Combatting Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing: National Boundaries and International Trade

• In Event: Science, Technology, and the Regulation of Food and Agriculture #2

Abstract

Fish is a common-pool resource and one of the most traded foods worldwide. Trade is one of the main pressures on the ecological and economic sustainability of the resource and a driver of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU). IUU has been demonstrated to have negative environmental impacts, produce economic losses, and threaten food security. Until recently, prevention of IUU has relied mostly on measures undertaken at the national level, such as monitoring, control, and surveillance systems for vessels in sovereign waters. The main limitations of this approach are the diverging capacities of states to manage their fisheries and the importance of fishing in the high seas beyond any national jurisdiction. More recently, market access and trade measures have started to be explored in some countries, shifting the locus of deterrence from the act of fishing to further stages along the supply chain. This shift also reflects a change in the framing of IUU as a problem and can therefore be studied using methods of discourse analysis: How are regulatory interventions such as labelling, catch documentation or traceability schemes justified? What discursive practices enable or hamper this shift? The Australian case shows how the framing of policy problems determines the measures that will be adopted towards their solutions, and how this framing is a result of competing normative conceptions regarding markets, regulation, trade, the role of science, and the defence of national borders.

Author

• Sonia Garcia Garcia, University of Technology Sydney