Call to Observers On The 2021 update of the Global IUU Fishing Index / by Francisco Blaha

Gilles Hosch figures a lot on my blogs, mainly for 2 reasons: he is my friend and I absolutely admire the integrity of his work. To be honest, I don’treally know in which order those two issues relate… but I have known him for over 20 years now… so it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Off for another trip, until 2019 we had over 2000 placements a year in the WCPO

Off for another trip, until 2019 we had over 2000 placements a year in the WCPO

He worked in 2018 on an IUU Fishing Index, that been cited quite substantially (see at the bottom).

I have to admit to a difficult relationship with indexes in general terms… basically, perhaps for personal reasons I never believed that as “one size does not fit all” concept, and is intrinsically hard for Indexes to capture the difficulties that developing countries have in terms of not only implementing MCS measures, how to measure the role of regional organizations like FFA here in the Pacific, but also the complexities of attracting and retaining good officers… one of the best officers I work with, in one of the busiest fisheries ports in the world earns around 21000 USD a year. On the other side, his equivalent in any European country would have less than half its workload, ridiculous amounts of resources, and make 5 to 6 times his income. How does an index capture the impact of this? And I have seen these issues in many indexes.

In any case, if I know about one person in this world that understands those (and the many other) challenges of indexes, and can bring equanimity into them, is Gilles. So I totally support his present work updating it. Furthermore, he is doing this work with Graeme Macfadyen who is another colleague I have also lots of respect for.

Of course, a great (and controversial) source of information are observers, and while the Index is based on more than 40 indicators, 2 of which are sourced directly from fisheries observer feedback – translating into roughly 5% of the Index as a whole.

Observer input into the Index is deemed crucial by my colleagues, in fact, Gilles has noted that “observers are the human eyes and ears of the global fisheries compliance framework, operating directly aboard fishing vessels. Observers see everything that is going on, and after a number of voyages aboard catchers and reefers, and entries into different ports, they start to understand exactly where the “magic” happens. And yet, their knowledge is generally under-leveraged. The Index allows us to overcome these dangers – and the associated code of silence – by eliciting observer feedback anonymously, and in a rather broad manner, in a way that their individual identities and contributions can be 100% shielded and anonymous.” 

Seeing the value of observer knowledge, I encourage all observers reading this blog to go to the survey and to provide their anonymous feedback. Basically, it is just about naming the flags and the ports with which they associate most weaknesses – and associated IUU activity. It should not take the average person more than 5 minutes to respond – but it may add a lot of Q-dos to the Index in terms of pointing the searchlights in the right direction.

The link to the survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GBR2NVY.


Here are some examples showing how and where the IUU Index was referenced in the recent past: