1 Addressing Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU ... - OECD

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Such drivers help IUU fishers to either increase their revenue or decrease their costs thus continuingmaking the operation profitable. What is needed is a number of actions by national governmentsindividually or in cooperation, as well as actions by RFMOs and by the private sector that effectivelychange the revenues of IUU fishers and hence reduce the incentives to engage in IUU fishing. As a startingpoint, the drivers underpinning IUU activities should be revisited by governments and urgent actions couldbe initiated on developing policies to alter the incentive structure to undertake IUU.6. An agenda for the futureDespite many actions that have been taken by the international community IUU is still and on-goingproblem. Clearly the reasons are economic and IUU fishers, when confronted with new limitations orregulations on their operations, will explore alternative ways of continuing their fishing. In conclusion,perhaps the most important notion to keep in mind is that as long as the IUU activity is profitable (or morelikely that when the expected benefits exceed the expected costs) it is not easy to stop.Measures taken so far by the international community are largely a legal patchwork with differentgeographical and jurisdictional scope. Combined with the fact that a variety of states subscribe to themeasures, the loopholes in the present system allow IUU activities to move around and seriouslyundermine the systems effectiveness.It is therefore important to consider alternative strategies that focus on the economics of the activity. Indevising new measures to combat IUU, it is important to identify instruments that either reduce the incomestream or alternatively increase the costs of the activity. Such actions will help make the IUU operationsless profitable and IUU vessels may move to other activities. In addition, and this relates to the “expectedbenefit” of the IUU operations, it is important to ensure that the monitoring and surveillance of IUUfishing activities is stepped up. However, only when combined with sufficiently restrictive levels of finesand penalties, such activities become meaningless from an economic point of view. In the meantime, manycountries could do more to ensure that excess fishing capacity is not spilled over into engaging in IUUfishing activities; in this regard well devised capacity reduction programs are crucial and can play animportant role in ensuring that excess capacity is disposed of without undermining measures to combatIUU.The work of the OECD’s Committee for Fisheries focuses on identifying such alternative strategies that arebased on the economics of the IUU activity. As a first step in this process, the OECD Committee forFisheries hosted a workshop on IUU Fishing Activities which took place in April 2004. An immediateoutcome of this workshop was a set of key observations and findings by the Workshop Chairs on possibleways forward. These “Observations and Findings” are reproduced in Annex 3.A possible confusing element in the international debate about IUU has been to group the various elementstogether into one whole i.e. IUU. From an analytical perspective a more tractable and tangible way forwardmay be to discuss and analyse each of the IUU elements separately with a view to identify where and wheneconomic instruments are most appropriately used. In other words for the illegal, unregulated andunreported activities to seek to identify what type of economic instruments are most useful and by the sametoken identify their costs and benefits. In this regard it should be recalled that there are both benefits andcosts to legal and illegal fishers alike and to the society at large.By focussing on the economics of the IUU activity, the OECD’s Committee for Fisheries is currently in theprocess of advancing how instruments can be devised that are effective economic deterrents to the IUUfishing operators. This work is expected to come to an end during 2005 and will contribute to otherinternational efforts in the combat against IUU fishing. Of particular importance in this respect is the10
ecently created “High Seas Task Force” 7 that has been set up on the initiative of fisheries ministers fromAustralia, Canada, Chile Namibia and New Zealand.In the meantime, it is worth recalling that perhaps the most important reason to deal with the IUUphenomena is that high seas’ fish resources are one of the truly last trans-boundary commons. Theinternational community needs to muster the necessary political initiative to “showcase” the IUU fishingdifficulty and to demonstrate an ability to tackle problems in the global commons from which we deriveessential proteins and which is an important source of living for many fishing communities.7 The High Seas Task Force is hosted by the Round Table ion Sustainable Development which in turn is hosted by theOECD. See www.high-seas.org for further details.11
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