Fishing Vessel Monitoring Systems: Past, Present and Future

VMS: Past, Present and Future 31
5.0 VMS and international cooperation/best practice use of VMS
The use of VMS has been declared an unqualified success by virtually all of the
fisheries protection and compliance agencies that have put it into place. It has
provided a useful means of regulating national fisheries as well as monitoring flag
vessels when they are operating in international waters or in the EEZ of a
different coastal state. On the national level, therefore, VMS is of sufficient
maturity to offer something akin to its optimal functionality, even if the level of
data analysis in many countries remains relatively limited.
Simple as is VMS technology and the corresponding implementation of a working
system, getting the most of fishing vessel tracking requires a solid conceptual
approach related to the fisheries in which it is going to be used. This is a precondition
for effectively establishing a context of international cooperation and
remains a first priority is to assure that the benefit received from the effort and
investment of putting a VMS into place be justified.
Furthermore, the establishment of a VMS cannot be done in isolation and implies
a number of responsibilities for the government entity with regard to its
governmental colleagues, its fishing industry and often its regional neighbours.
It is convenient to use four macro-categories to define the issues that must be
addressed if a VMS were to be considered optimal: technical integrity, security,
data access and distribution and the legal and administrative framework. Each of
these issues should be addressed individually.
5.1 Technical integrity
This is the starting point for any VMS. Before any technical specifications can be
defined, it is essential to ask a number of fundamental questions, such as which
fisheries can benefit from a VMS and precisely how the operations of those
fisheries will be enhanced by gathering real-time data on vessel movements.
In many existing VMS implementations, these questions have been avoided in
favour of an across-the-board implementation based upon vessel size. The
overriding principle here is that the larger the vessel, the greater the effort and,
therefore, the more pressing the requirement for VMS.
Whilst this reasoning is not completely erroneous, it does, however, lack a
certain subtlety in that it fails to take into account the actual “sensitivity” of a
given fishery. Sensitivity might be characterised as a less-than-purely-scientific
measure of the economic importance and inherent precariousness of a given
fishery. Relatively small vessels fishing threatened stocks of key species in
breeding areas might, for example, require closer scrutiny than very large
vessels fishing healthy stocks on the high seas.