Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT) has launched a report on the issue of illegal fish making its way onto markets, highlighting that one of the most significant challenges facing fisheries authorities, supply chain actors, and policymakers today is not simply illegal fishing itself – but how illegally caught fish enters legitimate markets.
Fish laundering is the process of disguising illegally caught fish as legal. It typically involves the mixing of illegal and legal catch, transshipment between vessels, vessel identity fraud, mislabelling, and the use of fraudulent documentation. What makes fish laundering particularly challenging is that it often takes place before fish reaches port. By the time seafood enters a supply chain, the original illegality may already have been concealed.
Once illegally caught fish has been mixed with legal catch, distinguishing between the two can become extremely problematic.. This creates significant risks not only for fisheries management and conservation efforts, but also for seafood traceability, food security, consumer confidence, and legitimate fishing businesses.
While document fraud in fisheries is well documented, much less attention has been paid to the operational activities that allow illegal catch to be disguised while still at sea.
Drawing on operational intelligence, case analysis, published evidence, and TMT’s experience supporting fisheries authorities, the report by Gareth Johnstone and Duncan Copeland examines a range of laundering methods that have been identified across multiple fisheries and regions.
On the long list are vessel identity fraud, in which multiple vessels operate under the identity of a single authorised vessel, ‘cookie-cutter’ fleets, with near-identical vessels swapping identities and licences, mislabelling of seafood packaging at sea, the use of mini-reefers and carrier vessels to conceal catch origin, the activities of certain at-sea fishmeal production and factory vessel operations that can obscure species identity and catch provenance when transparency and controls are inadequate, the mixing legal and illegal catches in purse seine tuna fisheries, and documentation fraud and the exploitation of regulatory loopholes surrounding transshipment and port controls. They point out that many of these methods can occur simultaneously, creating complex laundering networks that are difficult to detect and investigate – and while many of the activities discussed in this report are legitimate and widely used within fisheries operations, concern arises when these are exploited to conceal the origin, identity, or legality of catch.
‘Seafood supply chains have made significant advances in traceability in recent years. However, traceability systems are only as reliable as the information that enters them,’ they state.
‘If fish has already been laundered before landing, even sophisticated downstream traceability systems may simply record illegally caught fish as legal. This reality highlights the importance of addressing risks at the point of harvest and during fishing operations themselves, rather than relying solely on controls further down the supply chain.’
A key finding of the report is that the true scale of fish laundering remains largely unknown.
‘Because these activities are concealed by design, the number of detected and prosecuted cases is likely to represent only a fraction of total activity. As a result, fisheries authorities and policymakers face a significant evidence gap when assessing risk, allocating resources, and measuring the effectiveness of enforcement efforts,’ the authors state.
The Spotlight outlines ten practical actions that governments, regional fisheries bodies, enforcement agencies, and industry can take to reduce laundering risks and strengthen accountability – requiring comprehensive vessel tracking, expanding electronic monitoring and observer coverage, strengthening port controls and risk-based inspections, improving verification of fisheries documentation, increasing cooperation and intelligence-sharing between States, strengthening seafood supply-chain transparency, and ensuring thaty penalties outweigh the financial benefits of non-compliance.
The report also highlights the potential of regional initiatives such as the Blue Cordon and African Vigilance, emerging frameworks for cooperation between Africa’s fisheries monitoring, control and surveillance centres, which aims to strengthen cooperation between Africa’s fisheries monitoring, control and surveillance centres and close the jurisdictional gaps that laundering operations frequently exploit.
‘By shining a light on the methods used to disguise illegally caught fish and identifying practical opportunities for intervention, this Spotlight aims to support authorities and stakeholders working to strengthen transparency and accountability across global fisheries,’ the authors state.
‘Fish laundering undermines sustainable fisheries governance, threatens coastal livelihoods, weakens seafood traceability, and enables illegal operators to profit from the exploitation of marine resources.’
