I have been quite slack with the blogging, lately… in what use to be my “normal” job until February I’ll be all day away doing stuff, getting n baits, working on VMS analysis, and so ion… so to read something and write things other than the end of mission report was great…. Now I’m struggling to get away from a screen!
Actually Mola-mola are quite practical to tranship
But also I feel I keep recycling things like the issues of transhipments in the HS at the WCPFC… In 2018, WCPFC15 recognised the need to review how transhipment is managed and monitored by forming an inter-sessional working group (IWG) to study the effectiveness of CMM 2009-06.
So interested I’m that I was asked by my colleagues in MIMRA (Marshalls) to be their nominee to replace the departing co-chair in the IWG (my friend Sam Lanwi that is now the 2nd in command at the RMI embassy to WTO and UN bodies in Geneva).
Unfortunately, even if I’m operationally a MIMRA “officer” I get paid by the NZ government, and that put me in a weird situation as a rep of another country… anyway… I’m heavily involved as a technical officer in the working group.
The situation is a mess… In principle the CMM discourages transhipments at sea (TS) with an impracticability exemption… yet how impracticability is determined, is not defined or explored… as consequence the number at-sea Longline Transhipments within the WCPFC Area increased 165% in 5 years, from 554 in 2014 to 1472 in 2019 and as 2 Nov 2020, 61% of vessels on the record were authorized to tranship in the High Seas by their flag State.
All these transhipments are authorised based on the "impracticability" to go to port. They correspond in descending order to longliners flagged in Taiwan, China, Vanuatu & Korea, and go (also in descending order) to Carriers flagged in Taiwan, Panama, Korea, Liberia, China & Vanuatu.
obviously long lining is getting way more impractical.
This is just not good enough… on top of that with the COVID situation, the very few observers and at-sea inspections have been cut to limit the potential exposure of fishers, observers, and inspectors to the virus. While these steps are necessary, they also increase the urgency of updating and strengthening WCFPFC’s transhipment measure to ensure proper monitoring and reporting.
And I focus here on Longline only…because is, in my opinion, they are of more risk… I depart substantially of the opinions in this recent paper “Toward transparent governance of transboundary fisheries: The case of Pacific tuna transhipment”, that focuses on Purse Seiner. While their approach is to call (based on a prior paper of 2018) “potential transhipment, is defined as any occurrence in which a reefer and a purse seine vessel are fewer than 500 m from each other for more than 2 h, while located more than 10 km from any port”
Operationally there are many valid reasons for which a carrier and a PS can get alongside that do not imply transhipment as defined in the CMM, passing food, gear, crew, parts, salt, oil, etc. name it… it happens! In one case I remember we received the ashes of the captain’s dad who wanted to be spread in the high seas.
Also honestly it takes the best of one hour to tied up securely two vessels at sea, a PS can tranship anything from 700 to 1.3 tons at the time, depending on the made and shape of the hatches (read here if interested) and they could be doing 6 to 10 per hr… so in the best case scenario we are talking 10 tons in one hour… absolutely not worth.
Anything implying transhipment for me is from 4 hrs up, and that is the measure we use in Majuro when we detect vessels proximity while at sea for more than 4 hrs… we go and check the temperature records of the wells and dry lockers to see if they got open (ergo temperature spikes) during the time aside… the only time we found something was that they have received frozen pigs to distribute with other vessels for Chinese new years :-)
Furthermore, it assumes a total silence by the observers… of which PS have 100% coverage, and while I may believe that you can induce the silence of a few, definitively not of all… for what? 100-200 tons in a 1000 tons vessel…. Yeah...Nah. I reckon is good to have a fisherman reviewing the drafts of the papers before setting hard limits.
Anyway… back to operational issues… I’ll like to define over some basic issues like to clarify what “impracticability” really looks like... as to potentially identify a certain number of parameters may need to be accounted as to claim "impracticability"
For example position at the time of requesting authorisation, distance to ports at that moment vs distance to rendezvous place with a carrier, distance travelled by the donor vessels to the carrier in function of the carrier being based at the nearest port... and so on
While on the other side, legitimate impracticability reasons such as weather conditions in a way to closest port, bunkers distribution, fuel consumption - just as some examples are also to be considered.
I believe that an important outcome of the info required is to provide information that facilitates the way to a future agreement for of a standardised procedural process to be followed by flag states and/or coastal states before authorisation to tranship in the HS is given, and that the burden of proof for "impracticability" needs to be demonstrated through due diligence prior to the transhipment to be approved...
Particularly because the crosscutting issues that the "impracticability" exemption needs to be leveraged against... as there are a lot of other WCPFC CMMs that pivot to a different extent on this impracticability.
Under and Misreporting
Observer Coverage
EM
Labour issues
Safety at sea
MARPOL
In the meantime, inside the present framework of the CMM, there are some issues that can be much better of what they are now
Observer reporting forms and submission requirements need to be improved
In 2017, the Secretariat reported at the 13th Technical and Compliance Committee (TCC13) meeting that they had received only one observer report for the 958 high seas transshipping events that were reported to have occurred in the Convention Area in 2016. Since then there have not been any other apparent observer report submissions to the Secretariat, so it appears that the Secretariat has received only one observer report for the 4,931 transhipment events that occurred between 2016 and 2019.
While most other tuna RFMO Secretariats have access to transhipment observer reports, the lack of access for the WCPFC Secretariat undermines its ability to independently verify the information reported by transshipping vessels.
There is insufficient sharing of data on transhipment operations between WCPFC, IATTC, and NPFC
A recent geospatial report published by The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew) cross-referenced satellite AIS data track histories of carrier vessels and movement patterns consistent with transhipment behavior against publicly available information on carrier vessels and transshipments reported by the WCPFC Secretariat and Commission members. The report found that in 2016 there were high concentrations of carrier vessel activity and potential unreported transshipments in two WCPFC overlap areas —the IATTC/ WCPFC overlap area and where the NPFC Convention Area spans part of the WCPFC high seas area off Japan. These three RFMOs all have different reporting and observer carriage requirements, making it difficult to determine which RFMO rules and procedures a carrier vessel is, or should be, operating under in dually managed waters at any given time. As a result, the amount and type of species transshipped by a carrier vessel in such waters may go unreported to the appropriate RFMO authorities.
Discrepancies exist in transhipment reporting within WCPFC
The 2020 WCPFC Annual Report on Transshipment reveals discrepancies in notifications and declarations received from offloading and receiving vessels. For instance, Panama reportedly received 380 transshipments yet provided only 318 notifications and 377 declarations for the 2019 reporting period. Other members and cooperating nonmembers have similar inconsistencies, with only China and Liberia meeting the notification and reporting requirements for all transshipments. In total, 95 notifications and 4 declarations were not submitted by CCM carrier vessels, and 57 advanced notifications and 17 declarations were not submitted by CCM fishing vessels that transshipped in 2019
Additional sources of information are needed to effectively verify reported transhipment operations
According to the 2019 WCPFC Annual Report on Transshipment, the Secretariat undertook an analysis of VMS data to attempt to detect potential transhipment events. The Secretariat specified that an incident would be counted as an event when “…the reported WCPFC VMS positions related to two fishing vessels, are estimated to be within a distance of 250 metres, over a time period of at least 4 hours.” Overall, the VMS system only detected 23%t of the over 3,200 transhipment events that were reported to the Secretariat during the time period of interest. In order to improve the accuracy of the tool, and consider AIS data analysis. This is another useful tool for increasing the transparency of transhipment activity. Given that the VMS polling rate for longliners is once every four hours, supplemental use of AIS data could be used to gain a better understanding of the length of time a transshipment at sea takes place within the WCPFC Convention Area
A review of CMM-2009-06 found key areas that need improvement
WCPFC is one of the only RFMOs that allows at sea transhipment exemptions for small scale purse seine vessels, purse seine vessels operating exclusively in-zone, for troll, longline, pole and line vessels, etc. These exemptions and ambiguity make implementation inconsistent and allow for even more transshipments to occur than initially envisioned when Article 29 of the Convention was drafted. The WCPFC transhipment resolution also differs from those in many other tRFMOs in that it does not apply to the whole Convention Area.
As we discussed earlier… the present system ain working… no is no… so if you don’t like it go fish somewhere else.