Industrial Fishing Activity in Top Commercial Fishing Ports Global

Pew Charitable Trusts - Project Dates:
March 2018 - September 2018

Description of Project:
Fishing ports, the fishing vessels calling to them and the transactions taking place in them have become the focus of gradually increasing scrutiny since the inception of the Agreement on Port State Measures (PSMA) in 2009. With the entry into force of the PSMA in 2016, fishing ports have come to embody the latest statutory frontline in combatting illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. The centrepiece of port state action in this domain revolves around the principle that foreign vessels, visiting duly designated fishing ports, will be denied an authorization to land their catch if it is found that catch has been obtained by flouting national or international fisheries regulations – including, but not limited to those issued by regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs).

While other fisheries-related national, regional and global data sets and information can be quite consolidated, complete and advanced – e.g. the sizes of EEZs, the authorization regimes applying to them, RFMO membership of given States, etc. – formal knowledge and information about fishing ports, and the rules applying therein – at national, regional and global levels remains highly fragmented and in many cases limited. A formal comprehensive and up-to-date list of fishing ports, or designated fishing ports, does not exist. Globally speaking, we do not know how many fishing ports of which sizes, and catering to which vessel classes, are currently in existence.

The other important gap in current port state related datasets and knowledge – generally speaking – pertains to the degree of exposure of port states to the risk of IUU fishing, and of IUU harvests flowing through their ports, their current setup, and related performance in combatting these phenomena. Given the very recent nature of the PSMA, this is not surprising.

This paper set out to qualify port state control in fisheries at the global level by establishing baselines in the above domains, so as to gain a more detailed, complete and coherent understanding of global port state related dynamics (numbers of ports, amount of traffic, etc.), port state exposure to IUU risks, and performance in combatting IUU fishing.

Services Provided:

The study builds upon an earlier assessment conducted by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management Limited for Pew entitled ‘Fish Landings at the World’s Commercial Fishing Ports (Huntington et al, 2015) which ranked the world’s top 100 ports by volume of commercial fish landed by industrial scale fishing vessels. This new research differs in intent and approach from the previous study. Firstly, it is based on an entirely different methodology using global ship-based AIS data to pinpoint likely shore-side activity by fishing vessels - the latter covering both fish catching vessels and fish carrier vessels. Secondly it uses AIS-derived information on flag State, vessel type and vessel size to categorize activities by flag
type (e.g. foreign and domestic), hold size, visit rates and temporal and spatial distribution characteristics. Thirdly it develops an innovative risk assessment methodology to determine the quality of port State response (expressed as internal risk and determined by governance indicators) and port State exposure to IUU risk (expressed as external risk and determined by the profile of fishing vessels visiting a State’s ports). For each port State, the two risk components are combined to yield an overall Port State IUU Risk Index.