Assessing the Effectiveness of Monitoring Control and Surveillance of Illegal Fishing: The Case of West Africa

Abstract

This paper assesses illegal fishing in West Africa, one of the regions most affected by Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing (IUU) in the world. The catch, the economic loss and the amount recovered through Monitoring, Control, and Surveillance (MCS) are calculated based on a reconstruction method, and the information made available through national MCS units, between 2010 and 2016 in an effort to assess the effectiveness of surveillance efforts in the region. Results show considerable loss of revenues for Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, estimated at 2.3 billion USD annually, while a minimal amount of 13 million USD is recovered through MCS. In addition, this paper finds that countries touched by the Ebola crisis (Guinea and Sierra Leone) drive a tremendous increase in the loss generated by illegal fishing. However, further analysis shows that the overall severity of illegal fishing, as defined by a range of types investigated here, declines as the fines against the most severe forms of IUU fishing increase. Finally this study finds that Sierra Leone and The Gambia have the highest scoring MCS systems, and were the countries where the most offenders are caught and charged with the highest fines, while Senegal's new legislations which improved MCS during 2015 does not appear to show on the scoring results. This study finds that illegal fishing amounts the equivalent of 65% of the legal reported catch from West Africa and poses serious concern for food security, and the economy in the region.

Assessing Guinea Bissau's Legal and Illegal Unreported and Unregulated Fisheries and the Surveillance Efforts to Tackle Them

“…Industrial vessels, vessels that operate engins of over 60 HP, are allowed in the area beyond 12 nautical miles from shore, the legislation delimiting the 12 nautical miles zone for small-scale fisheries. Their catches, mainly taken by distant water fishing fleets, remain unaccounted for, for the vast majority (Belhabib et al, 2015a;Doumbouya et al, 2017). In contrast to artisanal fisheries, industrial fisheries, through some 200 trawlers, purse-seiners, and longliners, offer only but a few job opportunities to Bissau Guinean fishers.…”

“…In the second, Guinea Bissau gathers all fisheries data (industrial, and small-scale) and report them to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Belhabib and Pauly, 2015;Pauly and Zeller, 2016). In addition, with a limited MCS system, which mainly operates with a few occasional patrols at sea and ranking the lowest in the subregion of West Africa (Doumbouya et al, 2017), illegal fisheries in Guinea Bissau have been assessed to generate tremendous loss to the country in value assessed at 60,000 tons per year (Doumbouya et al, 2017). These fisheries compete directly with the small-scale sector by targeting similar species, and entering areas that are otherwise reserved to small-scale fishing operators.…”

“…To estimate illegal catches, we extrapolated the trend of the two last years of data presented by Doumbouya et al (2017) forward to reflect upon the improvement of the monitoring system in terms of days at sea. This method follows the rational that the variation in monitoring will be proportional to the monitoring outcome , subject to external factors such as the capacity of the patrol vessels to reach fishing grounds on industrial vessels.…”

“…Thus, here the artisanal sector is divided into two categories, distinguished by the craft used, Senegalese Nhominka pirogues and local dug-out canoes, or pailão, which 4 Data obtained from the government of Guinea Bissau. 5 Data compiled independently from various sources: unpublished (Doumbouya et al, 2017), and the Criminal Record of Fishing vessels © 2018 Dyhia Belhabib. have a capacity that is a third of that of the Senegalese nhominka pirogue (Tvedten, 1990).…”

“…We present below large-scale legal and IUU fisheries catches, and small-scale legal and IUU fisheries catches, which in turn includes artisanal, recreational and subsistence fisheries catch assessment. We then calculate the economic loss from IUU foreign fisheries in Guinea Bissau by multiplying the average annual ex-vessel price of fish by the total IUU industrial foreign catch in the country per year for 2017, as used in various other studies Doumbouya et al, 2017). This estimate does not include catches by small-scale fisheries sectors, which are in theory captured by the local economy, knowing that small-scale catches are mainly kept for domestic use.…”