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A recent report questions ‘Is the EU IUU Regulation working?’

The EU’s Regulation to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate IUU Fishing is the most far-reaching and influential system of its kind in operation today and re-defined the traceability landscape of trade flows of fish when it entered the world stage in January 2010. At its heart lies a catch certification scheme that aims to guarantee legal origin of fisheries products entering the EU market.

However, the authors of a recent study “Traceability, legal provenance & the EU IUU Regulation‚ have provided a detailed analysis of the regulation and how its certification scheme is applied on the ground for whitefish and salmon imported into the EU from Russia via China.‚ They report critical flaws in the scheme’s architecture, as well as much potential for ineffective implementation, including widespread and often undetectable document fraud.

They note that to date no data have been made available to suggest that the IUU Regulation is actually deterring IUU fishing, or that volumes of illegal fish entering the EU market are in fact diminishing. They also state that there is no evidence to substantiate the concern that the EU’s certification scheme is now deflecting illegal fish to other, supposedly less tightly regulated markets.

The authors suggest that until critical gaps in the catch certification scheme are effectively addressed, proposals that other countries should replicate the EU IUU Regulation are premature and that the EU should focus its efforts on improving, completing and strengthening the Regulation and the catch certification scheme which lies at its core. They note that if the EU fixes the Regulation and can demonstrate its effectiveness, it has the potential to become a very valuable model and tool for a global legal provenance traceability scheme that could then start to effectively deny market access to fish derived from illegal sources ‚and hence combat IUU fishing in a serious and meaningful manner.

The report can be accessed at: http://sasama.info/en/pdf/reports_17.pdf‚