News
New Partnership to Stop Illegal Fishing in West Africa
The six member countries of the Fisheries Committee of the West Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC) met in Ghana on 28-29 April 2015, to develop the foundation for a new regional partnership to cooperate in fisheries management and particularly stopping illegal fishing.
The Norwegian Development Agency (Norad) are supporting a 3 year project to support this partnership called the Fisheries Intelligence and MCS support in West Africa.
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West Africa is endowed with abundant fisheries resources making this region a hot spot for illegal fishing operators. National efforts by West African countries to strengthen their fisheries management systems have resulted in improved monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) of some fisheries.‚ However, many of the regions commercial fish species are migratory and the national and foreign fishing operators that target them follow these stocks, so effectively tackling illegal fishing requires a regional approach to fisheries enforcement.
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In many cases, the national capacity to cooperate regionally in order to identify, track, gather evidence and mount enforcement and prosecution actions against illegal fishing operators is limited, and requires support.
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The Project is intended to assist the countries to implement the commitments, and build on the structures already in place through the FCWC, by:
- support a case from the point where intelligence is received to enforcement prosecution of perpetrators,
- share information and cooperate effectively,
- track vessels and identify possible illegal fishing activity,
- identify the illegal fishers and eliminate illegal and risk’ vessels from license lists and registers,
- improve understanding of the fishing operations to inform MCS operations and strengthen MCS capacity,
- cooperate and harmonize with other countries, regions, organisations and initiatives; and
- build the foundations for long term regional and sustainable MCS structures in the region.
Samuel Quaatey the Director of the Fisheries Commission Ghana commented that we must remember that regional cooperation of this kind is long overdue, and the time has come to make this a reality for the region’.
The agreed next steps are to conduct regional training and develop national focus groups prior to the full launch of the Task Force at the Ministers meeting for the FCWC in December 2015.
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The Task Force model has been developed based on lesson learning from the FISH-i Africa model in Eastern Africa. The Coordination Team (CT) of the project comprises of the FCWC Secretariat, Trygg Mat Tracking, Stop Illegal Fishing and NFDS.