Flags of convenience fuel fish depletion

GENEVA, Nov 2 (AFP) - Loose shipping registration rules are encouraging overfishing in the world's oceans and fuelling a 1.2 billion dollar illicit industry that is harming the environment and endangering seafarers, a new report said Wednesday.

The study commissioned by the environmental group WWF, the Australian government and the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) said flags of convenience are the cornerstone of the illegal fishing industry.

"We urgently need an end to the corrupt system that allows fishing vessels to buy flags of convenience and operate illegally and without regulation on the high seas," said Claude Martin, head of the WWF.

At least 2,800 large fishing vessels either have a fla of convenience or are listed on Lloyd's Register of Ships as flying an unknown flag, the study said.

It is possible to register a ship in some countries within 48 hours over the Internet, for a few hundred dollars, with little proof required of the owner's real identity or link with the country of registration.

Belize, Honduras, Panama and the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines account for around three-quarters of the world's flag of convenience fishing vessels, the report said.

Even landlocked countries such as Colombia and Mongolia offer flags. "Flaghopping" by owners seeking ever laxer jurisdictions is a growing problem, the study said.

Nations with flag of convenience rules are "often turning a blind eye to illegal activities and exercising little or no control over how these ships operate," Martin said.

The ships, which generate an estimated income of 1.2 billion dollars (one billion euros) a year, the report said.They rarely have, or apply, the kind of fishing legislation seen elsewhere, including rules intended to preserve stocks by limiting the catch.

In addition to threatening the world's fisheries, such vessels also endanger wider marine life because of their slapdash attitude to "bycatch" -- the incidental capture of other species, such as turtles, sharks and sea birds, the report said.

It also criticised countries such as Spain and Taiwan, saying they made it easy for local shipowners to register vessels under other nations' flags of convenience.

The Spanish case "taints the image" of the whole European Union, said Martin.

David Cockroft, head of the British-based ITF, said unions have been campaigning against flags of convenience for five decades.

"They are used by shipowners to hide their identity, escape national rules, escape unions and exploit seafarers and now also fuel overfishing," Cockcroft told journalists.

"The people who benefit from this are not the people at sea, they are the people on shore," he said.

The report said vessels flying flags of convenience are the hub of a fish laundering trade, in which apparently legitimate ships take delivery of the catch at sea and take it to port.

"If the fish was labelled and could talk, you would find illegal fish in all the shops all over the place," said Martin of the WWF.

The report said governments must do more to ensure their apparently legitimate trade does not involve illegally caught fish, for example by giving port authorities more power to hold the industry accountable.

"The proliferation of flags of convenience shows that UN laws on flag states are insufficiently robust," said Australian Ambassador Mike Smith, urging the international community to crack down.

Spain gets lion's share of EU fish subsidies-website

BRUSSELS, June 26 (Reuters) - The Spanish fishing fleet secured nearly half of all EU subsidies between 1994 and 2006 and spent most of the money on building, rather than scrapping, ships despite falling fish levels, data showed on Friday.

The Commission has often complained about overcapacity in the EU fishing fleet, saying too many boats are chasing too few fish. Overcapacity is blamed as a key factor for the poor state of EU fish stocks, especially of mainstays like cod.

The data, viewable on http://www.fishsubsidy.org, showed a total of 8.54 billion euros ($11.9 billion) was paid across the EU to vessels, ports and processing firms, including payments likely from other policy areas of the EU budget and state government top-ups.

While Greece and Italy have more vessels in their fleets, Spain, which took 44 percent of the subsidies, has by far the largest EU fleet by tonnage. The figures showed second-place Italy took 12 percent of subsidies, while France and Portugal accounted for 9 and 6 percent respectively.

The website, launched on Friday, uses on patchy data released for the first time by the European Commission, which distributes and monitors fisheries subsidies across the European Union's 27 countries.

Spain occupied the first six places in the EU's list of most subsidised ports, with its Galician port of Vigo taking 238 million euros in handouts between 1994 and 2006.

In 2004, Brussels stopped giving subsidies for building ships. Before this, Spain spent the bulk of its EU money on new vessels or modernisation, whereas other EU countries focused more on scrapping ships.

Between 2000 and 2006, for example, Spain directed 60 percent of its fisheries subsidies into vessel construction whereas other EU countries used just 17 percent.

"You see a skewed balance of the support in that period. Other countries tend to have more scrapping," Jack Thurston, co-founder of the website and of a similar site detailing EU agriculture subsidies, told reporters.

Half of the Spanish fleet is registered in ports in the northwest province of Galicia.

PACIFIC ISLANDS SEEK OUTDATED-FISHING DEAL CHANGE

MAJURO, Sept 29 Asia Pulse - The United States and Pacific nations are a showdown over the management of the US$4 billion tuna industry with the island states saying their current treaty is outdated, reports AFP.

However, the United States says the 25-year-old agreement with the Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), which is to be reviewed next month, is considered valuable by the vast majority of Pacific states.

Criticism of the United States is being driven by the upsurge from 12 to 40 US-flagged fishing vessels in the region at a time when the Pacific is changing from the US-treaty formula of licensing boats.

It is being replaced by a vessel day scheme where licences are based on the number of days rather than number of boats as part of a move to reduce the tuna catch to 2004 levels.

Washington originally negotiated the fishing treaty with the FFA in 1987 to end a diplomatic crisis in the Pacific when the United States' purse seine fishing fleet was regarded as fishing illegally and flouting the rules.

The treaty gives the US access to the economic zones of the 16 FFA nations for a fee currently set at US$21 million a year. However, the FFA nations say that in the past year tuna conservation and management measures have changed in the region.

There is increasing concern about overfishing of bigeye and yellowfin tuna, and also the island nations are demanding a bigger share of the US$4 billion Pacific tuna industry.

They say they will be pushing for this to be taken into consideration at the US-Pacific fisheries treaty review in the Solomon Islands next month.

The US treaty is outdated," said Glen Joseph, director of the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority. It needs updating in light of the new Tuna Commission rules and current initiatives of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA).

The PNA countries -- Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Nauru, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu -- control the waters where most of the annual haul of tuna is caught.