Indian Ocean Commission
The Indian Ocean Commission coordinate several initiatives that cooperate with Stop Illegal Fishing including through information sharing with the Regional Programme for Fisheries Surveillance and working together with the SmartFish programme and members of the IOC MCS section.
The IOC is an intergovernmental organisation uniting the five island countries of Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion/France and Seychelles, for a range of development objectives. Stop Illegal Fishing work together with the Indian Ocean Commission in particular through their MCS Section and SmartFish programme in respect to the FISH-i Africa Task Force, capacity building in aspects of FishCRIME, research into the illicit shark fin trade, implementing risk assessments in MCS, the industry charter to stop illegal fishing and developing case studies of success stories.
Most recently IOC and Stop Illegal Fishing are working in partnership in developing tools for countries in Africa to become more equipped to tackle IUU fishing and to strengthen their capacity to target resources where it is needed. This has been through developing a database architecture to share information on fishing vessels, fishing activity, associated companies and much more – in Stop Illegal Fishing known as VISIBLE – and developing and applying risk assessment methodologies to identify where the most damage will occur if illegal fishing continues in a countries fisheries.