The light and dark of fishing transparency

According to the results of the Natural Resources Transparency Index (ITRN) 2021, public information on the management of water, forest and fishery resources is of better quality now than in 2020.

The fishing sector improved the transparency of public information by 59%, from 0.33 in 2020 to 0.52 in 2021.

You can see the results of the 2021 ITRN here.

This 59% increase means that there is more information on fisheries management on official portals in a complete and disaggregated form, both that must be published by law (Active Transparency) and that which is proactively published by government bodies and that is considered useful by society ¹ (Proactive Transparency). It also indicates that requests for information to Conapesca and Inapesca were answered promptly during that period (Reactive Transparency); and that there is a relative improvement in the access and possibility of reuse of information (Open Data).

Among the four indicators that make up the ITRN, Proactive Transparency plays a major role.

Proactive Transparency represents the pulse of transparency, showing where advances are found, but also the challenges faced by a society that is increasingly demanding information.

One of the advances identified from this perspective of transparency consists of the publication of copies of fishing permits issued in recent years with information on the holders, validity, fishing gears, fishing estates or permitted fishing areas, vessels associated with the permit with a name, RNPA, license plate, as well as other variables of information of relevance to both the government and society. It has been seen, for example, that companies that promote sustainable fishing use this type of information to identify fishermen who carry out good fishing practices (1).

^{Another significant advance is the publication of databases of the subsidies granted in 2019 with variables that allow the characterization of the beneficiaries in terms of their gender, geographical location and fishery 2.} These types of bases are very useful for analyzing the efficiency in the distribution of supports (2).

However, in terms of inspection and surveillance, progress was not as significant.

Information on inspection and surveillance actions available was very poor in 2020, and the same situation persisted in 2021.

Although progress was made during this period in publishing the records of the Satellite Monitoring System for Fishing Vessels - SISMED - (3), information that validates the respect of fishing areas by larger vessels, very little is known about what is being done and the results that have been achieved with inspection and surveillance actions.

According to the latest evaluation of the ITRN — PESCA, there is no public information on the material, monetary and human resources allocated to inspection and surveillance tasks. Nor is information published that accounts for how many citizen complaints resulted in an inspection, how many violations were lifted, how many fishing gears, boats and product were seized. There is also no public information on the results obtained.

However, without this type of information, how can we hope for efficient surveillance? According to the National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Mexico is one of the countries in the world where most illegal fishing takes place (4). Illegal fishing is the main threat to the sustainability of fisheries, it severely affects the fishing sector, threatens endangered species, jeopardizes marine ecosystems and affects compliance with the requirements of the Mexican fishing sector in its export markets, to mention some of the main economic, social and environmental impacts.

Improving transparency in the area of inspection and surveillance is an outstanding debt that must be addressed urgently, as it constitutes the first step in tackling the great problem of illegality.

¹ Between September 2019 and February 2020, Causa Natura carried out two workshops and an online survey in which fishermen, civil society organizations, students, researchers and government officials participated to identify the information required by society regarding fisheries.

² It should be noted that in 2020 there was a restructuring of fishing subsidies. Of the six supports evaluated by the ITRN matrix, currently only the support of PROPESCA remains in force. In this sense, the quality of the standards may have changed in recent years.