In Part 1, I introduced FAO's new Technical Paper No. 751 on decent work in marine fisheries, and mentioned that one of its authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is a friend I've known since 1998, a friendship built on more fisheries conversations than either of us probably wants to count.
Having covered the report's diagnosis of the problem, I want to use this second post to talk about the part I found most useful: what states and regional bodies are actually doing about it, and where I think the report's honesty about the limits of these efforts is its real strength.
Ratification Isn't the Only Path Forward
One of the more encouraging threads running through this report is its documentation of countries that haven't ratified ILO Convention No. 188 but have built equivalent, or in some cases stronger, protections into their own domestic law anyway. The Republic of Korea and Chinese Taipei are both discussed at length; Taiwan can't formally ratify ILO conventions given its political status, but it has built out a comprehensive legal framework covering foreign crew recruitment, labour standards, and social insurance that closely tracks the Convention's requirements. Indonesia is doing something similar, layering sector-specific regulation for fishing vessel crew on top of its general labour law, even while ratification and full implementation remain a work in progress.
I found this genuinely important, because it pushes back against the idea that a convention's ratification count is the only meaningful measure of progress. It isn't. What matters is whether the standards actually reach the fisher on deck; and the report does a good job showing that this can happen through several different legal doors, not just one.
The Coordination Problem — and Some Real Fixes
If there's a villain in this report, it's institutional fragmentation. Fisheries agencies, maritime authorities, and labour ministries in most countries operate in their own silos, with almost no routine data-sharing between them. A labour inspector might have no idea a vessel has a history of safety violations; a fisheries officer working on PSM might have no mandate, or training, to recognise the signs of forced labour even if they're staring right at them. (Albeit right now I’m working with the great crew of the iMCSn to change this last bit… more to come soon)
What I liked here is that the report doesn't just diagnose this; it names country-level fixes that are demonstrably working. Brazil's system of cross-checking crew rosters between its Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Defence during vessel inspections. Thailand's Port-In Port-Out control centres, which coordinate the navy, labour officials, and port authorities to catch trafficking and check crew documentation as vessels move through port. Indonesia's joint inspection protocols between its fisheries and manpower ministries. Namibia's newly launched National Coordination Mechanism, set up specifically to oversee ILO Convention No. 188 compliance across three different ministries at once. FFA’s HMTCs tie up licensing to minimum contract standards aligned with C188…
None of these is a perfect system, but they're proof that the coordination problem is solvable with the right institutional will, and that's a message national agencies genuinely need to hear.
The Regional Fisheries Bodies Are Starting to Move
The section of the report I found most consequential concerns Regional Fisheries Management Organisations; bodies like the WCPFC, ICCAT, and others that manage high seas fish stocks. These bodies have traditionally treated labour conditions as entirely outside their remit, focused purely on stock conservation. That's been changing, slowly and with real resistance from some member states.
The landmark moment the report documents is the WCPFC's adoption, in December 2024, of the first-ever binding conservation and management measure addressing crew labour standards, a measure that took roughly four years of negotiation to land, and won't take effect until 2028. (I wrote about my insider’s take on it here) It requires flag states to meet minimum labour conditions as a precondition for licensing, obliges port states to facilitate disembarkation of crew reporting abuse, and creates information-sharing requirements around crew recruitment providers. Other bodies — ICCAT, NAFO, the North Pacific Fisheries Commission, the South Pacific RFMO — have followed with their own non-binding resolutions built on similar principles.
This resonates strongly with something I've argued in the chapter I wrote for the Oxford University handbook of Human Rights at Sea: that no single instrument or institution is going to solve this problem on its own. What we actually need is a networked approach, international organisations, flag and port states, regional bodies, industry, and fishers themselves all pulling in the same direction, imperfectly but persistently.
The report's account of RFMOs edging into labour governance, often starting with something as narrow as observer safety before broadening into full crew standards, is a textbook example of that kind of incremental, networked progress.
Where This Leaves Us
The report closes without pretending there's a silver bullet. Its recommendations are the ones you'd expect from people who've actually worked this problem for years: ratify and implement Convention No. 188 more widely, strengthen interagency coordination at the national level, keep pushing regional fisheries bodies to treat labour as core business rather than an add-on, and use port state measures more deliberately as a lever for detecting and deterring abuse.
None of that is flashy. But having read Blaise and his co-authors' work here alongside my own thinking on this subject, what stands out to me is the shared conviction that decent work in fisheries isn't going to be delivered by one treaty, one agency, or one campaign. It's going to be built the way most durable maritime governance is built, slowly, through overlapping layers of law, regional cooperation, and enough political will at the national level to actually enforce what's already on the books.
For anyone working in fisheries management, labour inspection, or ocean governance more broadly, this report is worth the read … not because it has all the answers, but because it maps the terrain honestly, and points toward the places where real progress is genuinely being made.