The prohibitive costs associated with implementing monitoring systems aboard fishing vessels recently led to herring fishermen in the U.S. state of New Jersey successfully suing to overturn the longstanding Chevron deference, dealing a blow to the power of U.S. regulators.
Prior to the suit being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, the fishermen were forced to pay as much as USD 700 (EUR 640) per day in monitoring costs out of pocket under a 2020 NOAA ruling.
At-sea monitoring is become mandatory for more vessels as the world's regional fishery management organizations have adopted a mandatory 5 percent observer coverage on vessels operating in the waters they oversee, and as the Marine Stewardship Council has increased its requirement for observer coverage to 30 percent in some fisheries. But it remains an expensive proposition.
In an attempt to lower the costs of its monitoring systems yet still ensure traceability and oversight are key components of its fishing operations, Bellevue, Washington, U.S.A.-based fishing company Tri Marine searched far and wide to find the best value proposition for installing monitoring systems on board its fleet of tuna vessels.
Founded in 1972, Tri Marine has grown into one of the U.S.’s largest seafood companies and one of the world’s largest tuna suppliers, providing a range of products – from whole fish and loins to shelf-stable products. In 2013, one of Tri Marine’s long-time customers, Bolton Group, purchased a 49 percent share in the company before fully acquiring it in 2019. The company is vertically integrated with its own purse-seine fleet and processing plants and partners with other vessel owners and processors around the world for its global supply.
Vertical integration and more than 50 years of developing relationships has helped Tri Marine gain control over its supply chain, but its size, the number of fisheries it sources from, and its product diversification led it to invest in designing and maintaining its own traceability program, according to Tri Marine Global Sustainability Program Manager Christa Svensson.
“There are economies of scale in our operations that make a big difference for implementation of traceability," Svensson said. "For example, if a traceability system is going to cost USD 10,000 [EUR 9,170] a year and your boat only holds 100 metric tons, that is a much different value proposition than if your boat can hold 1,000 MT. That’s the challenge for making it cost-effective for longliners as well as purse-seiners while still making sure we get what we need out of both systems.”
Svensson said Tri Marine undertook a rigorous process to understand the value of different approaches to traceability, monitoring, and oversight, eventually deciding on a partnership with FlyWire she said delivers value to the company, its customers, and even back to fishing-vessel owners.
“Just like with cell phones, there is a ‘price-to-functionality’ value proposition we wanted to explore; do we just want to send text messages and make calls, or looking to the future, do we want apps, internet access, and the ability to watch movies?” Svensson said. “We talked to a number of service providers, but FlyWire was the most interested in looking at the challenges we were working on and building functionality and value for all parties into the system while allowing us to continue to drive costs out.”
Founded in 2014, Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A.-based electronic monitoring camera company first partnered with Tri Marine in 2022, and the company’s cameras were installed across Tri Marine’s fleet operating in the Atlantic Ocean in 2023.
“From our perspective, a primary reason electronic monitoring and the basket of associated digital technologies has not scaled in seafood consistent with other resource-producing industries is because no one has really gotten the value proposition right,” FlyWire CEO and Co-Founder Jacob Isaac-Lowry said. “Most other solutions seem to have been developed to support the conceptual flow of data in a supply chain rather than meet the actual real-world needs of fishermen and companies. Tri Marine’s commitment to finding real solutions that work in real supply chains made them a great match for how we work.”
Particularly in fisheries that require observer coverage, traceability and monitoring become significant costs, with some working in the industry, like the New Jersey herring fishermen that overturned the Chevron deference, forced to pay out of pocket.
“In the United States, across all regions, you're looking at an average per-sea-day cost of observation around USD 900 [EUR 826] per day – with no material cost difference between electronic monitoring and human observers,” Isaac-Lowry said. “Given we're currently providing MSC-level coverage to Tri Marine for distant-water longliners for only USD 78 [EUR 72] per day, it’s important to understand how much progress we have made by getting our technology meaningfully implemented.”
Svensson said the ability to deliver more value up the supply chain while finding new ways to lower costs for the people on the water showed Tri Marine's extra effort on the decision paid off.
“It has really helped change the value proposition for the fishermen. It moves the conversation from electronic monitoring being essentially an enforcement tool used to report to others to vessel owners realizing they can use this to improve safety on their boat or reduce bycatch,” she said. “Those improvements reduce risk and increase assured supply for the whole supply chain.”
As the technology evolves, addressing new challenges and leveraging new opportunities will continue to improve the value proposition for electronic monitoring, according to Isaac-Lowry.
“There are issues we continue to champion like privacy rights for crew and other opportunities to support fishermen. Because we better understand the nuance, we can now design better policy responses that improve conservation outcomes without overburdening fishermen,” he said.
