As a fisherman you have a natural interest in ports… they mean coming home or getting to new country, furthermore, they imply unloading (i.e. getting paid) or that we will start fishing soon (will start making money). Post fishing and from my work in MCS, PSM and transhipment in port controls I see them as unique opportunities to gather data and extend compliance (hence my personal interest in better managing transhipment at sea).
Off to “support” the HS fishery during the 100% inspections we do in Kiribati.
A while ago I wrote the decision-making factors that skippers use to “choose a transhipment port” in the WCPO
So when I so this paper “The global network of ports supporting high seas fishing” (by Spanish and Basque researchers) came out a few weeks ago I was interested in their methodology, but also their choice of words… particularly since I’m not a native English speaker… I guess “supporting” comes into my head as ”I’m a supporter of” a rugby team for example… i.e. I get the t-shirts, provides money, actively support their action, positions and so on…
Yet if I have a supermarket that is one of the roads to the stadium and the supporters of a team come there to buy stuff, and some of that stuff gets used in a riot… Am I supporting the riot?
And on that note to “support” vessels can have wide scope… from offering some sort of semiprotected anchorage and no much else (i.e. Kiritimati - Korobati or Funafuti - Tuvalu) to pretty much everything you need, from cheap fuel, food, repairs, custom bonded areas, telecommunications, entertainment, health services, and the lot) like Las Palmas _ Spain or Montevideo - Uruguay)
Don't get me wrong the paper make a lot of good points… but I was wondering if a geographically weighted element was part of their decision-making
For countries that I work with a lot here in the WCPO (and have friends there) like Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Fiji, that are all named as supporters of HS fishing, this may be unfair.
Let’s use the case of Kiribati, with the 12th biggest EEZ in the world…. So big that it has HS in between them, and all around them… 2 ports at each end of their EEZ and member of the WCPFC and IATTC
So basically if you going unload there, yes or yes you went through the HS, and if you are in the middle of the pacific, fishing tuna you are a member of one or both of the RFMOs and you fish in the high seas… but under all the controls of an RFMO (how good they are, is for discussion, but not their existence and regulatory impact)
Figure 4 from the discussed paper. Distribution of fishing effort in high seas among the countries supporting it.
Source: Science Advances 26 Feb 2021: Vol. 7, no. 9, eabe3470DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe3470
The paper listed it Kiribati as #9 of countries with at least 1 harbour supporting the fishing effort at the high seas, ahead of Uruguay (#10)
Montevideo is the key port for one of the last Unregulated ocean basins in the world (the South-East Atlantic)… and as such is without any form of regional controls on the HS (and base of frequent excursions of its vessels to the EEZ of neighbouring countries like Argentina)… yet Kiribati provides more support?
Particularly (as we discussed with Daniel Calvo Buron), Kiribati only allows fishing vessels in national ports that hold a valid Kiribati fishing license that is renewed on a yearly basis. This means that Kiribati fisheries control and decide about each fishing vessel that is authorised to call Kirimati or Tarawa to offload. Therefore, Kiribati force operators to get a legal local license to catch within its EEZ if a boat wants to call local ports. So Kiribati promotes their national EEZ catches instead of high seas catches while being able to apply regionally established PSM controls on them, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands have the same system, for example.
And that absolutely not the case with Uruguay… all the opposite one could argue.
So yes… you can argue that the paper is a global overview, which gives a fair representation of reality (and I have no issues with that!), and it would be too difficult to address the particular cases of many minor countries in the world and their particular circumstances… yet this is easy to assume… when you are not from that country, or as in my case, work quite hard with them as to clear the perceptions of these assumptions!
Furthermore, as someone that has to endure massively boring semantic discussion at regional meetings where English is the common language, yet not the mother language of 80% of the people in the meeting… words like “support” may need to be revised.
And I’m saying this as the nobody I am, just an ex fisherman (yeah ok I have 2 masters in different subjects) but my opinions are personal and don't represent at all the ones of my contractors.