Fishing vessels can often work long periods at sea without coming to port, thanks to the practice of transshipment, in which catches are transferred at sea to carrier ships called reefers. But the practice can also obscure the origins of catch and is often associated with illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Transshipment, though criticized by many conservationists, is common worldwide, and the North Pacific Ocean is no exception. For species managed by the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), a multilateral body that manages most non-tuna fisheries in the region’s international waters, about 85% of the catch is transshipped. Those transshipments will soon be more strictly regulated. At the NPFC’s annual meeting held March 24-27 in Tokyo, the management body’s nine members established a transshipment observer program for the first time. It will require an independent fisheries monitor on board all active reefers in the NPFC’s vast regulatory area. The parties also passed a set of other amendments to transshipment rules, tightening reporting requirements. Conservationists hailed the moves. Shuhei Uematsu, a manager at WWF Japan who attended the meeting, told Mongabay that the new observer system was “a major step forward in preventing IUU fishing.” The NPFC parties — Canada, China, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan, the United States, and Vanuatu — also adopted a number of other rules at the meeting, including on bottom fishing, transparency in the compliance process, and the management of chub mackerel (Scomber japonicus) and Pacific saury (Cololabis saira). The regulatory area of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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