The EU has been quite silent on the Yellow cards front for a while, but the came up with one that was on the talks for a while now.
I have to disclose that I’m quite partial to Ecuador, I worked there a lot during the last time they had problems with the EU, this was in 2007 in regards their market access issues around the seafood safety side, and we pulled it off by restructuring the way the Competent Authority for those issues operated.
Then I was there again in 2011, to assess their issues with the EU IUU Catch Certification Scheme, and it does not surprises me that some of my recommendations then are in line the reasons why the yellow card came to them 8 years later.
Manta (the tuna capital of the America’s) in the background.
Seafood to Europe is BIG business for Ecuador, they are the 2nd biggest exporter of Tuna and the 1st one in shrimp, so their industry has big influence in politics. But furthermore, massive EU capitals and companies have strong presence in the tuna industry.
I wrote in the past that is was quite suspicious that being the IUU definition well standardised, somehow the EU focused their trade related measures (TREMs) on the Pacific Islands, while the US on Ecuador and Central America…
So I guess the political winds changed and they rightly focus now in that region… there studies that link IUU levels with general transparency of the country… and it was quite remarkable that no country in Latin America (not the most transparent societies) was yellow carded.
The good news for Ecuador is that in the same way we did with the sanitary side in 2007, when they are against the wall, they are fast to change. And the reasons behind the yellow card are not too dissimilar to the ones that we (I was involved from the beginning) had to deal in PNG, Philippines, Solomon Islands and then Thailand… and we got out of it! So the solutions and systems have been tested before… now is up to them to find the political will and assume the costs that this will incur.
In their (as usual self laudatory) press release the EU outlined their key areas of concern… in any case they are right… Ecuador needs to pull its game on the following areas:
The legal framework in place is outdated and not in line with the international and regional rules applying to the conservation and management of fishing resources.
Law enforcement is hampered by this outdated legal framework, inefficient administrative procedures and a lenient approach towards infringements. As a result, the sanctioning system is neither depriving the offenders from the benefits accruing from IUU fishing, nor deterrent.
There are serious deficiencies in terms of control, notably over the activity of the tuna fishing and processing industries.
These deficiencies undermine the reliability of the traceability system upon which the certification of the legality of the catches is based.