The European Union has taken steps that would tighten Chinese seafood’s access to the European market by approving new fisheries control rules that aim to prevent seafood caught by illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing activities from entering its ports.
Campaigners have long advocated for more transparency on distant-water fishing, including calls for public access to information on the ownership of fishing vessels and improvements to the E.U.’s current system for identifying vessels engaged in IUU fishing or those carrying out human rights violations.
E.U. Parliament Fisheries Committee Chair Pierre Karleskind appeared to agree with calls from campaigners, and said that among many other goals, the new rules aim to strengthen the traceability of imported products “to guarantee compliance with the social and environmental standards to which European fishers are subject to.”
That has become a sticking point in the newly approved rules, and NGOs have welcomed the E.U. Parliament’s recent actions to curb IUU activities.
Steve Trent, CEO of the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), said IUU and labor abuse in the global fleet makes it “key that the E.U. steps up its ability to act” to protect legitimate European operators. He pointed to the size of China’s fleet when highlighting how its behavior “threatens socioeconomic stability and inflicts human and ecological harm globally” and why it’s so important that the new rules include such preventative actions.
Trent claims that the EJF exposed 554 suspected IUU-linked human rights abuses involving the Chinese distant-water fleet across global oceans in just three years – from 2019 to 2022 – and singled out forced labor as a global problem “which can directly undercut legal operators in the E.U.”
Daniel Voces, CEO of fishing industry lobby Europêche, echoed Trent and has lobbied for action to protect the E.U. fleet from what he and his organization deem unfair competition from China’s distant-water fleet, especially when that competition is coming from IUU means.
“The E.U. cannot allow a situation where it opens its doors to products of questionable origin and practices while burdening its industry with rigorous sustainability requirements and controls,” he told SeafoodSource. “China, as the most prominent fishing nation in the world, must take responsibility and be instrumental in its region and in the global arena to drive change. We need a global race to the top, not to the bottom.”
Though the new control rules should help curb IUU seafood from entering the European market, it may be harder to crack down on these activities in actuality, as it’s not clear how ready the bloc’s CATCH IT system – which was set up to help E.U. members detect fisheries products linked to IUU fishing and will be mandatory to use in two years – is to block any IUU-tainted product that stems from the Chinese fleet.
“There are still some issues to be tackled such as the interoperability of CATCH with third countries’ systems,” Voces said. “Nonetheless, I’m sure the system will bring about greater traceability and transparency across the supply chain.”
There are also labor issues occurring in the E.U.’s fleet, with ongoing campaigns by unions against labor abuse in the Irish fleet being one such example. However, Trent countered that “the unique size and opacity” of the Chinese fleet and the systemic nature of human rights abuses and IUU fishing on its vessels demand special attention.
Trent wants to see the E.U. introduce a carding system – similar to the card system applied for IUU activities – for forced labor, as the Fisheries Committee has recommended.
Neither Voces nor the Fisheries Committee responded to questions, though, about why the E.U. hasn’t applied the IUU carding system to China that it uses to force smaller countries to tackle IUU fishing. Cameroon, for example, cannot currently export seafood to the E.U., as it received a red card for inaction in preventing illegal fishing.
In addition to the approved rules, E.U. officials and politicians, such as Karleskind, are calling for the full implementation of the partial agreement signed by the WTO in June 2022 as one of the tools the E.U. can use to combat harmful subsidies of fishing operations. Ongoing negotiations on a wider deal that would ban subsidies leading to overcapacity and overfishing propose onerous reporting requirements on WTO members on the scale of their fleets and subsidies.
Photo courtesy of Igor Grochev/Shutterstock
