Running a tight ship

Frozen fish spill from an open net and slap onto the concrete pier a few yards from the Cap Saint Paul, the fishing vessel that hauled this catch in from the Atlantic. The day is hazy and hot, and men wearing hard hats drip with sweat as they converge on the pile of fish, grab each slippery cylinder just above the tail fin, and horseshoe toss it into one of the dozens of large metal bins that box the workers in.

A man standing on deck shouts, “Slow! Slow! Slow!” as another net full of fish flies up and out of the vessel’s hold, leaving a trail of foggy condensation behind it.

Today’s catch is largely skipjack, the type of tuna most commonly caught, processed, and canned around the world—including here in the port city of Tema, on Ghana’s Atlantic Coast. The West African nation’s economy is built on natural resources, and while gold and cacao are market leaders, a tenth of the population works in the fishing industry. The number one fisheries export is tuna.

The port is humming, methodical and efficient. But in 2013, Ghana’s tuna fishery was in trouble. That year the European Union—Ghana’s biggest export market for tuna and the largest importer of fisheries products worldwide—publicly questioned the legality and verifiability of tuna products from Ghana.

At the time there were reports of tuna being transferred from ship to ship as a way to skirt international rules and provide cover for fleet operators who wanted to profit off of illegal and unreported catches. The label of IUU—illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing—is one no government, industry, or fisher wants to be tagged with. Yet such activities take up to 26 million tons of fish out of the ocean every year. The warning Ghana received, called a yellow card, signaled that access to the EU market was at risk.

Today, as large, rust-colored gears grind loudly, lifting tons of tuna from the hold of the Cap Saint Paul, and as the crew works through piles of fish, every movement is reflected on the surface of a black dome bolted to the mast about four floors above water. Inside the tinted case is one of six small cameras positioned strategically throughout the vessel.

The cameras are part of a national pilot project to implement electronic monitoring of the country’s tuna fisheries. The work began in 2015 as part of the Common Oceans Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) Tuna Project, which is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and coordinated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The government of Ghana, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and WWF carried out the work during a three-year partnership.

Tropical tuna are migratory fish that swim great distances through national and international waters. It’s a largely plentiful resource—if managed well—and it fuels an industry that contributes an estimated $42.2 billion to the global economy every year. Tuna represent other kinds of wealth, too: Where there are tuna, there are often other marine animals, such as whales, turtles, and sharks.

And since wildlife isn’t constrained by political boundaries, governments work together on management and conservation, and part of their responsibility is to provide accurate data on fishing.

“In order to ensure the sustainability of a tuna stock, we need to know what is being taken out of our oceans, when it’s being taken out, and where it’s being taken out,” says Lauren Spurrier, vice president for ocean conservation at WWF. Those details are used to divvy up catch allowances, track wildlife population trends, and provide proof at market that a vessel’s catch is legal and reported.

There are verifiable systems in place looking out for various commercial and trade interests, but historically there hasn’t been a way to provide the same level of verification when a vessel is out on the water; this murkiness at the very beginning of the seafood supply chain creates uncertainty for the entire industry. And a lack of confidence in data can also impact the ability of scientists to advise managers on how best to control fishing in a way that allows ocean life to replenish and recover.

Before the yellow card, Ghana’s government and industry said they had been taking steps to improve monitoring and enforcement of fishing rules, including placing onboard observers on large purse-seine vessels. (A purse seine is a large wall of netting deployed around an entire group of fish. The net has floats along its top line, and a lead line threaded through rings along the bottom. Once the fish are encircled, the lead line is pulled in, “pursing” the net closed on the bottom.) But while such observation is needed—and in fact mandated in certain cases by international agreement—officials with the ministry, as well as industry leaders, still felt the sector was exposed if someone questioned the data collected by an onboard observer. That left Ghana’s tuna market vulnerable to censure.

“The yellow card was a wakeup call for Ghana to take real steps to address the EU’s concerns about illegal fishing,” says Spurrier. So the electronic monitoring pilot project set out to document exactly what was happening on the high seas.