Sources of Information Supporting Estimates of Unreported Fishery Catches (IUU) For 59 Countries and the High Seas Fisheries

Two of the many myths about marine fisheries are that they globally catch about 90 million tonnes per year, and that this catch is stagnating because we are now extracting the ‘maximum sustainable yield’, thus fulfilling decades-old predictions of a global potential yield near 100 million tonnes per year. And Bjørn Lomborg – he of the ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ – even glibly adds that the 10 million tonnes between present catches and the predicted potential is the (small) price we have to pay for overfishing.

The whole thing is, unfortunately, not even remotely so. In fact, a new concept, that of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) catches had to be invented (in addition to the concepts of ‘by-catch’ or ‘discards’) to be able to approach the reality that the ‘catches’ reported to FAO by member countries are only a part of (sometimes even a small part) of official landings, i.e., that the latter, in most cases, considerably under estimate real ‘catches’.

Perhaps is appropriate here to recall that the catch of a fishery (or more precisely its ‘yield’, i.e., its catch in weight) consist of the landing that is reported, plus the landing that is not reported (because it was caught illegally, or by small-scale fishers that nobody cares about), plus the bycatch that was discarded (and which consist of dead animals in the overwhelming majority of cases) plus the losses due to ghost fishing, i.e., the weight of the animals killed by gear (e.g., traps, or gill nets) discarded or lost by that fishery. It is now understood that, to understand a fishery, all these sources of death must be accounted for, especially in the context of ecosystem based management of fisheries. An ecosystem can be, for example, the Exclusive Economic Zone of a given country, in which case complete catches must be known for all fleets, whether national or distant-water fleets.

The fisheries science community has only recently realized the danger of taking at face value the ‘catches’ that member countries submit to FAO. However, their gradual replacement by sound statistics is going to be difficult, as an early experience I had with the catch of the People’s Republic of China illustrates (although the problem, in this case, was over-reporting of catches).

Indeed, I predict that a few governments are going to be put on the spot by the present report, which documents substantial IUU catch for many of the many countries it covers. Some of their representatives will even argue with the data presented therein. But they will not present better data.
As the alert reader will notice, this report emphasizes industrial fisheries, and the ‘Illegal’ part of IUU catches. Thus, it neatly complements Fisheries Centre Research Reports vol. 14(8) (2006), and 15(2) (2008), which present initial steps toward accounting for the catch of small scale fisheries, a major part of the second ‘U’ of IUU. Here too we welcome the outcome of a neat collaboration between the Fisheries Centre and the Marine Resources Assessment Group from the United Kingdom, both groups that have been working on estimating IUU for some time.

Through concerted efforts of this sort, it should be possible to overcome some of the myths that the existence of IUU catches have allowed to emerge. The present report will be an important step in this direction.

Daniel Pauly,
Director UBC Fisheries Centre
October 2008