Date published: 2005/08/24
The BBC says:
A coalition of environmental and development agencies has launched a new programme which aims to stem the loss of fish stocks worldwide.
The Profish programme will compile a global list of illegal fishing vessels, promote sustainable aquaculture and help protect marine reserves.
It could also reduce the extent of legal fishing by European boats in African waters.
Profish was launched at the Fish for All Summit in Abuja, Nigeria.
There are no reliable global estimates either for the economic value of illegal fishing, or for the amount of environmental damage it does.
But there is general agreement at government level that it is a serious issue, which is why the Council of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) adopted in 2001 the International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing.
The logic behind Profish is that information is key to reducing the impact and extent of illegal activities.
"There has been considerable work over the last few years to track illegal fishing," the World Bank's Director of Environment Warren Evans told the BBC News website.
"Although large vessels receive a lot of attention, in fact small-scale operations at local level are causing extensive ecological damage, by harming coral reefs, spawning grounds and so on; basically these boats exploit every stock they can."
The process of compiling the rogues' register will be led by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, which joins the World Bank, FAO, and other conservation bodies in launching Profish, with an initial investment of just over US$1m from Iceland, France, Norway, Finland and the World Bank's development facility.
Profish will also develop a "small-scale fisheries toolkit", which will show fishing communities how to manage stocks in a sustainable yet profitable way.
It also aims to develop estimates of "resource rent loss" for developing countries - the amounts of money they are losing by not managing fisheries for sustained production.
Well it sounds like a great idea. Only it could slip into the mode where a bunch of rich westerners (with no direct experience of fishing) are arrogantly telling the rest of the world how they should manage their own resources. The "small-scale fisheries toolkit" in particular sounds like it is going to be patronising ("those dumb Africans just don't know how to manage anything"). And is anybody going to believe the "resource rent loss" numbers? The people doing the sums have their own agenda, and so their estimates might or might not be impartial.
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