The human cost of fishing is higher than you think

IMarEST Global Fisheries Improvements Special Interest Group chair Eric Holliday FIMarEST discusses the hidden human cost of global fishing.

It's no secret that fishing is one of the most dangerous industries. In 1999, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that some 24,000 people working in fisheries and related professions die every year. In 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations increased that estimate to 32,000. However, research by the FISH Safety Foundation, an international non-profit working to make the global fishing industry safer, demonstrates that those figures hugely underestimate the scale of the problem. 

Triggering Death. Quantifying the true human cost of global fishing, by the FISH Safety Foundation, puts fisher death rates at over 100,000 a year.

"Fishers die out of sight, out of mind. That's the bottom line," says Eric Holliday FIMarEST, Chief Executive of the FISH Safety Foundation and chair of IMarEST's Global Fisheries Improvements Special Interest Group (SIG).

Lack of reporting 

The report highlights an issue many marine scientists will be familiar with — a lack of data.

When the ILO created its mortality estimates, it focused on official data. The problem, Holliday notes, is that not every country officially records all fisher deaths, and those that do may only record some of them. 

For the Triggering Death report, FISH Safety Foundation looked at both official and unofficial records. "We use everything, from whistleblowers to media to research reports," says Holliday. Even so, Holliday is careful to highlight that the 100,000-per-year figure is likely to be a significant underestimate because mortalities aren't necessarily captured in the media or research either. Then there are incidents associated with illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing that also go unreported. "We really have no idea how bad the situation is," Holliday says.

Lack of reporting isn't isolated to low-income countries that lack the infrastructure needed to capture mortality information. In Europe, for example, the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) houses incident information from all member states. "EMSA collates the information, analyses it, and disseminates the lessons learned, which is really, really good," Holliday says. However, EMSA's only covers fishing vessels of 15 metres and larger. "Over 80 percent of the EU fishing vessels are smaller than 15 metres, and these are all excluded from EMSA's analysis, which is a real pity," says Holliday, noting that fatalities are more common on smaller vessels than larger ones. 

Legal frameworks can increase fisher safety

Improving fisher safety requires a multi-pronged approach. Part of the solution lies in tackling IUU fishing and poverty. The other part, Holliday says, lies in legislation. 

Globally, fisheries "is the industry that has the least legislative oversight," Holliday says. He notes that fishing vessels are excluded from International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), and efforts to ratify a similar convention for fishing vessels, known as the Cape Town Agreement, have stalled. However, because the agreement would only apply to vessels of 24 metres and over, "even if the agreement were ratified today, it would only apply to around 1.5% of the world's fishing vessels," says Holliday.

Even without an international agreement, Holliday argues that "it's a country's responsibility to look after its people." Legislation is the start, but building on the ground capacity to enact safety measures and ensure incidents are properly reported is the next step.

Read Triggering Death. Quantifying the true human cost of global fishing, by the FISH Safety Foundation here. 

To become a member of the Global Fisheries Improvements SIG, log into My account, click on My Special Interest Groups and then tick the boxes of the SIGs you'd like to join. You can then also join the group on Nexus, the IMarEST networking platform."

Dr Sam Andrews is a marine ecologist and science writer