Above: Participants at the recent International Coldwater Prawn Forum held in St. John’s, N.L.
Campaigns against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by both the industry and environmentalists continually run up against a problem: government enforcement.
Enforcement is not as much of an issue for rich countries with well-developed fisheries management systems and strong enforcement histories.
In these cases, when IUU fishing happens, it can be successfully exposed, prosecuted and ended.
For example, in 2012, three Scottish fish factories and 27 skippers pled guilty and were fined more than £1 million for illegally harvesting mackerel in excess of E.U. quotas.
Carlos Rafael, the largest owner of scallop vessels in New Bedford, went to jail in 2017 over falsifying sales records to hide illegal landings.
Similar enforcement has happened in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Japan, France and elsewhere.
But too often, governments are not able to effectively enforce against IUU, either because of lack of will, lack of resources, or simply poor ability to manage fisheries.
Mexico is a case in point. Although Mexico is part of an international agreement to close fishing in the Northern Gulf of California, vessels were detected fishing in the closed zone this month.
The response of the United Nations’ Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) commission is to monitor the situation and take another look in 2020, a year from now.
There is another way we might approach IUU fishing, using supply chains to bypass governments that are ineffective or too weak to prevent the mixing of legal and illegal catch. This is called a blockchain system.
In November, at the International Coldwater Prawn Forum in St. John’s, Dan McQuade, marketing director for Raw Seafoods, a scallop company operating out of Fall River, MA, presented the blockchain system his company developed in partnership with IBM. It was one of the clearest examples of a blockchain that I had seen (see graphic below).
Block 1 represents each scallop bag processed onboard a boat. It is tagged with a printed label giving information on time and date, where caught, boat name, and other parameters as needed, even hold temperature.
Block 2 represents the receiving of this at the scallop packing plant. Scallops are graded, repacked for distribution either at foodservice or retail. Block 2 incorporates the link to Block 1, but details processing date, grade, size, license no., etc…
Block 3 represents the distributor, in this illustration, Santa Monica Seafoods. This tag includes the date received, location, size and date shipped to their customer.
Block 4 represents the restaurant, which includes date received, size, sell-by date if any and various consumer marketing materials.
By scanning a QR code, the restaurant customer (or any participant in the supply chain) can bring up all the connected information at each step in the process. The blockchain is in effect a guarantee that the original raw, untreated scallop, was never mixed with treated or adulterated scallops during its passage through the supply chain.
The technology of the blockchain involves public and private key cryptography, which makes it impossible to alter any of the blocks in the chain, once they are registered.
Raw Seafoods is promoting this as a marketing strategy with IBM to increase customer trust and satisfaction with their all-natural scallops.
But imagine a similar system applied to an area with significant IUU fishing, such as the upper Gulf of California.
In this case, fishing co-ops would be the originators of the first block, detailing product, date caught and location. Processors and receivers would be the second block, detailing date received, product, pack and ship date.
Importers to the U.S. would be the third block, again showing date received, customs data if needed, size, count, pack, etc. The buyer, whether a retail or foodservice user of shrimp, would be the fourth block, registering the product into their system.
The cost of this would include computers, printers, bar code readers, the cloud computing services and programming necessary to make it work. But once in place, it is scalable at a remarkably low cost.
The transaction cost for the entire supply chain could likely be reduced to one or two cents per pound.
Obviously, the system relies on each party putting accurate information into their block. However, because the record is permanent and instantly traceable, it lends itself to low-cost audits as needed. For example, if the fishing co-op itself were suspected of laundering illegal catch, data controls like GPS location and date could be added, to make this more difficult.
When IUU fish or shrimp is comingled with legal product, it becomes infinitely harder to track. The benefit to fighting IUU fishing is that the blockchain tag could become a buying or importing requirement into the U.S. This would not eliminate IUU fishing going to underground or other markets, but it would allow non-government entities to provide the resources to control their own supply chain requirements.
Implementation of a system like this in an area with high IUU fishing would not depend on government enforcement action, but instead would use the blockchain technology to validate the product from its point of harvest right through to its point of consumption.
This would allow buyers to actually avoid purchasing fish or shrimp that had co-mingled IUU product. Enforcement to require only legal product, like with toothfish, for example, can be quite successful at reducing and eliminating IUU fishing. With toothfish, it took years of concerted action by both the legal toothfish industry, governments in the fishing nations, a U.N. port state agreement and backlisting of IUU vessels, and U.S. laws regulating imports of toothfish.
There simply is not the money or will in the international community to replicate this wherever IUU fishing is taking place.
Investment in a blockchain designed to reduce or eliminate IUU fishing from a regional hot spot could be a far less costly technological solution that does not depend on the enforcement budget of the governments involved.
However, it would depend on the commitment of the legal fishing parties at all levels of the supply chain. Unless the harvesters at the first level buy into the system, it will not work. But here, the provision of incentives would be far less costly than a broken enforcement system.
As these chains begin to be implemented for marketing purposes, it may be worthwhile to explore what a real IUU focused blockchain would look like as an alternative to the painstaking diplomatic process of governments convincing each other that they have to spend the resources and act.
This article was republished with permission of John Sackton and seafood.com.
