Charting New Waters: Strengthening Fisheries Governance through Beneficial Ownership Transparency
Introduction
The exploitation of naturally occurring fish stocks is estimated to generate more than US$141 billion in revenues annually. [1] Due to the opacity around fishing rights, it is often difficult to ascertain who ultimately benefits, and whether countries are meeting the economic and social goals set out in their fisheries policies. The fisheries sector also faces challenges around sustainability and accountability, and corruption in and mismanagement of fisheries activities can have profound adverse environmental, social and economic consequences. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing operations – which are estimated to generate somewhere between US$15 and 36 billion annually – pose additional challenges and have significantly increased the extinction threat faced by marine species. [2] IUU fishing activities coincide with criminal offenses – especially trafficking, tax evasion, fraud and organized crime – in as much as 60 per cent of cases. [3] While other natural resources, such as oil, gas and minerals, have become subject to increasing transparency and oversight measures, the fisheries sector lags behind. The identity of the individuals who own, control and derive benefit from fishing rights, quotas, licenses and vessels often remains unclear.
A growing body of civil society and multilateral organizations are calling for greater beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) in the fisheries sector – that is, the collection, sharing and use of information about the beneficial owners of fishing activities. Implementing BOT in the fisheries sector can be challenging given the multitude of actors involved and the existence of regulatory frameworks that are patchy and at times inconsistent across countries and waters. The majority of countries have implemented or are implementing central BO registers for corporate vehicles across different sectors of their economies to comply with international anti-money-laundering (AML) standards. [4] Leveraging the existing efforts in many countries to implement BOT for AML purposes, and applying these to the fisheries sector, may provide concrete next steps.
Footnotes
[1] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022: Towards Blue Transformation (Rome: FAO, 2022), https://www.fao.org/3/cc0461en/online/sofia/2022/world-fisheries-aquaculture.html.
[2] Channing Mavrellis, Transnational Crime and the Developing World (Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity, 2017), https://gfintegrity.org/report/transnational-crime-and-the-developing-world/. Also see, for example: “A quarter of sharks and rays threatened with extinction”, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 20 January 2014, https://www.iucn.org/content/a-quarter-sharks-and-rays-threatened-extinction.
[3] Austin Brush, Strings Attached: Exploring onshore networks behind illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (Washington, DC: C4ADS, 2019), https://c4ads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/StringsAttached-Report.pdf.
[4] “Open Ownership map: Worldwide action on beneficial ownership transparency”, Open Ownership, n.d., https://www.openownership.org/en/map/. The Financial Action Task Force is the driving body behind this move, but other international bodies and mechanisms endorse, encourage or require central registers, including the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the European Union (EU).
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