I’ve known the good people of the Fish Safety Foundation for a while (NZ is not a big place) and they are committed to the cause. Is hard not be overwhelmed by their reporting of 100000 fishermen diying a year. Is a huge number, and each of them is a tragedy in itself. As a former fisherman that had to bring dead crew members back to shore, the grief I’ve seen in the relatives' eyes is something that will live with me forever.
Of course, as soon as you read the report, you undertand the limitations they faced in reaching those figures but most importantly, the geographical and type of fisheries distribution of these deaths the picture becomes clearer.
Unfortunately, the figure seems to be immediately associated with deaths in commercial fishing and blamed on the rampant IUU fishing… as if there were no people working on fisher safety, rights and IUU fishing anywhere.
The table above is already telling you that 98000 (98%) of those deaths come from artisanal and inland fisheries in Africa. I’m not going to dwell on the difficulties faced in Africa for generations and generations since colonialism and the lack of resources and opportunities. While working there and witnessing the conditions and crafts the subsistence fisherman use, the very few enforcement capacities of fishing authorities and the absolute lack of political will by some of the authorities I worked with to reign on DWFN on their EEZ… the total share of those deaths in sadly not surprising.
So in this post, I’ll tell you what the situation is in the area I work and know: the Pacific. In terms of small scale fisheries, the bulk of the work done here has been led by SPC and FAO. Already a deep dive into the situation was done in 1991 by my friend Mike McCoy for FAO. Since then a lot of work has been done in 5 key areas
Sensitising fishery managers that sea safety is a legitimate and important objective of fisheries management
Focusing more attention on small fishing vessel safety.
Improving systems for recording/analysing sea accident data and making use of the results
Awareness programmes
Regional sea safety workshops
While not perfect, it has worked over the years, and with the use of substantial efforts by Search and Rescue Support by NZ and Aus assets and the use of commercial fishing vessels. And there is plenty more that can be found, in fact as recently as this year, I propose working with newer technologies and using sail for emergency rigs.
I do take a strong interest in the drivers for fishers taking risks, and the authors of the report go deep in that. And I agree with them: Governance, IUU, Sustainability, Climate Change, and Poverty have a massive role in it (I also would have included culture winch, from my own experience, is influenced by poverty – you have nothing to lose when you have nothing)
However, I believe that the influence of each of these drivers is also regionally varied… their individual and combined influence in Eastern Africa may not be the same as that in Western Africa, which then will be different in SE Asia and definitively in the Pacific.
And here I take a HUGE issue with a briefing by PEW on this report, one that makes me rethink the collaborations I had with them so far.
For some reason, they have a massive dig at the Pacific Islands, which are barely touched the Fish Safety report and quoting a reference that not even the original, and they state:
an estimated 24% of Pacific marine catch is underreported each year—with half of that underreported catch reaching international markets
as to justify the comparatively few deaths in the region, on IUU fishing
That figure is demonstrably not true and is based on desktop research that mixes SE Asia with the Pacific. A much fairer quite would have been to quote FFA’s IUU quantification report 2022, a report done by the people that is the forefront to the IUU issues in the region, where “total annual volume of the product either harvested or transhipped involving IUU activity in Pacific tuna fisheries during the 2017-19 period was 192,186t, with 90% confidence that the actual figure lies within a range of 183,809t to 200,884t” which is substantially less than the 12% they quote reaching the international market.
As said, no issue with the FISH safety report itself, but again I take issue with the usual framing and quoting of their findings by environmental, philanthropic, and media organisations' to shame and further marginalise the thousands that I know and work with, and whose life is devoted to manage fisheries, control IUU and uphold the rights of fisherman.
A much fairer quote needs to be “new study found that of the estimated 100000 fisherman deaths a year , 98% are artisanal and subsistence fishermen, of which 63% occur in inland waters of Africa, the most unfairly treated continent in the world” so this is the one I’m using.