Report | February 9, 2022

Urgent Opportunity for EU, US, and Japan to Jointly Turn the Tide on Illegal Fishing

The One Ocean Summit presents a unique opportunity to strengthen cross-national collaboration to tackle illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. As a coalition of organizations working on environmental and human rights issues, we call upon the main market States; EU, US, and Japan at this One Ocean Summit to jointly work together to combat IUU fishing.

IUU fishing constitutes one of the most serious threats to sustainable fishing and to ocean function and conservation.1 It directly contributes to overfishing, threatening the sustainability of marine ecosystems and fish populations; undermines coastal communities’ livelihoods and food security; destabilizes the security of maritime States; creates unfair competition for fishers operating legally; and can be associated with human, drugs, and weapons trafficking and labor rights abuses in the seafood sector.

As the world’s largest and most valuable import markets, the European Union, the United States, and Japan collectively account for more than 55% of internationally traded seafood2 , playing a key role in the commercial exploitation of fishery products globally, and therefore an attractive target for IUU products. This confers on them a vast responsibility for ocean and fishery sustainability, worker safety, human dignity, food security, livelihoods, and key national defense interests.