As 2021 fades, and I’m exhausted, I look back to a year like no other in my working life. I’ve been operational for most of my life… the desk and my laptop is normally the place where I prepare for an upcoming mission, and where I report on it after its done.
My job was to be out in the water while training people either there or in a classroom for a bit, an exemption to that was doing intelligence analysis of incoming vessels, where I’ll spend time (with others) analysing VMS / AIS tracks, going through licensing databases, looking for ER inconsistencies, and so on… and thinking and ground-truthing on Catch Documentation Schemes… these are the kind stuff I’ll normally do when Go places and what people have paid me to do for the last 2 decades.
my fisheries “reality” for the last 20 months
When in March of 2019 I took the last plane out of Kiritimati Islands… I thought oh well we bunker down for a few months, tighten my belt and wait for the storm to pass… but as things moved on… I was worried about what will I do without travelling… as a dyslexic non-native English speaker the policy and research world are not an easy fit for my lack of writing skills.
Yet somehow thanks to the support (and patience) of my main clients (NZ MFAT, FFA, PEW, TMT, OM, XERRA, Stanford University) other options opened and I found myself setting up research teams and advising organizations and various aspects… and yes… A LOT of writing, and it show… I have never published so much work in my life and in so many different topics where my experience somehow helped.
The main ones I remember the most
An assessment of fishing vessels plastic waste generation in the WCPO region and potential measures to improve waste management in the fleet. I did this study with my friends Robert Lee (a former longline skipper, fleet manager and FAO officer) and Alice Leney (a waste management specialist - garbologist, besides being mechanical and solar power maverick)... it was a much bigger job we all anticipated and required a lot of lateral thinking around how to do under limited enforcement opportunities. I really enjoyed the job and learning while doing it.
World Tuna Day: What does it mean for the Pacific? Radio NZ asked me to write about it for its Pacific Service, and that inspired me to make a more personal account for this blog
Transhipments took a lot of my time this year. Either helping collages that were invited to the FAO expert consultation on transhipments, or working as part of the HS working groups at the WCPFC, or ground-truthing and technically editing articles of the topic for NGOs
The 1st time I meet a fisheries consultant. This is an area I have been thinking to tackle for a while since I’m VERY aware that I do a fully “colonial’ job, and I struggle with that… I go to countries to “help” them to do a better job and “be” like the developed countries, which in most cases have been colonialist themselves… so it was a good opportunity to reflect on my job, my impressions from the 1st time I met a fisheries consultant and how I got to become one.
Submission to the NZ parliament. I was invited by the NZ Parliament Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, to make a submission on their enquire on IUU fishing in the WCPO. Besides being a great honour to provide a written submission, I was actually really keen to make an oral one… as I had never been to parliament here in NZ! Not to be due to COVID.
A practical take on the duty to uphold human rights in seafood workplaces. I’m usually writing about academic papers I read and like yet this is the first time that I do one that has my name on it!! To be honest not in my wildest dreams when I started fishing in the mid-80s, would I ever thought to be in the place I’m now, doing the variety of work I do and be helping to write an academic paper on labour rights for fellow fishers and seafood workers!
The MCS Practitioners Introductory Guides’ this was one I’m very proud of… have maintained many times… "it is impossible to appropriately measure or regulate what you do not understand" so to write inspection tools was a privilege. The first fishing gear specific guides on Longline Fishing, Pole and Line Fishing, and Purse Seine Fishing, are all very pertinent to the WCPO, and have been now published. To further support capacity building to inspectors and non-inspectors, we worked on a fourth guide for Industrial Fishing Vessel Inspections, that is complementary to the gear guides, and tackles an introductory understanding of the key considerations and needs during vessel inspections.
Quantification of IUU Fishing in the Pacific Islands Region - a 2020 Update. There are jobs that I take a lot of pride in being part of, and this is one of them. They are ground-breaking, and as such take a long time, have a lot of moving parts, and require lots of brainpower, lots of assumptions and therefore lots of ground-truthing on the assumptions made.
And two more that would have been done now yet got moved for 2022, one on containerisation practices in the pacific and the other longline cluster behaviour
Yet also some interesting stuff was written about me, which never cease of surprising me
I have collaborated a lot with INFOFISH over the years. So when they asked me for an interview for the magazine industry profiles section, I knew that is was a sincere offer and they were after my personal and independent views since normally they get more corporate-oriented people, that have an agenda or try to sell something… and I’m very aware what a privilege it is to be an independent advisor
And one that was totally unexpected and really moved me was this one, New Zealand Geographic Magazine. A fisherman’s Journey, as I have been a follower of that magazine for many years now.
Finally also it was also the 1st time i got to do all the WCPFC meetings as a member of the RMI delegation, from the 3 inter-seasonal working groups I’m involved (transhipment, tropical tuna measure and labour standards) as well as the scientific and technical and compliance committees to finally the plenary. Albeit having being part of this fishery since 1991 starting as fisherman... I never been so close to the inside action of these meetings. It has been an eyeopening experience and I learned a lot of the incredible mixture of deep fisheries knowledge, psychology, chess and Shakespearian command of english that one needs tp work at this level. My greatest lesson in multitasking and attention to detail ever.
So yeah.. an interesting year… productive in a sense that I never really experienced before with most publications ever, yet at the same time (albeit being home) I have not felt so alone since adolescence (disclaimer: it wasn't a good one). My professional and personal life are very intertwined, almost two years at home in a developed country like NZ and the exposure to the whole anti-vaccine, the “personal freedom” debate, the push for private certifications (ecolabels and labour ones), the NGO’s MPAs drive, and so on… has confronted me again and again with the incredible level of entitlement and to an extent neo-colonialism of most western societies… and made me miss a lot my working friends in the Islands, Asia and Latin America
Let see what next year looks like…
In any case a HUGE thanks to the 28000 of you that read 45000 of my blogs… and after over 7 years… my mind explodes when a look at the stats of over 200000 visits and 165000 visitors.
Thank you all
