I've spent most of my working life around fishing vessels, ports, and the people who make the seafood industry run, and if there's one thing that has stuck with me through decades in this sector, working on aspects from the welfare of sharks and cetaceans to bycatch mitigation, compliance, data, and 1000 more issues, and it's how slowly the world has moved on protecting the fishers themselves.
So when FAO released its new Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper No. 751, Progress in advancing decent work in marine fisheries: challenges in the evolving legal and policy framework, I read it with more than professional interest.
Part of that interest is personal. One of the report's authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is someone I've known since 1998. That's over a quarter of a century of crossing paths at FAO meetings, technical workshops, and the kind of late-night conversations about fisheries law that only two people who actually care about this stuff would have. Blaise has spent his career quietly building the legal architecture that underpins fisheries governance, and watching his name attached to this report, alongside Ke Song, Julia Nakamura and Daniela Kalikoski, felt like watching a thread I've followed for years finally being pulled together into something comprehensive.
I've written about the human dimension of offshore fishing myself, in a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Manual of Human Rights at Sea. So reading this FAO report felt less like discovering something new and more like seeing an institution catch up, properly and rigorously, with problems that those of us working at sea and in ports have been flagging for years.
Building on a Decade-Old Foundation
This report doesn't appear out of nowhere. It's explicitly a follow-up to FAO's 2016 scoping study on decent work in fisheries and aquaculture, and then the draft Guidance on Social Responsibility in Fisheries and Aquaculture Value Chains I co-wrote with Katrina Nakamura in 2019 and did no progress through the COFI process at the time becuase it was seen as too prescriptive in their language by the USA delegation.
But specifically, it responds to a specific recommendation from the fifth FAO-ILO-IMO Joint Working Group on Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, held in January 2024. That Working Group asked FAO to help develop guidance for national fisheries agencies on implementing ILO and IMO instruments governing fishers — and this report is part of the response.
In any case, what struck me about this report is the argument: that decent work and the fight against IUU fishing are not the same… yet they can be deeply entangled. Vessels that cut corners on crew safety, wages, and living conditions are very often the same vessels cutting corners on catch reporting and licensing compliance. However, I would be the 1st to recognise that this is not a given in my own experience; I worked in Argentina under some of the best protections known to fishermen while doing very doggy stuff
In any case, strengthening monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) systems and the tools we already use to fight illegal fishing can simultaneously protect the people on board. That's not a new idea to those of us who've done port inspections, but seeing it stated so clearly in an FAO technical paper matters, because it gives national fisheries agencies a legal and practical hook to act on.
Why Fishers Are Different
The report makes a serious effort to explain why marine fishers can't simply be treated as a subset of seafarers or lumped in with land-based agricultural workers. Anyone who has spent time fishing in the last couple of decades knows this instinctively, but it's worth spelling it out: months at sea, limited communication, no real access to healthcare, and a crew member's near-total dependence on the vessel master's goodwill. Add to that the reality that many fishers are non-nationals recruited through opaque, multi-country arrangements, hired in one country, employed on a vessel flagged to another, working in the waters of a third, and you get a jurisdictional tangle that almost nobody is positioned to untangle in the moment a problem occurs.
The report's authors organise this complexity into a three-dimensional framework I found genuinely useful: the jurisdiction where fishing happens (from internal waters out to the high seas), the legal status of the fisher (national versus non-national), and the scale of the fleet (small-scale, medium-scale, or large-scale industrial). It sounds academic, but it's actually a practical diagnostic tool. It lets you ask, for any given labour problem: whose law applies here, and does that law actually reach this category of worker?
The Convention at the Centre — and Its Limits
Much of the international legal architecture the report describes revolves around ILO Convention No. 188, the Work in Fishing Convention, which sets minimum standards for safety, medical care, rest hours, and wages on board fishing vessels. It's a solid instrument. But as the report is honest enough to admit, ratification remains thin , only 24 states as of writing, and none of the major distant water fishing nations beyond Spain have signed on. That's a gap I've raised in my own writing too, from the theory and as a ILO-trained fisheries labour inspector.
What I appreciated is that the report doesn't just lament this gap; it goes looking for evidence that the underlying standards are spreading anyway, through domestic law, regional agreements, and market pressure, even where formal ratification hasn't happened. That's the subject I'll pick up in Part 2, because the most encouraging parts of this report, for me, aren't about the treaty itself. They're about what states, regional fisheries bodies, and even private industry are doing around it, often without waiting for Geneva to catch up.
For now, the takeaway from the first half of this report is simple but important: decent work in fisheries is not a side issue to sustainable fisheries management; it is part of it. Anyone still treating labour conditions as separate from stock conservation and IUU enforcement is, frankly, a decade behind where this field has already moved.
Part 2 continues with a look at how countries and regional fisheries bodies are actually putting these principles into practice — with mixed, but genuinely instructive, results.