Chinese fishing vessel fleet (Photo: The Maritime Executive)

The Coast Guard is coming out with its first ever strategy to counter Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) fishing. The Commandant talks about it in a US Naval Institute Podcast.

The Commandant makes it clear the Coast Guard is not going to become the World’s fish cops. Apparently the Coast Guard will look to increased intelligence and information exchange, enforcement modeling/training/capacity building, and working with NGO. There was a suggestion, we might have some law enforcement “fish dets.”

Interestingly one remark was, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” That sounds like the first order of business.

IUU has been a problem in South East Asia and off the East and West coasts of Africa. Increasingly it is becoming serious problem for Latin America.  For a recent example, CIMSEC just published a piece regarding Chile’s response to IUU, “ILLEGAL FISHING IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: WHAT CAN THE CHILEAN NAVY DO?”

The Commandant kept referring to the recent operation of Bertholf in support of Ecuadorian enforcement efforts. We discussed this earlier here.

This is a serious world wide problem. The US Coast Guard is going to see what they can do.

When the strategy is published, I will provide a link.