Catch Reporting Cannot Be Ignored: Failure to Keep Accounts in Fisheries Will Drag Down Marine Resources

By Xu Chengyu (Founder of RFI Responsible Fisheries Indicators) / Edited by Yu Kai

The Council of Agriculture recently stated that the European Union may be preparing to issue a red card to Taiwan's fishing industry, and the deep-sea fishing sector is deeply worried, believing that the annual output value of aquatic products exported to the EU is nearly 7 billion yuan. If these are banned from being imported into the EU and diverted to the domestic market, it will cause major fluctuations, or even a collapse, in domestic fishery product prices. But a crisis is also an opportunity, and Taiwan can use this chance to seriously reflect on the problems in fisheries management.

Severe "unreported" violations in coastal and offshore fisheries, marine resources bankrupt

It is true that some vessels in Taiwan's deep-sea fishing industry violate IUU (Illegal, Unregulated, Unreported) rules, but they are not the majority, and can be described as a typical few bad apples. However, in contrast, in Taiwan's coastal and offshore fisheries management, IUUis the norm!

The international emphasis on IUU is because IUU is the greatest harm to responsible fisheries management. Among these, "Illegal" means "illegal fishing" and Unregulated means "unregulated"; these are relatively easy for everyone to understand. But why is Unreported, which Taiwan's deep-sea fishing vessels violated this time, so important? In fact, this precisely reflects how far Taiwan's fisheries management concepts lag behind the world.

Simply put, we can treat reporting as "bookkeeping." If an organization does not keep "books" in its operations, everyone knows that organization will go bankrupt; if fisheries management has no "bookkeeping,"what goes bankrupt is marine resources.