The absence of transparency measures leads to things like IUU fishing, fisheries mismanagement. fraud and corruption in fisheries decision making and Overfishing is a major problem all over the world in the ocean. It doesn't matter if it's near a coastline. It doesn't matter if it's in the high seas. Every country struggles with ensuring that fisheries species like the species that are fished are actually managed properly.
A lot of the countries that we are operating in or partnering with have specific roles attached to specific species. What we would really like to see is a much, pardon the pun, but a much broader net cast. where more of these species are falling under these import control schemes and things like that so There's some species that have sustainable fisheries and there are some that just don't. And it's very difficult to control because
there are a lot of players at play. You have the government, you have the industry, and then you have the scientists and conservationists that try and feed information into both processes, government and industry, to be able to get the right number of, say, to set a quota or to make sure that management is put forth. Now, with that complexity, you put in political will and you put in voters and campaign contributors and you get a lot more complex in how things roll
out. And it can be really sticky situations. What adds to that complexity is the fact that we don't have a lot of information about most of the fisheries that
happen around the world. That means a specific species that is fished may not have the amount of information that we need as scientists and conservationists to be able to set quota for government to manage properly as well as We saw the same thing in maritime security, where within a single country, you might not have the Coast Guard talking to the Ministry of Fisheries. And that's a challenge. But it's also just not something that they've ever been faced with before. They
And there are some, like I said, there are some bad players and there are some good players. And the bad players are greedy and they just want as much money as possible. The good players want to be able to fish forever and be able to pass it on to generations to come. So how do we manage data that we don't have a lot of? The
big thing is transparency. Being able to find out how we can get as much data as possible and sharing that data and sharing how the data came to be and the methods to get that data, the methods of phishing with other players around the world. In comes the Coalition of Fisheries Transparency. It's a global network of civil society organizations working to advance fisheries transparency measures to ensure the sustainability and
equitability of the fisheries sector. And today I have the director of that coalition, Maisie Pidgeon who is here to talk about the work that the coalition has done in the two years since its inception and the work that it plans to do in the future and hopes to do and gives us a lot of information on the complexity as well as some of the strides that have been made by a variety of different countries. So we're going
to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live
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if you want that information to your inbox Monday to Friday at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, you can do so by signing up to our newsletter. Go to speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter and you get that information sent to your inbox Monday to Friday at 8 a.m. So, at speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter, let's start this show. So, this is a topic that I've been wanting to talk about for a long time. And Maisie's team reached out to me and said,
hey, do you want to talk about fisheries transparency? And I said, absolutely I do. And you're probably wondering why does this matter? And why don't we have this information before? Like why do we not have enough information? If you remember a couple of years ago or a year ago, I had on someone from Oceania, Canada. We talked about sort of the state of stock assessments and fisheries in Canada. And the big thing there, the big conclusion was we don't have a lot of information on
most of the fisheries that are available. And they're going to be putting out another, if they've not already put it out already, they're going to be putting out another stock assessment sort of evaluation. And we're going to find out probably the same thing, that we do not have enough information on enough of the fishery stocks that are being fished around the world, around Canada. Imagine what that is around the world. There are a lot of different countries.
They all have their own practices and their own rules and their own set of regulations. Not all of them are equal. Some of them are a little bit behind. Some of them are really advanced. It's not all there and that's really hindering better management of fisheries by not knowing what we have to manage. Not having that information can lead towards the extinction or
the collapse of a fishery of a specific species. And so we're gonna talk a lot about how important transparency is, how the coalition started, why it started, and what the purpose is in this interview with Maisie Pidgeon. Enjoy, and I will talk to you after. Hey Maisie, welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about transparency and fisheries? Absolutely, let's do it. All right. This is a topic that I've been wanting to have on the podcast for
a long time. And when you contacted me and your staff contacted me to be like, hey, Andrew, would you like to talk about this on your podcast? I'm like, absolutely, yes. I'm going to respond, respond, respond as quickly as possible. Because I find when we get into just the topic of overfishing and fisheries in general, it can feel disconnected from anybody who's listening to this podcast, even myself. Sometimes I'm just like, do I have any control over this? Do I have enough information
on this? How can I do better either as an individual or as like a volunteer for an organization such as Oceana or anything like that? How can I support this type of work in any way possible? And so it's great to have yourself on to be able to explain this to us. Now, we're gonna get your title in just a second, but we're gonna get involved into like, you know, illegal, unreported, and I keep forgetting the last one, and what's
the last one? Unregulated. Unregulated, shoot. And unregulated fisheries. We've talked about it in the past before. We're going to really get down into it. How do we combat it? How do we address it with other countries and so forth? So we're going to get into all of that. But before we do, Maisie, why Sure. My name is Maisie Pidgeon. I'm the director of Nice. Very, very nice. Now, how does one become the director of sort
of like a coalition like this? Because, you know, this is, why don't you just let us know a little bit more about the coalition first, and then we'll kind of talk a little bit about your background and how you Yeah, absolutely. So the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency
is a network of 50 civil society member organizations. and we have members across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, Oceania, and all of those organizations are working to improve fisheries governance and sustainability through advancing fisheries transparency
policies. The framework around which we work is something called the Global Charter, which I'm sure we'll speak about later, but it's a set of 10 policy principles around fisheries transparency, the best practices in fisheries transparency in the areas of vessel information, fishing activity, Gotcha. Okay, look, now this makes me want to get into it even more. Before we do, I just want to get a little background on you, Maisie. So how does
one become a director? Like, where did it all start? Where did your love for So I have been in this position for just over two years. And prior to that, I spent about a decade and a half working in maritime security. So I originally started working in counter-piracy. And that evolved into all other kinds of maritime crime, including illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, as well as wildlife trafficking by maritime modes and things like that. So I've worked
for NGOs. I have been a consultant for the U.N. and Gotcha. OK, so this is interesting. You know, it's funny when you said counter piracy right at the beginning, you know, I think people think piracy now of videos and and other things. But now we're talking about like actual pirates, actual piracy on the water. Like, I think the closest we could probably really relate to is sort of the pirates in Somalia
that, you know, were attacking supply boats. And there was a famous movie starring Tom Hanks, who, you know, really sort of displayed sort of what would happen and how dangerous it could be. What it like what, like, how prevalent is piracy still today, Well, when I started working on it, that was really sort of the height of the Somali piracy crisis that you're talking about, in which case we were seeing anywhere from 50 to
100 attacks every single year off the coast of Somalia. And increasingly, we saw lots off the coast of West Africa and in the Sulu and Celebes seas as well, and eventually even into Latin America. Thankfully, at this point in history, we have decreased the annual piracy attack numbers. And I think a lot of that is due to international cooperation, which is sort of brings us back to where we are now talking about IUU phishing and some of the tools we might have in
Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about that. The IEU fishing. I kind of defined it very poorly at the beginning of this episode. Can you just talk about what it is and the problems that it's causing in fisheries today and I'll actually start by talking a little bit more about transparency and what the lack of transparency can do, can enable, I
should say, if that's all right. But the absence of transparency measures leads to things like IUU fishing, fisheries mismanagement, fraud and corruption in fisheries decision-making, and even human rights abuses in the fisheries sector is unfortunately
something that we see as well. The downriver effects of this kind of fisheries mismanagement, which is sort of the broad umbrella that IUU would fall under, I would say, includes overexploited fishery stocks, food insecurity is a major concern, and risks to the livelihoods of residents of these coastal communities in places like West Africa or Pacific Island nations, for instance. Meanwhile, we would say transparency is the tool at our
disposal to combat these kinds of challenges. These measures are, generally speaking, low cost and easily implemented. And I think the really critical thing, which is something I bring from my past in maritime security, is that more and better information enables informed and inclusive decision making, which brings everybody to a seat at the table. From the government perspective, too, it lends credibility. It demonstrates the government's trustworthiness to citizens
because they're sharing information and they're including them in the process. So to us, transparency measures are really a win-win for For sure. Now, if it has so many benefits, Why are we talking about it now? Why isn't it just something that we have in every government where there's transparency? Where is the incentive to not be transparent for when it comes to fisheries, where it comes to I think there's a couple of different ways
that you could frame this. I think the fishery sector is one in which there are some corrupt actors working. Um, where a small number of people are becoming enriched by overselling fishing licenses or something like that. Um, so that's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem though, and I think probably the more commonplace one is there's just a lack of understanding of what fisheries transparency can do. Um, these infrastructures are
not necessarily in place, uh, in places. Um, and there are a lot of competing voices telling these governments that there The fishing industry doesn't want additional measures to abide by. So it can be a kind of complicated set I feel like international fisheries in general, even whether you're looking at a national scale, It feels like it's complex, right? Like this is not an easy problem to solve. I mean, if it was, it probably would have been solved a long time ago.
So you've mentioned some of the complexities and some of the problems from a human rights point of view, obviously, in terms of what we call fishery slavery and other acts that have occurred through a lot of these bad players and so forth. You know, I feel like with overfishing, that kind of is one of the major problems with the ocean. It feels as though a lot of, it feels almost like there's a blanket, and some movies have highlighted this, where there's this like blanket of negative view
of any kind of fishing. in any kind of fisheries, to the point where people are like, the only way we can really get over overfishing is if everybody stops eating fish. You and I know that will never happen. There's too many people that depend on the protein stores worldwide that will happen. And even people who don't necessarily need to depend on it will still want to have fish. So we know that's not low. But we also know that it's not all fishing is
bad. So I guess where I really wanted to go with this was, When we talk about fishery and transparencies, there are some fisheries where there's large and then there's small fisheries, right? And when we talk about transparency, it's like where do we begin in terms of Oh, yeah. Okay. I hear you. Um, so I think some of the positive examples, uh, here are generally sort of fishery by fishery. And just in case your listeners are not necessarily
fisheries biologists, which I am also not for the record. Um, when I refer to a fishery, I mean, a specific species of fish. So maybe that's squid or maybe that's yellowfin tuna. Um, so a lot of the countries that we are operating in or partnering with. have specific rules
attached to specific species. What we would really like to see is a much, pardon the pun, but a much broader net cast where more of these species are falling under these import control schemes and things like that so that we have better data on all of the species that Got you. So everybody is part of the information that comes in.
So for instance, I know in Canada, we've talked to Oceana Canada before they've come in and they've done their annual report on where the fisheries stock assessments are and where our fisheries management is. And a lot of the times there's lack of data for a number of species. So it's really difficult to gain an understanding of where they're at, whether they're critically endangered in danger or they're doing really well we we have no idea because there's there's
a lot of lack there's a lack of information of those species. And a lot of the times as we know from just ocean biology and how it's changed over the last number of decades is that. We've seen a change in like going from looking at more of a habitat style, like looking at like an ecosystem management, base management scheme, rather than a species by species basis. Because you never know if you're fishing yellowfin tuna, you're going to affect other species. That's right. Long lining or
what have you, right? And gillnets can also affect other species. There's a lot of gear that comes down to it. Absolutely. Yeah, I should also say that a lot of countries, for instance, we're working in East Asia with Japan and Korea, and they have started their import control schemes by looking at high-risk species. And this is, of course, a really logical starting point. From the perspective of the coalition, any progress is good progress.
And we understand that countries are not operating from the same starting point. So, like, regardless Yeah, for sure. Obviously, yeah, that's an important point to stay home is not every country has made it a priority in the past, even though they might be a coastal country and depend on its fisheries. It took a while before the US and Canada probably tracked cod. Yeah, right. So we were probably on the downfall a lot before than we knew when it comes down to that for
Atlantic cod. It's really interesting when you talk about this coalition, you talk about working with different countries. When it first started, how many countries were involved? Did the coalition have as many organizations a part of it? I think you mentioned about 50 organizations. Did it have as many when it first started or have you been bringing people on bringing people in as we've gone along. And part of that is organic,
as you might imagine. But a lot of that has been that my team and I have been working with our other partners, whether that's Oceana or EJF or some of these other civil society organizations who are really plugged in on the ground to understand who they're working with and where these major fishing countries are, whether they're seafood exporting countries, seafood importing countries, fishing nations, And finding potential partners in civil
society on the ground in those places too. Sorry, I was just going to say we really are seeking out places where we think civil society has an opportunity to make an impact and change policy. So that's sort of the criteria for the places where we're actively recruiting members and seeking to organize them and align their strategies and Makes total sense. If you think about it, if you think about looking at tackling transparency for fisheries, that's a huge undertaking for
like a small team. You need the team that's on the ground that understands the local fishery, which helps and the local people who are involved in the fishery. and get that feedback mechanism. That's still
a tall order to take on. How is the organization, like how's the sort of the coalition sort of organized in terms of gathering the data and then compiling it into reports to give you more of an idea, the coalition more of an idea of what we're actually seeing and what kind of information we're So to me, the value of a coalition is in its ability to bring together diverse organizations that have a variety of skills, a variety of areas of focus and expertise, and pulling all of
these different abilities together to tackle a complex issue. So with that in mind, I would say that's really what we've done. We rely really heavily on the different skill sets that are contained within the member organizations. Oceana, for instance, is not in every single country where we are prioritizing in 2024. Neither is WWF, for
instance. So we seek to see who the most active people are, understand what the situation is based on their perspective, see who the potential, you know, champions in government or industry are. We focus on government, but some of our partners work more closely with industry. So we're Yeah. No, absolutely. And was it difficult to bring on?
some of those like smaller civil society groups that were on the ground or was it did it make sense for them to just be like Yeah, we want to contribute to this to this coalition and contribute to the information that we can get worldwide as When we reached out to most organizations, so long as they were aligned with what is contained in the global charter and those 10 policy principles, we didn't really have too
much pushback. People were really happy for the support and for the community of practice that hopefully And do a lot of the different groups follow the Global Charter? It was definitely new to some of them. So within the Global Charter, there's everything from vessel monitoring, which, if you're familiar with Global Fishing Watch, is something that they really focus on, to collecting crew data, which touches back on your human
rights question earlier. So some of them have different areas of focus, but they generally are aligned with the really broad definition of what's included in transparency policy. They might
That makes a lot of sense. Now, is it the goal of the coalition to have all this information in a shareable database to all these coalitions, or to the members of the coalition, having information on specific fisheries of species in, say, Indonesia, to Greenland, I don't think that we will ever be the arbiters of that data, so to speak. But what we do aim to contribute is knowing who has that data. So that if a partner in the Philippines wants to know how Indonesia accomplished measure XYZ,
Gotcha. So they can contact that affiliation and say, yeah, we'd love to work with you. So it kind of fosters, it's kind of a way to like, it is a network where you're fostering collaboration. OK, I like that. I like that idea. Bit of a social media One of the goals that we were originally tasked with was developing a global community of practice so that we could really start to build worldwide momentum towards fisheries transparency because civil society is really
powerful and they've accomplished lots of things. But a lot of these victories have been you know, somewhat isolated by geography. So our funders and our supporters see CFT, the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency, as a vehicle to connect the dots between folks Yeah. Well, even just to put them in contact is a huge feat. You're familiar with RARE, the group RARE? They do a great job at their Fishing Forever program, where they connect tropical countries, but more like villages of
tropical countries. They're connecting government officials, mayors, and so forth in the Philippines to people in Haiti and the Caribbean. And it's great to be able to get to share information, transfer of information, look at similarities, look at differences, and how each one of them have been able to tackle a challenge, say, in fisheries for this instance, and then maybe they can use some of that to apply their own. I think that's probably the same kind of deal with this, just a little bit
higher level, because you're dealing with a lot of different countries. Is Yeah, right. I mean, obviously, every country has its own nuances. So there is no one size all application for fisheries transparency, unfortunately for us, I think. I think it's just useful in its most basic form for these organizations doing this really hard work to know they're not alone, to hear some other ideas. Maybe they try them. Maybe they already have before they worked or they didn't. But
they're not reinventing the wheel. And I think that community actually is really valuable on its own without Well, I mean, if you think about it, we globalize everything, pretty much. We globalize transparency and figuring out how to tackle these challenges, right? I think it's great. How many countries are currently working You know what? I just asked somebody on my team. Wow. That's incredible. 62 countries.
Now, this is something that I've always wanted to know. A lot of times when we talk about fisheries or overfishing, there's always certain countries that are highlighted as being maybe not the best players in town or not tracking They've had fishers from that country doing some bad practices. And so they get highlighted a lot. It's the same country. I don't really want to mention them
because I don't really want to bring them down. Because I assume the coalition, when you go and work with a country that may have been highlighted before as not monitoring IUU fishing as well as they could be and stuff, Do you go not as like a finger wagging, you're going in as, hey, we want to help you be as transparent as possible. When you do approach or if you do approach, what's the reaction of the
country, you know, of the government that you're working with? Are they a little bit standoffish because fisheries can be such a big player in terms of like GDP or is it more of like, yes, we would love to work with you because we need some In my experience, nine times out of the 10, it's the latter. Oh, great. I think people are generally receptive to what we're selling, for lack of a better word, because I think that they see that it benefits their people. And
this is something that their constituents will get behind. But that said, it should be noted that we really focus our efforts, like I mentioned earlier, places where we think we can have a tangible impact. So some of this is already baked into the calculus in some respects, where we see an opening with governments. But I'll say, we've certainly engaged with governments who have maybe received a yellow card or a red card in the past from the European
Union. And that is not disqualifying for us. That's an Yeah, for sure, for sure, because that's an opportunity to work with them. Because look, I think what some people don't understand when they read articles like that, and I'm glad you brought up the yellow card, red card with the EU, because they brought that out a number of years ago. It's kind of like a soccer or a football sort of approach to saying you've done well, you haven't done well, or you're in the warnings zone.
It's very difficult for a government to track IUU. Is that not right? It can't be easy because there's so many different scales Yeah. And even another layer to that is that there's lots of different agencies within a singular government who might have some piece of the fishing sector, whether it's commerce or the Ministry of Fisheries or Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they all sort of have various touch points, and they might have different components of the full information picture,
which makes this, you know, pretty difficult. We saw the same thing in maritime security, where within a single country, you might not have the Coast Guard talking to the Ministry of Fisheries, and that's a challenge. But it's also just not something that they've ever That's true Yeah, so with the coalition What are the keys to success in working with a country to get them to be? Is it to get them to be more transparent? Is that the goal when you work with the country
or you work with organizations like what? What is the keys to getting them the more trans like the most transparency out of the of So I would say it depends. There are certain countries which are in the position of maybe stepping up and taking a global leadership role in transparency, and that would be the way that we frame the ask. They've already shown some willingness to embrace transparency policies, and
we want them to go further. In other settings, maybe there's been a considerable amount of investment from our partners in the ground time, money, whatever. And we're looking for the lowest hanging fruit to just get momentum going. Like I said, success is success. This is a big, long fight. So we will take what we can get. And these are all victories worth
Right, for sure. When you approach a country who hasn't maybe had a lot of experience in this endeavor, I guess, what are those first pieces that would be like, hey, it's successful that you've already taken this first step? This It totally depends, I think. It depends on what the government has prioritized to this point. Maybe they have been publishing lists of vessels authorized to fish in their waters. That's a great first step. Yeah. That's a really great first step. Because so
much can build from that. Maybe they've already agreed to share their data with Global Fishing Watch. That's an amazing first step, too. So it really just depends on what their priorities are and where the political will is in Right. Do you find it sometimes frustrating when you come up against a country who resists? Or do they resist when you try and work with them on certain aspects that would bring
I mean, sure. Uh, there's always setbacks in this kind of work and it can be really frustrating, but I think our role as the coalition is not so much to focus on that. It's to support the folks on the ground who are really in the grind, um, and make sure that they have what they need from a global perspective, whether that's just another point of leverage or some communication support or whatever we can offer. to make sure that they're sort of staying in
Yeah, for sure. On the other hand, on the other scale, you had mentioned you had countries who have done pretty well and then you want to challenge them a little bit further to tackle even more of that transparency, where are they at when you get to them and they'd be like, oh, these guys are pretty far advanced? What have they done to say, hey, they've done really well? You don't have to name a country, but if there's something like an example that you can talk about where
there have been pieces where you're like, oh, wow, this country's fairly advanced. Let's I've been talking a lot about the global charter, which I have a copy of here. a country that has maybe ticked off six of the ten, or something like that, of these ten policy principles. So what that would look like for us from that point on would be, you're so close. You could be one of the first countries in the entire world to be fully aligned with the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency. Doesn't
that sound appealing to you? And, you know, I think we get varying levels of receptiveness to that. But I think in general, countries do want to be leaders, but there is a lot of geopolitics at play, too. And we certainly understand that. It's one of the biggest challenges of this job. Fish Exactly. That's such a great line. I love that. You mentioned the 10 policies here. Can we actually just list them just for the audience? Absolutely. If that's OK? Sure. I
No problem. So under vessel information, require unique identification numbers for all fishing vessels, including transport and supply vessels. Publish lists of licenses, authorizations, and sanctions. Make public the beneficial ownership of vessels. And stop the use of flags of convenience by fishing vessels. That's a good one. Under fishing activity, make vessel position data public. Ban or closely monitor at sea transshipment, or the transfer of catch from ship to ship at sea. Right. mandate
seafood traceability. Uh, we're looking from boat to plate. Yes. And then in governance and management ratify international agreements that set standards for fishing vessels and trade. Um, those include the FAO agreement on port state measures, the international labor organization, fundamental principles and rights at work, uh, Cape town agreement, um, ensure equity, public and equitable access to fisheries data.
and participation in fisheries management and decision-making. And finally, collect data on the conditions of fishing vessel crews and Interesting. These are all like, they all sound really great because there's a couple of them where I was like, oh yeah, that's a big thing. The flag was a big thing, obviously. But the first two seemed very simple. I'll explain the
flag in a little bit, or maybe have you explain the flag in a little bit. Some people don't understand what happens at sea, and you have a lot of experience with that, with your maritime security experience as well as this experience. But the first two seem very simple in terms of publishing data and making sure that you have the vessel demarcation, like the vessel numbers. as well as who's allowed to, you
mentioned it before, who's allowed to fish in those waters. I think that really helps with that transparency, because you have a lot of fishing vessels that come in
from a different country, from a foreign country, and come in and fish. Some countries have handled it in very different ways, from sinking boats, as extreme as sinking boats, to not doing anything at all, or not even realizing that they're there, to putting in specific pillars that would destroy any kind of trawl nets to protect the local coral reefs and other habitats. Can you just talk about the vessel flags and what that, I think it's the third priority, what that would mean
and what it means? Because some people here may not understand, like in the audience, may not understand what the vessel means and searching Absolutely. So every vessel needs to have a flag of a country. And it's a bit like having your car with a license plate tagged to Virginia or Colorado, say. And basically, the flag under which your vessel sails, you are meant to abide by the rules of that country.
So when we say flags of convenience, that's one way of saying that those countries that issue the flags are not necessarily connected to the vessel in some way. The vessel is not necessarily from that place. The crew is not necessarily from that place. We call that a genuine link. And when we say flags of convenience, sometimes these countries are less inclined to, you know, enact the rules at sea. So this enables things like illegal fishing or human rights
Yeah, yeah, that's a great explanation. You know, that always surprised me when I first learned about that when I was in school and I was just like, I can't believe people can switch flags that easily and go to places where they may not have the same rules as in other places, they may not be as strict. You would think with maritime law, That would have to be the same, but I guess every country goes by its own Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the ocean is a big, wide
space, unfortunately, for enforcement purposes. But there are things like there are measures in place, which is why all of these principles kind of work in cohesion with one another. Later on, the international agreements stipulation that's included in the charter One of the things that that calls for is the Port State Measures Agreement, which, in theory, would Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's wonderful. The other thing that stood out, one of the policy points, was the stopping
of transferring at sea. And can you explain what that means? Because this is a big thing when it comes to human Yes, it is. Absolutely. So transshipment at sea. is basically a fishing vessel has a fresh catch, which is then transferred while still at sea to a larger transport vessel, which brings that catch back to port to be sold. And so where the human rights concerns come in is that this allows those fishing vessels to stay at sea for extended periods of time.
We sometimes see months or years. And oftentimes, the crew that are on the vessels are there against their will. So they don't have access to fresh food or water, to medical care, to Wi-Fi is a big issue right now in the fishery sector that people are calling for. And you can imagine the kinds of nefarious things that might happen when people are at sea for years at a time. So that's something that we're looking to crack down on. We say ban or closely monitor. at
sea transshipment. Sometimes transshipments are inevitable and that's certainly understandable, but they need to be logged and monitored to Yeah, absolutely. Even fisheries observers who have been on
those transfer boats have had a lot of problems. There was a couple years ago a gentleman who was lost at sea because he kept reporting on these types of nefarious transfers, not only from a human rights impact, but even just from being unable to identify fish because they've already been kind of processed, let's just say, and they couldn't identify the fish. It could have been a shark. It could have been a swordfish. We didn't know.
We couldn't know, right? So that can be quite difficult. So all these policies make a lot of sense in terms of bringing this to transparency. Now, how long is it? You've been with the director two years. Were you at the inception of the coalition, director? I was. OK. So this has been involved. This is two years. This is a long process to do. Where would you rate the work that you've been able to
do now compared to when you first started? Obviously, you've probably hit some pretty big milestones in terms of the number of countries that are involved, number of organizations that are involved. But where do you see, if you look past the past two years, how fast you've progressed? And then I'll ask the future as well. Where do you see things going This is a marathon, and we are maybe on mile two I like that. We've done a lot of work, but
it's going to be hard. But we've trained for this, so we're Absolutely. Now, with that said, you talk about training, you talk about people who are involved in the coalition. What are the type, we've got a lot of people who are looking for ways to help out with organizations and they've dedicated their careers to working on the conservation side, not just on the science side,
but on the conservation side. What are the types of, I guess, titles of people, of jobs that people We have a couple of different sort of characterizations of partners. So the coalition has a secretariat of three staff and some additional support. So it is myself, a communication staff person and a membership engagement and outreach person. So that is the nuclear family of the Coalition Secretariat.
But we have tremendous support from our co-chair organizations, which include Oceana and the Environmental Justice Foundation, who each provide staff time on a really regular basis. So basically a full-time staff person from each of them as well, who help organize with their offices on the ground. So this is a lot of transparency policy manager, communications staff, those kinds of folks. And then we have even support from Oceana's chief scientist and the COO at
EJF. So it's a really broad range of folks. In terms of our member organizations, I would say that most frequent title that we see is policy officer or some derivation of that. Uh, there are a lot of lawyers in the mix, uh, which is quite useful in terms of understanding what the legal environment is in these places and what the opportunities are to actually move laws ahead. Um, so that's, that's always an incredible asset, uh,
to have those folks on our side as well. Um, and then there's a lot of conservation biologists and marine biologists like yourself and scientific communicators, which are all essential Amazing, amazing. This has been wonderful. I assume if people want more information, they can go to the website fisheriestransparency.net. I'll link to it in the show note. You do have a Twitter profile as well, Fish Coalition. That's right. And so we'll put
that as well. And in the next year or so, what kind of projects are you, as the coalition, focusing on over the next year? Are there new countries that are going to be coming on board? Or what is the priority for So we are looking at a couple countries in Africa and Asia, where we are hoping to advance specific transparency policies. We're also looking to take advantage of the upcoming Our Ocean conference in April. where what we'd really like to see is the profile of transparency raised
in a way that we haven't seen yet. I understand that this can be kind of an obtuse concept and we're trying to to combat that too so that people understand that this is a tool and it's an accessible tool which is to everybody's benefit. So that is one of our our major lifts for 2025 as well and you know I think We are always open to
opportunities as they emerge, too. So I'm reticent to say that we have a concrete plan at this point, because oftentimes And especially as a network does, conversations happen. You get introduced to different people who are in the game. you're able to either grow the network from an organization, like from bringing on more organizations, civil society groups, or even by countries. And obviously, this is a growing work, and it's complex, and not an easy undertaking. I just want to thank you.
for not only coming on the podcast and letting us know about this, but also to do the work that you do and manage it from such a large scope. You have a good nuclear family, but it is a small nuclear family that does a lot, and
we appreciate all the work that you do. And we'd love to have you or some of your partners on to talk more about some of the projects that have gone on in the last two years or that are upcoming and you want to share Feel free to reach out, because we'd love to have you on to get the word out there and get this audience knowing. Because the one good thing about this, they like to speak up as well. So they're going to talk about it as well.
So we'd love to have you back on as well. Well, thank you so much for having You bet. Thank you. Thank you, Maisie, for joining us on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. It was great to have you on. I'm looking forward to being able to talk about more projects that the coalition is putting together or working on and some of
the results that have come out of the coalition in the future. Maisie and I were talking after and she's like, hey, we can put you in touch with some great players that we have that we'll be able to talk about. a lot of interesting projects that we have. And so today is just sort of the kickoff of this overview of the Coalition of Fisheries Transparency, being able
to get the whole purpose of it and why it's so important. And then we're going to dive in deep into some of the other players that are working on the ground with specific fisheries in specific countries. And we're going to see the challenges they face, the successes that they've had through those challenges, and also maybe some of them not so successful. So we're going to talk about that because it's all about transparency.
And I think that's really important. So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did recording it and doing the interview for it. Maisie was fantastic. So again, thank you to Maisie. But do you have questions around fisheries transparency, IUU fishing, or anything that has to do with overfishing, whether it be on the high seas or coastal area or within the EEZ, the Exclusive Economic Zone of each country? I would love to
hear it from you. You can just put a comment on On the Spotify if you're watching this on Spotify or listening through Spotify or on YouTube Or you can hit me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean That's at how to protect the ocean And of course if you enjoyed this video and you're watching this or you're listening to this Please subscribe hit that notification bell on whatever platform you're watching or listening to this because it's really important that
we spread the word and that we have regular information about the ocean coming to us. Like I said, this is a resource that I didn't have when I was a kid. We didn't even have internet when I was a kid. That's how old I am. I had to go to the library, which is great, but a lot of the books that I had in Ontario and Toronto did not have a lot of information on sharks or on fisheries or on the ocean just in general, other than large, beautiful photographs, didn't have a lot of information. The
encyclopedias can only take me so far. Now with the internet, now with all the information that's out there, I'm trying to bring it together so that you can have it for yourself and you can stay informed and you can make better decisions around the ocean so that you can live for a better ocean. So stay tuned, subscribe, follow, hit the notification bell, whatever you have to do so that you can get more information and use this as a resource for you to help protect
the ocean. So thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next