IUU fishing – future challenges in our waters

One concerns landings of catches that are not reported (”black landings”), and the other is fish that are caught at the fishing grounds but not landed. Both are unacceptable as they entail that mortalities are not registered as removal of fish from a stock.

The Barents Sea
As we know, prolonged IUU (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated) fishing has led to overfishing of cod in the Barents Sea beyond the total allowable catch (TAC). For several years, IUU catches surpassed 100 000 tonnes.

Active steps have been taken to reduce this overfishing. In this work, the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries has collaborated with the inspection authorities in a number of other countries and international organisations. Estimated overfishing in 2007 was approx. 40 000 tonnes. The figure below illustrates developments in recent years.

The decline in overfishing in the Barents Sea is the direct result of a number of concrete measures:

• a continual long-term focus on the part of the Norwegian inspection authorities
• bilateral collaboration with other countries
• the introduction of port State control in the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) area from 1 May 2007

Challenges in the Barents Sea
IUU landings first started in Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany, and elsewhere. Since the introduction of the port State control regime, there has been a marked reduction in illegal landings in the NEAFC area.

However, we know that IUU landings have increased in north-western Russia. Unfortunately there is no overview of the size of these landings. Another major challenge is related to getting figures on imports to China, where the fish is processed and sent back to the European market.

A number of other organisations make important contributions to the work to reduce IUU activities, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace, and chains of grocery stores are able to influence trends. The media also plays a crucial role in combating IUU activities in the Barents Sea by focusing on this issue and raising awareness.

In the future, the Directorate of Fisheries is going to continue working along the established lines and is going to assess the possibilities for collaboration with other countries, primarily in north-western Africa. Countries such as Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal are particularly interesting collaboration partners.

The North Sea
Efforts to reduce the unregistered fishing of mackerel and other pelagic species are currently regarded as acceptable. Landings are registered, and at least 10 percent of the landed quantities or 15 percent of the landings are inspected.

This work has been formalised through a working group of inspection experts from Norway, the EU and the Faroe Islands. This working group was established in 1999 and has its mandate from the annual quota negotiations between the parties.

Challenges in the North Sea
The main challenges in the future are linked to undisclosed mortalities in the fishing grounds, i.e. “high-grading”, slipping, discarding, etc. The Norwegian Institute of Marine Research has discovered that mackerel as a species tolerates less contact with equipment (purse seines) than previously thought. This means we need to look more closely at what happens during the actual catching process.

The success of the work in the North Sea depends on the Norwegian authorities maintaining and developing the collaboration between the various national inspection authorities, establishing bilateral collaboration with other countries, and playing an active part in multilateral projects. This is demanding and difficult work across linguistic and cultural boundaries and requires long-term goals.

For more information, please contact the Control Section on telephone +47 03495.