Sea Control - Sea Control 356 - Global Fish Transshipment Networks with Dr. Gohar Petrossian

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Links1. "Identifying Central Carriers and Detecting Key Communities Within the Global Fish Transshipment Networks," by Gohar A. Petrossian, Bryce Barthuly, and Monique C. Sosnowski, Frontiers in Marine Science, March 31, 2022. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. I'm joined today by Dr. Gohar Petrosian. We'll be discussing her article on global fish trend shipment networks. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local SimSec chapters, whether you're in Singapore, Lagos, Nigeria, Germany, Yokosuka, Japan, Chicago, or Newport. Chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and see what you can do to start a conversation locally.

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. And with that, Kimber's met. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Gohar Petrosian, and we're going to be discussing her report alongside co-authors Bryce Barthouli and Monique Sosnowski in Frontiers in Marine Science, entitled Identifying Central Carriers and Detecting Key Communities Within the Global Fish Transshipment

Networks. So, Gohar, welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Would you mind introducing ourselves to our listeners? Yes, hi. First of all, thank you for having me. I'm Dr. Gohar Petrosian. I'm an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as the Director of the International Crime and Justice Master's Program at the college. Well, thank you again. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed today are our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. I'm going to immediately deviate from the script just a little bit here and ask you how you came to this topic. Well, it's the topic of my research, really. For almost a decade, I had been applying my criminological training as a researcher, as a criminologist to the study of crimes against wildlife and in particular, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

So this is just one part of that research that I do on a regular basis. And we'll jump right into the article and the questions about it. What is transshipment? How common is it? And why do people do it? OK, well, transshipment is a very common practice. It has been practiced for four decades, really. So it is essentially defined as the process of engaging, exchanging resources such as fuel, crew, gear and fish, of course, at sea or at port between carrier. or we also refer to them as REFERS, and fishing vessels. By transshipping catches, fishing vessels really save the time and the cost of making trips to ports to offload their catches. And illegal fishing vessels in particular take advantage of this process to potentially obscure the origin of their catches that may have been caught illegally.

and why do you believe it's important to identify the networks and actors associated with trans shipment that's a very good question trans shipment is often referred to as laundering at sea and it's one of the means through which illegal fishing vessels which i mentioned earlier conceal their stolen fish most of the time this involves highly valuable and vulnerable species such as sharks tuna, billfish, salmon, you name it. Transshipment also enables illegal fishing vessels to engage in labor exploitation. This is a topic that has been explored widely in our field, especially in the past five years or so. The availability of transshipment services allows the vessels looking to evade enforcement to stay in the high seas for extended periods of time and away from

monitoring and control mechanisms and therefore engage in their illegal activities without worrying about being caught. So understanding who these enablers are of illegal fishing and who the fishing vessels are that are taking advantage of transshipment can shed light on the potential actors involved in high-risk behaviors and essentially lead to targeted policy responses, hopefully. The purpose of your study was to identify the quote-unquote central actors in these networks. How are you defining central actor in this instance? Well, we define central actors as those who are most influential and key players in the network involved in global transshipment activities. So our focus in this particular research was to

identify the key enablers or the central carriers. And we used various analytical techniques and approaches to identify, for example, that out of the over 600 carriers that were involved in the transshipment activities, only 130 of them, which accounted for about 22% of the carriers, accounted for over 72% of all transshipment enabling activities or transshipment activities with fishing vessels. So essentially, in a way, we applied the so-called Pareto principle to identify the key enablers of transshipment so that it naturally leads to targeted intervention strategies that can only be really focused on those key actors or central carriers, we call them. Now, did you focus on a specific geographic area or areas? And if you did, can I ask why you chose the areas that you chose?

We actually didn't. The study is global in nature. So we looked at all transshipment activities occurring globally, both within the exclusive economic zones or EEZs of the countries and in the high seas. The only exception was actually the Russia to Russia transshipment events that occurred within the Russian EEZ. And we use data downloaded from Global Fishing Watch carrier vessel portal, which is a publicly available website that allows researchers like me to study patterns or trends of transshipment over time. And they have that data available from 2012 onward. Your answer reminded me, I made a note that I wanted to ask specifically about why did you choose to exclude the Russia to Russia transfers? What was unique about those? It was actually the lack of uniqueness that led us to the exclusion of the Russian to Russia transshipments.

So initially, when we extracted data from Global Fishing Watch, we ended up with about 25,000 transshipment events involving carriers and fishing vessels for the five-year period that we were looking, which was June 2015 through June 2020. And it involved 691 carrier vessels and about 2,736 fishing vessels. But when we analyzed the data, the filtered data, we realized that about 50% of those activities occurred between Russian carrier and Russian fishing vessels within the Russian EEZ. So we had three reasons to exclude their activities. One of the reasons was that Russia-to-Russia transshipments usually take place within a self-contained system, and they have a very limited interaction with global transshipment networks in general. We did not include, however, the transshipment activities between Russian vessels and other vessels elsewhere, you know, beyond their EDCs. EDCs. So for example, there were incidents where there were Russian vessels involved in transshipping activities around the Western African coastline. So those were not excluded. The other reason was

that considering we were really interested in building network graphs to understand nuances of relationships, including over 50% of the activities that were only between, in fact, 91 carriers and about 360 fishing vessels, all Russian, right, within Russian EEZ. We realized that if we just included them, it would have introduced a lot of noise to the data and we wouldn't really be able to understand better nuances in the data. And the third reason was that really including them would have had very limited policy making utility. So there wasn't anything unique. There wasn't really policy relevant implications that could have come out of this, but we could have introduced a lot of noise to the data. So we decided to exclude them.

Is it also possible that that's legitimate activity for them if you have Russian flag vessels conducting transfers inside the Russian EEZ? We actually looked back historically a little bit. It's a post-USSR, post-Soviet Union activity. So it wasn't really anything that could have, technically, it's really the Russians fishing their own fish in their EZs and then transshipping between their own vessels. So there wasn't really anything interesting in a sense in terms of those activities. But there was obviously a lot of interesting activity going on when the Russian vessels were involved with South Koreans, right? The Russian vessels were in the Western African waters so those were not excluded uh specifically because we did want to understand what their

behaviors were like when they're it's not involving their fish in their waters you know their vessels etc well thank you for indulging my diversion there into into all my rushing questions we'll go back to uh the rest of the data um how did you go about gathering the data on something that's typically occurring out on the high seas outside of territorial waters Actually, luckily, I didn't have to do the gathering of the data myself. I just had to download it from the Global Fishing Watch carrier portal database, which is publicly available. Any researcher can go and examine the data by downloading and geocoding it using software such as ArcGIS. So they have been collecting this data for, I think, for over at least over five years now.

And they use, you know, AIA satellite-based imagery, signaling, et cetera, to collect billions of signals received by the vessels at any time. And then they process it and then they make it easily accessible for researchers. So all I did was really download the thousands and thousands of records that they have and then study for the time period that I was interested in. It was a little bit of a methodology question, but then how did you assess that a transshipment event had taken place? Actually, Global Fishing Watch did the job for me. I did not have to do that. So they have a very detailed discussion on their methodology of the data. So they, I believe, assess it based on the speed by which the vessels move. They also use the proximity of the vessels next to each other, the time spent between two vessels with each other, and so forth.

So they use a combination of various metrics to determine whether this activity could be considered a likely transshipment event. They actually use the word likely transshipment event, so not a solid, yes, this is definitely transshipping. But if they're spending a long period of time together, they're either not moving or moving very slowly at the same speed, etc., and they're in very close proximity to each other, a carrier with a fishing vessel, then chances of this activity being a transshipment activity are extremely high. So what did you learn about where transshipment is likely to take place, which vessels are involved, and then which flag states are most likely to participate? Well, there have been studies before, right, that examine general transshipment activities. What our study did was looking, it just extracted data for the central carriers. So specific to the central carriers, we determined that their activities were primarily concentrated in the eastern central Pacific and the northern section of the southeast Pacific. More specifically and significantly, the majority of these activities in these particular regions occurred within the exclusive economic zones of the Pacific Islands, such as Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, and others.

We also noted certain concentrations in the EEZs of Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. In South America, we've noticed concentrations in the EEZ of South Africa and to some extent Madagascar and Mozambique. And interestingly, in the Western African coastline, high concentrations of transshipments were noted within the immediate outskirts of the EEZs, not within the EEZs of those Western African countries, which was a very interesting phenomenon to observe. When it comes to the flags, we examined the flag pairings between the carriers and the fishing vessels, and we noted that the Panama and China relationship emerged as the most prevalent, accounting for about 25% of all transshipment events. So of the 8,840 events of transshipments that occurred during our study period, about 2,000 of them were between vessels flagged to Panama and China, those pairs. Others included Taiwan-Taiwan pairings, another 9% of that, and then Panama-Taiwan pairing, and Panama and South Korea. Yeah. Did you come away with any conclusion about Panama's role in this? Is it just a flag of convenience that's commonly used or is there something more sinister is probably too strong a word.

But some other reason. We were careful in using the terminology flag of convenience. So we just, in the manuscript, we stick to the open registry terminology, I guess, to make it a little bit less sinister, as you call it. Panama is an enabling country. And it's not only just Panama. We also found Liberia, Vanuatu. Those are known flags of convenience or open registry flags that have been implicated many, many times in IUU fishing. So vessels who are engaged in eye-fishing activities most likely carry those flags because they know that the punishment mechanisms or monitoring control mechanisms of these countries are extremely low or non-existent. So that essentially allows them to carry out their activities freely without the fear of any repercussions, I would say.

What recommendations did you come away with for enforcement organizations? Well, I think going back again to those 130 carriers that engaged in over 70% of the activities, I think our overarching recommendation was that the regional fisheries management organizations and other maritime management bodies should really maintain acute awareness of transshipment activities, especially of those involving those 130 carriers that occur within their convention areas and maybe increase, you know, their inspection or engage in regular inspection of these vessels when they arrive or depart from ports. Luckily, right, Global Fishing Watch also provides information about the ports where they live from and the ports they arrive to. So their activities are not hidden in a sense. And now we know who those vessels are, who they're owned by. In fact, you know, the Panamanian flagged vessels were owned by South Korean companies, you know, Chinese companies and so forth. So it had really very little to do with Panama.

So if we are to just say one word, just pay attention, target your intervention strategies or inspection strategies or maintain just acute awareness about the movements of those key or central carriers or enablers of potential IU fishing or labor exploitation practices. And hopefully with targeted interventions, there will be less of that happening in the open seas or in the waters of most vulnerable countries. Just one follow-up question on that. The 130 carriers that you identify as kind of the central actors, is there a set of common characteristics to those carriers? Are they broken down by percentages? Do X number belong to this state, X number belong to this state or to these companies? If we think that necessarily the state is not necessarily the issue, but the ownership crosses borders. We did do a sub-analysis, actually. We conducted what we call modularity analysis, which allowed us to identify the communities of actors involved in those activities. And what we ended up finding out was that in Community A, so we broke down into multiple communities, but Community A emerged as the most important one because the actors within Community A involved only 23 carriers and 446 fishing vessels, which I mean, in the larger scope of things, this is a very small number, right?

And but they were involved in 23% of the activities engaging central carriers. So they were even more central, right, than the central carriers themselves. And a significant majority, like I mentioned earlier, were by the name and the address of the owners, like we knew that they were primarily South Korean or Chinese organizations, period. And in certain cases, the same owners owned multiple carriers that were engaged in those transshipment activities, and they were engaged in multiple transshipment activities. So there are fewer that I think the intervention is a lot more feasible than we sometimes think. We just need to identify the key actors, narrow it down, and then target our interventions to deal with those actors more systematically, I guess. So, for example, there was an organization that owned the vessels called Meitamaru, Gentamaru, Taihomaru, all of them were very similar in name and the owner was pretty much the same owner. And all of those key actors were within the same community A, which was, I guess we can call it the cream of the crop of the transshipment, because they themselves engaged in over a quarter of the activities involving the key actors or the central carriers. Those central carriers, were there common destinations that emerged as far as where the cargo ultimately wound up as far as ports? Unfortunately, in this study, we did not do the port level analysis.

We did not do the movements to the ports. So I can't definitely answer that question. But I think from just the assumption made by in terms of where the owners are, where their registration, where they're registered, I would assume that they're going to either Chinese or South Korean ports. In fact, this assumption is based on an analysis for another paper we're currently working on, and it's founded. They are mainly Chinese and South Korean ports that they're lending the catches. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today.

I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Gohar Petrosian. Gohar, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next? You just mentioned a paper that's on this similar topic. Yeah, well, you can always find my work through my, the John Jay website, my faculty website. In terms of the work we're doing, we're actually examining various other factors related to transcription activities, such as, for example, one of the studies we're going to look at examines the temporal evolution of the network structures of the actors involved and whether they become, over time, they become more organized. We're already seeing certain patterns that, you know, if we examine transshipments from 2015, just 2015 and then just 2016, 17, et cetera, network graphs become a lot denser and more organized. So a lot denser, which suggests that the relationships are becoming stronger over time. And then the transshipment activities are becoming, I guess I keep using the same word, more organized than they were before. There are so many other various projects I'm working on involving fishing patterns, global hotspots, and a few others on transshipment.

But I think this temporal one is a lot more conceptualized, better conceptualized than others are so far. And one other one is looking at the transshipment activities by RFMO region to understand which RFMOs should be worrying about which vessels that repeatedly carry out transshipment activities within their regions. RFMO, is that Regional Fishing Monitoring Organization? Yes, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you again for coming on. I hope I'm able to talk with you in the future as those papers become public. But to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 I'm going to get out of here, I'm going to get out of here.