Sea Control - Sea Control 294 - EU Fishing Governance with Dr. Alin Kadfak & Dr. Anna Antonova

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Links1. "Sustainable Networks: Modes of governance in the EU’s external fisheries policy relations under the IUU Regulation in Thailand and the SFPA with Senegal," by Alin Kadfak and Anna Antonova. Marine Policy, Vol. 132, October 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today my guests are Dr. Alan Kotfak and Dr. Anna Antonova, and we're going to be discussing their article from the October issue of Marine Policy on EU Fisheries Governance. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. Write, fight, win. Beginning with Giving Tuesday and going through December, we're holding our annual Write, Fight, Win holiday donation campaign to support SimSec into the new year. SimSec's proud to say, since our founding, our content has been free and always will be. Especially as more websites build paywalls or pursue intrusive advertising, we hope those in the SimSec community who value our free, no-ad model

will consider supporting us with monthly donations. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security Aloha shipmates and welcome back aboard Sea Control

Today my guests are Dr. Aline Kladvak and Dr. Anna Antonova and we're going to be discussing their article from the October issue of Marine Policy Sustainable Networks Modes of Governance in the EU's External Fisheries Policy Relations under the IUU regulation in Thailand, and the SFPA with Senegal. So Aline, Anna, thank you for joining me. Aline, if you wouldn't mind, could you start by introducing yourself to the listeners? Hi, thank you, Jared. My name is Aline Karfag.

I'm a researcher at the Department of Rural and Urban Development in Sweden, Swedish University of Agricultural Science, or SLU. I'm currently working on two research projects funded by Swedish research council. One is on sustainable fish and fish worker which aim to understand the EU fishing policy as a global governance mechanism that addressed both sustainability and human rights using Thailand as a case studies which also you know part of that is going to this publication and And the second project is Sweatshop at Sea Projects, which is aimed to investigate the implementations of hybrid governance in Thai seafood supply chains. Particularly, we're looking at the labor rights and how this, you know, Thailand become a very crucial case for this new approach to looking at seafood global governance.

Anna could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself please sure and thank you Jared for the introduction so my name is Anna Antonova I work at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society which is at Edelman Munich in Germany and my work is in between policy studies and particularly marine policies environmental policies in the EU and what's called the environmental humanities which is a way of bringing different humanities disciplines to bear on environmental issues. So I have worked with fisheries policies of the EU, particularly the external dimension, but I've also worked kind of on the internal experience of communities who live along European coastlines and how they experience the change of their

coastlines in fisheries, but also in different kinds of policies and different kinds of industries. Well, thank you, ladies, again, for joining us. And as a reminder, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So Aline, I'll ask you the first question. What was the impetus for your paper here? I think this paper started from probably the frustrations that I had when I was set out to explore the implications of EU IUU policy in the third country. And I couldn't actually find so much research being done. Another piece on labor implications of the EU IUU, I came across Anna's work on the, okay, I have to read the title, The Rhetorics of Responsible Fishing,

she's looking at the notions of human rights and sustainability in the European Union's bilateral fishery agreement in developing country. So I thought, yes, that's Anna, is the person who I would like to collaborate with and that we need to be able to understand a bit better how the EU positioned themselves for external fishery policy.

So hence I contact Anna and then we start this paper. Anna, what did you mean when you refer to the EU's normative power? This is actually something that's very important for the EU and one of the big reasons why I've always been interested in working with the EU. And it's an idea that has been around since the conception of the EU when it was originally established in 1951 as the European Coal and steel community and this is the idea that this would be an organization that exerts influence not only through market forces or policy alignment but also through really soft power ideas and norms so peace in europe was probably the original one but then later also freedoms of movement and

environmental sustainability came into play as some of the norms that the eu propagated and this type of influence to ideas and norms was then in 2002 theorized by ian manners as normative power Europe. And it is a very key aspect of how the EU's various institutions exert power internally to member states, but also externally when it comes to the EU's influence on the global stage. And in fact, in a sense, it's even more important in the external dimension. Then Anna, a follow-up question for you. How does the EU regulate its own fishing fleets? The EU regulates its fishing policies through the so-called common fisheries policy, which the name kind of suggests and this comprises a set of rules which um that regulate fish stocks

management environmental economic social goals respect to fisheries performance um it regulates fleet capacities funding from the fleet so really quite a lot of things across the eu it's also a very complex set of rules the common fisheries policies it contains detailed measures per sea basin which are decided by regional advisory councils and then there's on the ground implementation that is managed by member states. So when it comes to things like, for example, licenses or which vessels get the quotas to national total allowable catch. And the common fisheries policies is also important because it determines market policies for seafood across the EU in terms of both trade and standards. And in our case, it's important because it sets out rules

for international cooperation between the EU and non-EU countries for fishing. Aline, what are the two key policy mechanisms that the EU uses to influence external entities? Yeah, when we started writing this paper, we kind of identified these two policies. One is on EU regulations and another is sustainable fishing partnership agreements and we think that is one of the most two key policies that the EU is trying to influence external

fishing regulations. So I started with EU-IUU briefly, it's very, it's become quite important regulations for the external countries. So as we know that IUU, which is illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing is a global problem. So FAO has attempted to address these problems for quite a long time, actually over two decades. So, but with limited market control and an enforcement capacity is hard. It was hard for FAO to actually make the third country accountable. So EU, in 2010, EU took the initiative to design these specific regulations, which I'm going to read EC regulations number 1005-2008

to hold itself an external country accountable for the IUU fishing. So to do so, EU actually limit the proven IUU product from entering EU markets. And actually, they just celebrated 10 years anniversary last year, and you can follow them on the EU website. So the goal of this regulation is to ensure food traceability of fish entering EU market through CAT certificate scheme. So all coastal flag market and post-states are expected to comply with the EU CAAT certification. And for the SFPA, which is the Sustainable Fishing Partnership Agreement, the EU is kind of the earliest bilateral fishing agreement with third parties, particularly focusing on developing countries to go so the EU go fish the surplus stock in the

other country is that so they're negotiating individuals agreements basis between EU and the partner states and each agreement is actually complemented by implementation protocols and the EUSO may only access water under the jurisdictions of the partner countries. I think maybe Anna wants to add something more with the SFPA, because there's something of her specialties. Alan basically covered the basics, and we'll get to talk a little bit about how that implied in the case of Senegal a little bit later in our conversation. But the SFPAs, which emerged originally as just fisheries agreements

between the eu and third-party countries were originally established because of this um this rule that came out of unclosed three with the surplus catch that any country that wasn't able to fish the total of its total allowable catch would then have to kind of open up its stocks to being fished by others um and the eu wanted to retain access to certain waters where its fisheries fleets had been fishing before the establishment of the EEZs and therefore it concluded these agreements and the earlier of these agreements were criticized as being probably quite unsustainable because they were intended to just pay for fish and not necessarily to take care of the stocks and over the years these were reformed along with the common fisheries policies to take on a lot

more of the EU's trade goals and its normative aspirations on the world stage. So they became a little more formalized over time. So Anna, does the means of regulation differ between EU internal and external waters? That's an interesting question because the answer essentially is yes and no. So it depends really on what aspects of regulation we're talking about. So if we're talking about how the EU controls its own fleets and how it controls the seafood products that come into its markets, then in theory, at least, no, the answer is the means of regulation shouldn't differ because EU vessels fishing in external water should obey the same general rules and sustainability targets as EU vessels fishing in internal waters. but if we are talking about the EU exerting or attempting to exert influence over external water policy so if we're talking about setting standards for how fishing is done in general in these waters then of course the means of regulation do differ as the EU doesn't really regulate what it can do

is influence and what Alan and I tried to do in our article is try to theorize a little bit further about what those ways of influence look like. So we took on and adapted a way of thinking about this from an article written in 2009 by, in nine, sorry, by Labanek and Simofenik, which theorized originally three types of governance, so hierarchical, market, and network. Hierarchical won't really apply for the most part

for our conversation because it talks about hierarchical relations between the EU and its member states. But the market and network forms of governance are important. the market forms of governance is something that applies in fisheries negotiations so it's one of the ways in which at least implicitly the EU can exert influence because it's the largest seafood market in the world everyone wants to import to that market so there is a big market incentive but on the other hand we also have the network form of governance which in our view is also a normative power aspect which we might understand as the ways that it implements its normative power

outside of its waters so through dialogue through promoting principles and norms developmental assistance and so on and i know one of the critiques of the eu's its own fishing fleet is its sustainability track record you touched a little bit on this in your earlier answer but what's the substance of that complaint so this has a long history just like the common fisheries policy in general has a long history it is I think arguably one of the most criticized policies of the European Union and I think historically probably with good reason so in the past a lot of other critics have criticized the common fisheries policies for all various things various aspects of sustainability failure for example there were criticisms that it used to

set the total allowable catches for certain fisheries quotas internally too high in this regard um of scientific advice um it was accused uh in previous years for promoting overcapacity by over subsidizing its fleets um this applied also to long distance fleets so this criticism was made against the eu at the time um and the sustainability track record in external waters as i begun to talk a little bit about earlier um has been worried because historically the agreements for the eu to fish in third-party waters weren't necessarily intended originally to be sustainable they were intended to maintain access for eu fishing fleets to these waters and so they weren't sustainable necessarily to begin with they were criticized as very

straightforward fish pay and goal in the late 1970s early 1980s and they were criticized as creating an economic incentive for fishing also especially through subsidies for long distance fleets now with that said and with those criticisms against the common fisheries policy The EU has also worked really hard in the decades of the policy's existence to improve its sustainability track record because it is committed to these normative goals. And this applies when it comes to both the internal and the external dimension. And sustainability has improved a great deal. And you can see this in a number of different policy measures that it has implemented, often in response to the criticism that has been levelled against it. So, for example, earlier versions of the common fisheries policy were more centralised and top-down.

This was one of the criticisms as well that was levelled against the policy. And in response to EU implemented these regional councils that set policy. Total allowable catch is now a base scientific advice much more closely. There is, for instance, a relatively new landing obligation rule, which responded to criticism that fishermen were having to toss an intended catch back into the sea. and in the external they mentioned this applies as well this this attempt of the EU to become more sustainable the EU is for instance very committed to only important legally caught fish this comes from the IOU regulation which Alan touched on and the external fisheries agreements

themselves have improved over the years so they've come to pursue sustainable targets explicitly this is now part of the agreement. They also, since the 2002 reform, but also improved in the latest reform, include developmental goals that come with developmental payments and support. And I'll talk a little bit more about this later as well when I talk about Senegal. Aline, how did the Thai government react to receiving the EU's yellow card? Yes, Thailand received the yellow card in april 2015 um i think for me it was not a surprise thing for for thai government um because before eu gave a yellow card i mean just i think i forgot to just saying that the eu regulations also provide a carding system where the yellow card is mean the warning card for the third

countries to try to reform their internal fishery regulations to be able to continue export seafood to EU and if the EU gave a red card to the third countries therefore there will be a complete ban of the export to the EU market. So Thailand received yellow card in 2015 but before that they have already discussed between the two governments, between EU, Digimare and Thai government for a couple of years leading to 2015. So I think it was not a surprise. And Thai government react and respond quite rapidly, very quickly. For example, by June in the same year, thai government adopt iuu policy into the royal ordain on fisheries uh in 2015 this regulation is discussed issue aligned with the uiu regulations such as

monitoring control and surveillance and traceability eliminate all form of forced labor and improve welfare of the working conditions of the fish worker on the fishing boat So even though, you know, this last point on the social welfare of the fish worker and the fish board is actually not included in the EU-IU regulations, but it was part of the dialogue, which I actually wrote another paper on. So Thailand was also set up as a new center dealing with IUU, which is called Command Center for Combat Illegal Fishing, CCCIF, which actually report directly to the prime minister. so they the government took the matter seriously the government also um set up 32 uh pot in pot out um office which is a an office that inspects all the fishing vessels catch and fish worker at 32 house right away um they set up vessel monitoring system for the commercial fishing boat um over 30 than gross, which has not existed before.

So they respond very quickly, I would say. Would any of these measures be effective without the EU's ability to affect the marketplace? Yeah, I think we already touched upon the difficulty of FAO attempt to create many international framework a decade ago before EU-IUU regulations without market power. Therefore, we see that there was no influence,

I mean, there's no active practice to be able to eliminate IUU fishing because every frameworks, you know, including code of conduct for responsible fisheries, agreement to promote compliance with international conservations, for example, There's no market pressure attached to those regulations. So I would say that it would be very difficult to have a very effective without market pressure. Anna, over to you now to discuss Senegal. So how and why the SFPAs evolved when Senegal signed in 2014? so the sfpa um in 2014 followed uh quite a long hiatus actually after the protocol to the agreement had lapsed um and then senegal became the first country to sign a sustainable fisheries

partnership agreement with the eu after they were reformed in the 2012 cycle um and the reform like the previous reform introduced a lot of changes so the 2002 reform which had also covered Senegal's agreement with Europe at the time, introduced the idea of the so-called partnership agreement, which comes from language from the 2000 Code to Know Agreement, which included a commitment to ensure that African Caribbean and Pacific countries, so ICP countries, had equal agency in how trade agreements were negotiated. And the fisheries partnership agreements of the early 2000, including the Senegal one, for the first time included what I mentioned a little earlier, this added developmental aid. So not just a financial compensation for the fished stocks,

but also developmental aid, which in Senegal, for example, came at just under 20% of the overall compensation intended to support Senegal's own goals for its marine sector, for its fishery sector in this newest iteration now in the um in the one signed of 2000 as of 2014 um several things are new all of them i would say um quite positive so for instance the eu vessel owners now directly provide part of the payment um of um of this compensation which combats criticism that was earlier leveled at the eu that it was essentially subsidizing these fleets to fish externally so now they do provide part of the payment from their access fees and also the developmental funding constitutes a much larger percentage it's a little difficult to calculate because the numbers

are not necessarily set for the overall so it depends on a lot of aspects of the overall payment but it's maybe a half of the of the compensation comes to be the developmental compensation There are also increased monitoring measures, including joint monitoring, which are meant to ensure that the fleets are compliant with sustainability targets and that there is no illegal fishing occurring. So there is support for that as well. And one important aspect is that there has been historically a loophole with these agreements when it comes to these so-called direct authorizations. So this is where either EU member states on the member state level or individual vessels try to obtain authorization from the host country directly, as opposed to being part of the agreement through the EU, including by reflagging fishing vessels, which is a way to get around these regulations and these targets of sustainability, which the EU doesn't want. And so this is explicitly closed in this current and not allowed in this current agreement, because the EU doesn't necessarily want to open itself up to criticism because of that.

So these are some of the developments that are key for the new SFPA. And what's been the importance of language in structuring these agreements? so i touched a tiny little bit about that um when i talked about the partnership language which came from um the acp countries in the cultural agreement but language has been very important throughout and language is a very important aspect of the eu's normative power essentially because it it helps determine and helps shape how the eu relates to the to its partners and now this has two edges on the one hand every time the EU evokes language of partnership and sustainability that carries with it also legal weight because it evokes certain international

agreements and a history of these international agreements as in the partnership language goes to the Cotonou agreement and to the Lomé convention before it whereas language of sustainability talks back to various commitments to sustainability on the international scene all the way back to Stockholm in 1972. So the language, the use of such language is very important and it carries a certain legal and historical weight. On the other hand, it is also language. And I think I'll call Aline here because in the Thai case, the language of partnership was perhaps a little bit more problematic than it was in the Senegal case. And she can comment on this, but ultimately language is just one of the tools. And on the international scene, language is a soft power.

So it doesn't overrule the more problematic dynamics of power. And this will also get into Aline's answer to the next question as well, that might exist in the global scene. How would you characterize the power balance in these negotiations, Aline? yes um i think we kind of that's become you know after the we looking at the two cases and we kind of conclude and we try to understand this power balance or imbalance between a year and a third country and we observe that without exploring historical complexity that anna have already you know touched upon uh and uh multilaterally construct power relations during the dialogue and negotiation between eu and the third country we will not be able to to understand or to know

the power balance between these these two party during uh the dialogue on the negotiation so our two case bring out the nature power of this actorness in the way i think um in thai case uh Thailand has positioned itself as a very constructive collaborator, I would say during the dialogue. So, but our findings, you know, because we, I mean, for myself in the Thai case, I interview quite a lot of stakeholders

and in the sense that EU, what I have observed and what I have heard is that EU has been seen as a holding an inspector role rather than the equal partner roles during the dialogue. And that go to with the language, the way that you have been discussed during the dialogue, they're trying to have a equal partnership,

but sometimes it's actually didn't come out as it is. In the case of Senegal, even the concept and language of partnership has been increasing, become more noticeable the EU cynical fishing relations still, yeah, complicated in the, you know, and I have touched upon on the maybe post-colonial than historical context, which this partnership has been operated on. So, yeah, I would say that, yeah, it is important to actually go deeper into the history and the context during the dialogue to get to understand the power balance between

the two parties but it is important however that both EU and the third countries are you know trying to bring the mutual objective in this dialogue and I think is I want to emphasize one more thing is that EU and the third country government should open the dialogue to the key stakeholders and a public debate so that the reform or the you know whatever happened after the influence between the dialogue and negotiation actually include all the stakeholders. And I think the actual phishing practice will be more sustained if you include all other stakeholders, not just the state-to-state conversations. I think that might be our conclusions for this paper. Well, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my

guests, Dr. Aline Klattak and Dr. Anna Antonova. Anna, where can we find you online? What are you working on next? You can find me online in various places. You could probably go to my page on the Rachel Carson Center's website. I'm also on Twitter under Anna S. Antonova. So if you want to follow me on Twitter, please go ahead. And I'm on ResearchGate and Google Scholar and all of those um academic networks um what i'm still working on um this is i finished my phd only a year ago and so i'm still working on bringing that work out into the world so um that's a comparison between the bulgarian black sea coast and the yorkshire north sea coast and their experiences of changing coastlines um and partly eu policy as well um so keep your eye out for that

hopefully some will be coming out soon yeah once that comes out i i actually want to talk to you That sounds fascinating. Aline, where can we find you and what's your next project? Well, I still have a lot to do with these two projects as I'm currently working on. So first, you can find me in Twitter as my name and SLU website under my CV, I think. Oh, I've never actually been asked these questions.

But yes, it's interesting to say what I do. But a lot of Zoom and workshop webinars coming up next year, hopefully. And I can say maybe two exciting publications that hopefully will come out next year is one on traceability. I would like to explore further about what does it mean for labor conditions and labor rights when you apply traceability in fishery governance. That will be hopefully a paper out for next year, and that will take Thai case also as an empirical case. And the next one, I'm looking at the expansions or the change of NGO in post-AID setting, and particularly looking at the labor NGO and the implications of labor reforms to NGO in the middle income countries. and actually okay one more thing we kind of move from Thailand and now we should start to explore EU IUU yellow card in Vietnam it's just started two months ago so will be something coming up

hopefully next next year on Vietnam that's excellent I look forward to talking to you both about all the projects that you listed here but thank you again for coming on today the listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © transcript Emily Beynon We'll be right back.