions were cut drastically tomorrow, it would take between 10 and 25 years before we could detect a decline in tuna populations.

That is a hard message for a treaty that has to demonstrate results. It is also the strongest possible argument for both aggressive emission cuts now and continuous long-term monitoring, because the only way to see the payoff is to keep measuring for a very long time. Which brings us back to the specimen bank.

Not all mercury is the same, and not all billfish are the same

Here is the finding that genuinely surprised me, and that has direct consequences for food safety advice in our region.

Consumption guidelines are written for methylmercury, the toxic organic form. But in practice, risk assessments are almost always based on total mercury, assuming that most of it is methylmercury anyway. For tunas, that assumption holds: methylmercury is 70 to 100 per cent of total mercury in tropical tunas and albacore.

The team then measured four billfish species from New Caledonia and the Indian Ocean. In swordfish and striped marlin, methylmercury is around 90 percent of the total, as expected. In blue marlin and black marlin, it is less than 15 per cent.

These fish have high total mercury levels, but most of it has been converted into something else. The evidence points to selenium-dependent detoxification in vivo, with inert mercury selenide nanoparticles as the end product, and selenoneine, a selenium compound abundant in the muscle of tunas and swordfish, as a likely precursor in that pathway.

The practical consequence is that lumping "billfish" into one dietary category, as health agencies routinely do, gets it wrong in both directions. On a methylmercury basis, adults and children can eat blue and black marlin more often than swordfish or striped marlin, which is the opposite of what a total mercury reading would suggest. If we are going to give advice to Pacific communities where these fish are food, not just an export product, we need to measure the right compound.

For the tunas caught off New Caledonia, the picture is reassuring and familiar: every skipjack sample was below 0.5 mg/kg, yellowfin was mostly low with a small tail above the stricter guidelines, and bigeye was the outlier, with most samples above 0.3 mg/kg and a third above the 1 mg/kg predatory fish guideline. Species and size, together, are what matter.

Plastics, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and the other stuff we have no rules for

The paper also reports a smaller exploratory study of around 100 samples from New Caledonia and PNG, covering persistent organic pollutants (PCBs, PBDEs, organochlorine pesticides, and PFAS) and plastics.

POPs are present, suggesting atmospheric and oceanic transport, given that the sources are overwhelmingly in the Northern Hemisphere, but the levels are low compared with those in other oceans and currently pose no known health risk.

Plastic fragments or fibres above 2 mm were found in the stomachs of 6 of the 20 fish examined, mostly polypropylene and polyester. Plastic additives were detected in muscle tissue at levels comparable to fish sampled in Spain.

And here is the gap: there are no health standards for those additives. We can now measure things in tuna flesh for which no regulator anywhere has set a limit. That is not a reason to panic; it is a reason to build the baseline now, while levels are low, so that in twenty years we can say whether something changed.

On the other side of the ledger, skipjack and yellowfin from both areas remain a solid source of fatty acids, including omega-3. The benefit side of the equation has not moved.

What SC is asked to do

The asks are modest: note the findings, note the uncertainties around detoxification and selenium, note that these fish are nutritionally valuable, and support the ongoing activities of the Pacific Marine Specimen Bank as an accessible long-term repository.

That last one is the only one with teeth, and the paper ends with a sentence that should worry us: funding is being sought to continue the work.

A 25-year archive of tuna tissue, collected by our observers, now underpinning a global treaty's effectiveness evaluation, and its continuation depends on the next grant cycle. We spend a great deal of money in this region for geopolitical purposes. A fraction of that keeps an asset like this alive.

For those of us working on the traceability side, there is a bonus I flagged back in 2017 and still believe in. If mercury varies by origin and by species, then knowing where a fish was caught is not just a compliance requirement; it is information about the product. Our region has low-mercury fish. Being able to prove its source turns a paperwork obligation into an argument.

As always, my summary is no substitute for the original. Read the paper; the figures do a lot of the work, and the science is theirs, not mine. I'm just pleased that the samples came from our part of the world.