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Improving Governance to Combat Illegal Fishing in Africa
By Dr. Andre Standing, Institute of Security Studies, Cape Town
Illegal fishing seems to thrive in countries where open and accountable governance is lacking and where the voices of civil society may be muted as a result.
African countries are often depicted as uniquely vulnerable to illegal fishing. This is debatable, for it is a problem that continues to be rampant in many developed countries, not least within the European Union. Nevertheless, there are strong reasons to suspect that illegal fishing could be on the increase in many African countries, and the challenges of combating it are immense, albeit not insurmountable.
Although we have very little reliable data on the scale of illegal fishing, we know that it has become an embedded feature of global fisheries. Put crudely, the world’s fishing fleet is too large, fish are becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cost of commercial fishing is increasing. That many boats break the law to supply consumer markets and turn a profit seems almost inevitable.
The likelihood that African countries are experiencing a growth in illegal fishing no doubt reflects Africa’s increasing importance in the global fish trade. Broadly speaking, the demise of fish populations began in the Global North, where the vast majority of high value fish is consumed. This has caused a displacement effect, where the supply of fish to the key markets in Europe and the Far East has progressively been found in the rich and largely under-exploited waters of developing nations.
Thus, the tendency in the last few decades has been an intensification of fishing in many African countries by foreign boats, and growing export of fish away from the continent. Daniel Pauly, one of the world’s foremost marine biologists, likens this process to a hole burning through a paper; ‘as the hole expands, the edge is where the fisheries concentrate until there is nowhere left to go’.
Although much of this foreign fishing is regulated through formal license agreements, a large number of boats seem to fish in African waters without licenses, and many who do pay licenses ignore the rules that limit fishing intensity, conserve the marine ecosystem and generate income to host governments the use of proscribed fishing gear, fishing in protected zones or out of season and misreporting catches are all thought to be common problems. In South Africa, for example, unlicensed fishing vessels, using highly destructive gill nets, caught some 32 000 tonnes of Patagonian toothfish during the late 1990s, whereas total allowable catch limits are now set at 450 tonnes per year.
Yet it is important to realise foreign fishing boats are not the only cause of pressure on fish stocks in African waters. We have also seen largely unregulated growth in small scale or artisanal fishing in many African countries. Unfortunately, as fish become less abundant, there is a trend in some countries for local fishermen to use more destructive and desperate means to sustain catches, such as the use of very fine meshes and even dynamite. Indeed, heightened competition for dwindling resources, by both industrial and artisanal fishing boats, seems to be fostering a race mentality, where every boat attempts to take as many fish as possible.
This competition in turn may help boat owners rationalise malpractice. Ever more efficient and harmful fishing by all stakeholders has become both cause and effect of resource depletion.
The challenges facing States to tackle illegal fishing
Responding to these various illegal fishing practices is a daunting challenge. There is a strong degree of international consensus regarding best practice in how to monitor and inspect commercial fishing vessels in order to limit the opportunities for crime. However, the stark reality is that many countries lack the capacity and skills to achieve anywhere near the necessary degree of law enforcement many countries do not have patrol vessels, or if they do, they cannot afford to pay the fuel costs.
Meanwhile, where law enforcement officials are poorly paid, they may easily ‘look the other way’ in return for a small bribe. Kenyan officials decided to scrap an onboard observer programme in the shrimp trawl industry due to persistent allegations that ship owners were giving observers boxes of prawns. Likewise, it is claimed by local NGOs that some officials tasked with patrolling the sea against illegal fishing in Tanzania sell fuel from their boats to poachers. One can find similar accusations in most countries.
The situation is made all the more difficult due to the trans-national nature of certain illegal fishing activities. Illegally caught fish may be transhipped on the high seas, or it is laundered through foreign ports. Several so-called ports of convenience are thought to exist in Africa where illegal fishing boats seem to congregate. It has, therefore, become vital for countries to work together to combat illegal fishing. Unfortunately, trans-national policing and investigations can be laborious and thwarted by poor communications, corruption and stifling bureaucracy. Moreover, there is widespread suspicion that for some countries, not responding to illegal fishing may be convenient, particularly when the culprits are important domestic fishing companies who are supplying processing factories and consumer markets and are financed by politically important financial institutions. Indeed, for a long time criticism has been directed at Spanish authorities for not doing enough to inspect and report fish landings in their country originating from West Africa. The same apathy seems to be apparent in many Far Eastern countries where arrests and prosecutions of boats operating in foreign countries appear to be rare, if non-existent, despite widespread knowledge that so many Asian fishing boats are involved in illicit fishing practices abroad.
Given these problems of investigating instances of malpractice, it becomes increasingly important that when criminal activities are detected, penalties and sanctions are of sufficient severity and are given widespread media coverage. This may act as a deterrent and help denounce illegal fishing not only locally, but internationally. A positive example involves the prosecution of Hout Bay Fishing Company in South Africa in 2002, which also involved collaborative investigations between South African and American law enforcement agencies. The company, who was found guilty of massive poaching of rock lobster and hake that was exported to the United States of America, not only received a record fine, but also had its boats confiscated and the directors were imprisoned. Moreover, several local inspectors were incarcerated for accepting bribes.
Unfortunately, such examples appear to be the exception. While there has not been a comprehensive study into the matter, it appears to be the case that few instances of illegal fishing in Africa end up in courts, and when they do, penalties are considered too lenient. This possibly reflects the low importance attached to illegal fishing by judges and the criminal justice system. The result is that illegal fishing may be a relatively ‘risk free’ activity. The same problem occurs elsewhere and is not simply an African affliction. In 2007, a report by the European Court of Auditors claimed that levels of punishments for boats fishing in EU Member States were so low that the fishing industry probably considered penalties as nothing more than potential running costs.
The importance of transparency and accountability
It may be easy to feel despondent over illegal fishing, given its structural causes as well as the inherent difficulties of monitoring, inspecting and prosecuting wrongdoers. Yet the truth of the matter is that given the necessary political will, far better results are almost certainly achievable.
Encouraging political will among and between African States to combat illegal fishing remains a critical task of local civil society, and quite possibly there is a role to be played by the more responsible fishing companies. In Tanzania, for example, a group of concerned NGOs, businesses and conservationists have set up the Tanzanian Dynamite Fishing Monitoring Network. This logs instances of dynamite fishing, raises awareness and helps put pressure on the relevant authorities to act.
In Mozambique, a similar group called Eyes On The Horizon has helped raise awareness of various forms of illegal fishing, including the poaching of sharks for their fins by Asian companies. To such examples we can add the work of Stop Illegal Fishing, based in Botswana and the newly formed African Marine Alliance, a regional civil society network designed to raise awareness of unsustainable fishing that was conceptualised in Kenya in 2007. There are probably many more examples of innovative grassroots organisations working to combat unsustainable and illegal fishing in Africa, and such initiatives may expand in the future.
Yet, unfortunately, illegal fishing seems to thrive in countries where open and accountable governance is lacking and where the voices of civil society may be muted as a result. This was the conclusion of a 2005 report by the British consulting firm Marine Resources Assessment Group (MRAG). Their study claimed that rates of illegal fishing seemed to correlate with proxies of good governance, such as access to information, media censorship and levels of perceived corruption. It seems likely that part of the problem relates to conflicts of interests, where politicians and senior officials can have direct involvement in commercial fishing companies, some of which may benefit from illegalities. The authors of the MRAG report argued that increased effort and funding given to monitoring and inspections of fishing may be forlorn without due attention to improving standards of governance.
Indeed, the role of corruption in exacerbating unsustainable fishing is slowly gaining international recognition the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, in collaboration with the World Bank, recently held a conference on this theme in Washington, which was the first of its kind. Such work is undoubtedly inspired by high profile anti-corruption campaigns in other resource sectors, such as the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative and the Publish What You Pay Campaign, both playing an important role in reforming the mining and oil industries in Africa and Asia.
As experience from these other resource sectors shows, the first steps at improving governance will be for more open and transparent management of commercial fisheries. Publishing information on fishing licenses and contracts, putting in place systems to protect whistleblowers, conducting independent audits of fisheries departments and proactively engaging civil society groups are just some of the activities African governments should be pursuing. In fact, a regional initiative to promote transparency in fisheries, inspired by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, could be effective. It is highly likely that such efforts will be supported by donor agencies, particularly those from Europe and North America for whom ‘good governance’ has become such a priority for development.
Illegal fishing will always thrive in an opaque environment, where corrupt officials, powerful vested interests and various forms of mismanagement are able to exist beyond the scrutiny of others. Creating an environment less conducive to corruption is certainly not a panacea for African oceans, yet it may be a vital condition to ensure fishing contributes to pro-poor development, improved government revenues and ultimately the conservation of our remarkable, but vulnerable marine ecosystems.