Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in historical perspective

• Main Author: Christensen, J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2016
• Subjects: Pacific; Southern Ocean; Patagonian Toothfish
• Online Access: https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/33758/

The phenomenon of ‘Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing’, or ‘IUU fishing’, is among the most pressing challenges confronting fisheries scientists, managers, and conservationists in the twenty-first century. IUU fishing is an activity which seeks to avoid official monitoring and for which a deficient of reliable information often exists, yet global studies of its extent suggest that it may have accounted for as much as 20 % of the world’s marine capture harvest in the final two decades of the twentieth century. This chapter considers IUU fishing from the historians’ perspective. It provides a short history of IUU fishing, locating the phenomenon in the global expansion of marine capture fisheries and the changes to the regulation of fishing industries and control over maritime space and marine living resources that took place during the twentieth century. Three case-studies of IUU fishing from the Indo-Pacific are examined in detail: the Southern Ocean fishery for Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides); the presence of Indonesian fishers in the Australian Fishing Zone; and Japanese under-reporting of Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) catches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential for further investigations of IUU fishing from an historical perspective.