[OANNES Foro] About organized crime in the fisheries industry

[Mario Cabrejos]

*New paper highlights spread of organized crime from global fisheries*

by Basten Gokkon <https://news.mongabay.com/by/basten-gokkon/>

4 September 2020

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/new-paper-highlights-spread-of-organized-crime-from-global-fisheries/?utm_source=Mongabay+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4dee30bfe2-Newsletter_2020_04_30_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_940652e1f4-4dee30bfe2-77237718&mc_cid=4dee30bfe2&mc_eid=b698d4520b


JAKARTA — A new paper calls for greater coordination by governments around
the world to tackle the persistent problem of organized crime in the
fisheries industry impacting the wider economy.


The “blue paper” published
<https://www.oceanpanel.org/blue-papers/organised-crime-associated-fisheries>
Aug.
18 by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, an initiative
by 14 world leaders, highlights the extent of crimes associated with global
fisheries beyond illegal fishing, including fraud, money laundering,
corruption, and drug and human trafficking. They occur worldwide throughout
the entire fisheries value chain: onshore, at sea, in coastal regions, and
online, it says.


The paper says these crimes are profit-driven while depriving states of
national revenue <https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/9/eaaz3801>,
threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities and endangering
<http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1144274/icode/> marine ecosystems
around the world. The authors add that the perpetrators behind organized
crime in the fisheries industry are companies with complex operational
activities in many countries. Some of these crimes are corporate in nature,
as in the laundering of criminal proceeds through offshore financial
centers where ownership can’t be traced.


[image:
https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2015/11/03132049/illegal-fishing-boat-462x330.jpg]

A Taiwanese-flagged fishing vessel suspected of being used for illegal
fishing activity, is pictured prior to being boarded

by law enforcement officers. Image by Shawn Eggert/U.S. Coast Guard (Public
domain).


A pressing issue that the paper highlights is the poor understanding of the
true scale of organized crime in global fisheries, given that no
statistical data are publicly available to give an accurate estimate.


“The nature of organized crime is that it is clandestine, making it more
difficult to gather accurate empirical data,” Emma Witbooi, lead author of
the report and director of South Africa-based PescaDOLUS International
Fisheries Crime Research Network, told Mongabay in an email.

Witbooi, who is also a research associate at Nelson Mandela University in
South Africa, said the empirical studies and data that existed on
illegality in fisheries were focused almost entirely on illegal fishing
itself, and not the broad range of associated criminal activities
throughout the fisheries value chain. She said this was due to the
prevalence of traditionally only viewing illegality in the fisheries
industry in the context of violations of fisheries management regulations.


“Fisheries agencies, however, do not have the mandate or the skills and
resources to deal with organized crime in the sector,” Witbooi said. “This
requires a shared understanding of the problem to effectively cooperate on
law enforcement cross-border investigations, ensuring the most appropriate
agencies are involved (i.e. not just fisheries but tax, labor, police,
etc.) and to ensure suitable skills and resources are employed.”


Opaque regulatory frameworks also perpetuate lack of transparency around
financial transactions associated with the fishing industry and beneficial
ownership of fishing companies and vessels, subsequently making inquiries
even more difficult, Witbooi said.


“Fisheries crime is also frequently not given priority at national level as
cases are notoriously difficult to successfully prosecute leading to a
likely gross underestimation (at data level) of the extent of such cases,”
she said.


“And cases that make it to court frequently focus on fisheries infractions
(as they are the easiest to prove) rather than other crimes along the value
chain so examining case records will not necessarily give an accurate
indication of the number of cases involving organized crime in fisheries.”


The poor monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) capabilities of many
coastal states makes it even more challenging to gain an accurate picture
of the extent of illegality in the fisheries industry, said Kamal Deen-Ali,
the paper’s co-lead author and executive director of the Ghana-based Centre
for Maritime Law and Security Africa.


“[A]longside the fact that they usually take advantage of the loophole in
the system such as inadequate MCS capability, one clear thing is that for
the networks to be effective in executing these crimes, there are complicit
law enforcement agents who take a bribe in exchange for looking the other
way,” Deen-Ali said in an email to Mongabay.


“In a nutshell, turning the tide on these crimes requires more than
instituting laws and cooperation between countries and agencies, it
requires active intelligence gathering and importantly improving the
welfare of coastal communities many of whom are already vulnerable to the
impact of depleting fisheries,” he added.


[image:
https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/07/02163127/Fishing_check_140402-N-ZZ999-550-768x512.jpg]

U.S. Coast Guard officers and a Ghanaian Navy sailor inspect a fishing
vessel suspected of being used in illegal fishing. Image by Kwabena
Akuamoah-Boateng/U.S. Navy (Public domain).


The authors say in their paper that coastal states with rich marine
biodiversity but with the least resources to prevent and combat
transnational organized fisheries crimes are highly likely to be the
victims of these transnational organized crimes, or TOC.


“TOC in fisheries will occur in countries that lack law enforcement and
with a high level of corruption among enforcement officials and
bureaucrats,” Mas Achmad Santosa, co-lead author of the paper and chief
executive of the Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative, told Mongabay in an
email.


The marine advocacy NGO Oceana, which was not involved in writing the blue
paper, welcomed its recommendations for policymakers. It called on
countries to mandate fishing fleets be equipped with and use publicly
accessible tracking technologies, and publish data of vessel monitoring
systems, fishing vessel authorizations, and information on the real owners
of fishing vessels.


Oceana also urged governments to ban their citizens from engaging in or
supporting illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing anywhere in
the world.

“The governments of the world should work together to ensure that all
seafood is safe, legally caught, responsibly sourced and honestly labeled
to protect the oceans and the people who depend upon them,” Beth Lowell,
Oceana’s deputy vice president for U.S. campaigns, said in a statement.


[image:
https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/07/02155717/Boutwell-560x420-768x512.jpg]

The fishing vessel El Soberano, carrying illegal drugs, was interdicted by
the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Boutwell in November 2011. Image by U.S. Coast
Guard (Public domain).







//////////////////////////////





[image: 2]

<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
Libre
de virus. www.avast.com
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: <http://lista.oannes.org.pe/pipermail/oannes-oannes.org.pe/attachments/20200911/94d32a46/attachment.html>