A boarding team from the Gambian Navy has detained a trawler found to be in breach of a stack of regulations – and to be fraudulently branding frozen products destined for Euuropean markets with an expired eco-label certification.
The Naval party boarded trawler Twenty in Gambian waters. While licenced to fish for shrimp, only fraction of the catch in Twenty’s fishroom was found to be shrimp, and Gambian investigators suspect the claim to be fishing for shrimp was simply to be able to use gear made with smaller mesh netting.
Even so, the netting in Twenty’s gear was below the minimum size allowable for shrimp fishing.
In addition, Twenty’s skipper had failed to keep an up-to-date logbook, and had also failed to ensure that the trawler’s position and identification were being transmitted by AIS. Twenty has been detained in the port of Banjul.
Cartons of frozen shrimp found in the fishroom were branded with the name of Asaro, a fishing company based in Mazara del Vallo in Sicily. Asaro was awarded Friend of the Sea certification in 2018, and the scheme included Twenty. This certification expired in 2021.
Twenty is the fifth trawler to be arrested through this year’s Operation Gambian Coastal Defense, a renewed five-year partnership between Sea Shepherd Global and the Gambian Ministry of Defence to conduct at-sea patrols.
Sea Shepherd has worked in partnership with the governments of Gabon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tanzania, Benin, Namibia and The Gambia since 2016 to combat IUU fishing by providing civilian offshore patrol vessels to African coastal and island states so that authorities can enforce fisheries regulations and conservation laws in their sovereign waters.
To date, these partnerships have resulted in the arrest of 86 vessels for illegal fishing and other fisheries crimes.
