Monthly Archives: August 2017

And so, the negotiations need to answer critical questions. How will marine protected areas be chosen? How much of the ocean will be set aside as sanctuaries? Will extraction of all marine resources be prohibited from those reserves as so-called no-take areas or will some human activity be allowed? Not least, how will the new reserve protections be enforced?

Russia, for instance, objected to using the phrase long term conservation efforts in the document that came out of the latest negotiations in July, instead preferring time-bound measures. The Maldives, speaking for island nations, argued that new treaty negotiations were urgent to protect biodiversity.

Several countries, especially those that have made deals with their marine neighbors about what is allowed in their shared international waters, want regional fishing management bodies to take the lead in determining marine protected areas on the high seas. Others say a patchwork of regional bodies, usually dominated by powerful countries, is insufficient, because they tend to agree only on the least restrictive standards. (The United States Mission to the United Nations declined to comment.)

The new treaty negotiations could begin as early as 2018. The General Assembly, made up of 193 countries, will ultimately make the decision.

A hint of the tough diplomacy that lies ahead came last year over the creation of the worlds largest marine protected area in the international waters of the Ross Sea. Countries that belong to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a regional organization, agreed by consensus to designate a 600,000-square-mile area as a no-fishing zone. It took months of pressure on Moscow, including an intervention by John F. Kerry, then the United States secretary of state.

The discussions around marine protected areas on the high seas may also offer the planet a way to guard against some of the effects of global warming. There is growing scientific evidence that creating large, undisturbed sanctuaries can help marine ecosystems and coastal populations cope with climate change effects, like sea-level rise, more intense storms, shifts in the distribution of species and ocean acidification.

Not least, creating protected areas can also allow vulnerable species to spawn and migrate, including to areas where fishing is allowed.

Fishing on the high seas, often with generous government subsidies, is a multibillion-dollar industry, particularly for high-value fish like the Chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna served in luxury restaurants around the world. Ending fishing in some vulnerable parts of the high seas is more likely to affect large, well-financed trawlers. It is less likely to affect fishermen who do not have the resources to venture into the high seas, said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In fact, Mr. Lundin said, marine reserves could help to restore dwindling fish stocks.

High-seas fishing is not nearly as productive as it used to be. Its not worth the effort, he said. Weve knocked out most of the catches.

Currently, a small but growing portion of the ocean is set aside as reserves. Most of them have been designated by individual countries the latest is off the coast of the Cook Islands, called Marae Moana or as in the case of the Ross Sea, by groups of countries. A treaty, if and when it goes into effect, would scale up those efforts: Advocates want 30 percent of the high seas to be set aside, while the United Nations development goals, which the nations of the world have already agreed to, propose to protect at least 10 percent of international waters.

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Nations Will Start Talks to Protect Fish of the High Seas - The New ... - New York Times

The United Nations has advanced a step closer to an international treaty to protect marine life on the high seas, with an aim of setting up a mechanism for creating marine protected areas in areas beyond national jurisdictions.

International waters outside countries exclusive economic zones make up 60 percent of the ocean and cover almost half of the surface of the earth. The waters are rife with marine life, including many threatened species, but are subject to little governance.

The new treaty would update the 35-year-old United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by adding provisions for marine conservation.

In the last several decades, the array of human-caused threats to the ocean has surged. Fishing pressures have increased, noise from heavy ships disrupts marine mammals, gyres of plastic waste swirl and oil spills slick the waters. Additionally, rising ocean temperatures and higher acidity resulting from humanitys carbon emissions threaten whole ecosystems.

UNCLOS was negotiated at a time when we could not foresee the human footprint stretching into the deep ocean or the high seas, and so it left this vast expanse of ocean unprotected, Peggy Kalas, the coordinator of the High Seas Alliance, told SeafoodSource. We need the new treaty to close this gap.

Passing a treaty update is a long and complicated process, Kalas said. In July, a preparatory committee recommended advancing to an Intergovernmental Conference, which is the body that would debate the actual treaty text. The United Nations General Assembly needs to approve the Intergovernmental Conference, which could convene as soon as 2018. A couple of years of negotiations would follow, and the U.N. could finalize a new treaty as soon as the end of 2019.

Though the decades-old UNCLOS treaty addresses deep-sea mining and freedom of the high seas in areas beyond national jurisdictions, it doesnt address biodiversity. At the time, scientists had barely discovered some of the most exotic deep-sea habitats and creatures, such as undersea vents and organisms that dont depend on sunlight.

Human pressures on marine life have since ramped up, with technology enabling fishing farther and deeper than previously imagined. When the UNCLOS treaty was first enacted in 1982, humanity was catching roughly two million metric tons of fish per year, according to Douglas McCauley, an ecologist and conservation biologist at University of California, Santa Barbara. Today, catches are closer to five million MT.

We are fishing on the high seas with more tech and more power than ever before, McCauley told SeafoodSource. The biggest trawler today is a vessel of about 14,000 gross MT. There was nothing like that on the sea several decades ago.

Climate change threatens fisheries, and the seafood they provide; the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from man-made climate change. The cost of rising temperatures and more acidic waters could be dire: one study pegged the cost to global fisheries under a high carbon dioxide emissions scenario at USD 10 billion (EUR 8.5 billion) in annual revenue, McCauley said.

Advocates say that marine protected areas and a mechanism for creating them in the new treaty are needed to allow fish and other organisms a protected space to adapt to fast-changing marine conditions.

By increasing the productivity of marine life, large reserves would reduce the risk of localized extinction and increase population sizes, thereby increasing resilience to stress and promoting adaptation, Gladys Martinez, an attorney with the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, a pan-American advocacy group, told SeafoodSource.

Like the international Paris Climate Accord that most of the worlds nations agreed to in November 2015, an updated high seas treaty would demonstrate collective commitment to tackling an environmental threat to the global commons, Martinez said. But unlike the Paris agreement, the high seas treaty would not specifically address climate change-causing carbon emissions.

The road to an updated high seas treaty will be long, with potential opposition from the fishing industry and deep-sea energy developers, Martinez said.

These industries have greatly benefited from the lack of international regulations, so it is in their interest to preserve the status quo as much as possible, she said.

Negotiators will also have to overcome ignorance about the importance and value of the high seas and the risks of failing to act, Kristina Gjerde, the senior high seas advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told SeafoodSource. But international collaboration on marine science will help overcome that, Gjerde added.

Marine protected areas, a more standardized process for assessing environmental impacts and scientific capacity building and sharing will all be needed to address the gaps left in the UNCLOS, Gjerde said.

What the (UNCLOS) drafters did not envisage was the cascade of cumulative impacts now assaulting our ocean that requires a more coherent, comprehensive and coordinated response, Gjerde said.

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Treaty to enable high seas marine protected areas takes step forward - SeafoodSource (blog)

It will be levied at the time of Customs clearance

New Delhi, August 2:

High-sea sale transactions or imports will attract Integrated Goods and Services Tax (IGST) only once at the hands of last importer on the final price of the item, said the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC).

The clarity was need as it was impacting imports in many crucial sectors such as power and telecom.

The GST Council has already decided that IGST on high-sea sale transactions of imported goods, whether one or multiple, shall be levied and collected only at the time of importation that is when the import declarations are filed before the Customs authorities for the customs clearance purposes for the first time, said the CBEC, adding that the IGST would be levied on the final value of the product.

However, the importer or the last buyer in the chain would be required to furnish the entire chain of documents such as original invoice, high-seas-sales-contract, details of service charges and commission paid to establish a link between the first contracted price of the goods and the last transaction, it added.

High-sea sales of imported goods are akin to inter-State transactions, stressed the CBEC. Under GST laws, IGST, which is refundable, is levied on imports and exports.

The confusion had arisen as high-sea sale transactions or such imports go through multiple buyers, where in the original importer sells the goods to a third person before the goods are entered for customs clearance.

Questions had arisen both within industry and tax officials whether IGST would be levied for each transaction, which would make it cumbersome and expensive.

Tax experts welcomed the move but said that the government also needs to clarify whether such sales would exempt on the hands of the high-seas seller and consequently trigger the reversal of input credit.

There was lot of confusion in the industry on the taxability of high-seas sale i.e. whether it is taxable twice or only once in the hands of the ultimate importer, said Abhishek Jain, Tax Partner, EY.

According to Pratik Jain, Partner and Leader Indirect Tax, PwC: It states that IGST would only apply in the hands of ultimate importer and the sales made by intermediary company would not be liable.

(This article was published on August 2, 2017)

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High-sea sales to attract IGST only once, clarifies CBEC | Business ... - Hindu Business Line

Inexpensive seafood can come at a high price. To make as much money as possible, its not uncommon for fishing vessels to spend more than a year at sea, fishing continuously, without supervision; some vessels spend as much as 525 straight days at sea, and others have logged 503 continuous days. This practice is only possible due to transshipment the high-seas transfer of seafood catches between ships and global fish stocks and human rights are taking the hit.

The U.S. is the worldssecond largest market for seafood. Americans eat almost 16 pounds a year each, spending $96 billion (and that doesnt include fish used in pet food). But 90 percent of that seafood is imported, and the odds are good that it was passed from one ship to another in international waters, where a whole range of illegal things may have happened.

Transshipment takes place when large fishing boats unload their catches to refrigerated cargo vessels, also known as reefers. Its technically legal, and provides a cost-effective method for fishing boats to remain at sea and prolong their fishing trips without needing to head to port between catches. But because transshipment often happens far from monitoring eyes, it also has beenlinked to illegal, unreported and unregulated (commonly referred to as IUU) fishing, along with human trafficking, slavery and other criminal endeavors, including drug and illegal wildlife trade.

IUU fishing encompasses a grab bag of activities, not all strictly illegal. Fishing is illegal if it breaks national fishery laws or international fishing agreements examples include fishing in prohibited areas or using illegal equipment. Unreported and unregulated fishing activities arent necessarily illicit it might mean fishing in unregulated waters, or not reporting discarded fish. Illegal fishing can be difficult to accurately assess, but estimates say its responsible for $23 billion in economic losses.

Illegal fishing can be difficult to accurately assess, but estimates say its responsible for $23 billion in economic losses.

In an effort to curb IUU, safeguard sovereign fish stocks and strengthen ecological protections, NGOs and governments have taken an increasing global focus on transshipment practices in recent years. And several new projects are using technology to create the biggest and most accurate picture of transshipment to date.

Until recently, there was no global data on transshipment. A patchwork of regulation means there is no cohesive strategy and oversight, and no regulation that clearly explains what transshipment should and shouldnt do, said Tony Long, director of theEnd Illegal Fishing Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Different countries have different resources and different capacities, and some have signed up to some agreements, some to other agreements, and some have signed up to none at all," said Long. "So its an absolute playground for anyone who wants to take advantage of that situation." Additionally, many transshipment reefers fly underFlags of Convenience, meaning theyre intentionally registered in foreign countries with lax regulations, a practice linked to problems ranging from labor abuses to safety violations.

Arecent paper published in the journal Marine Policy examined high-seas transshipment (in ocean areas outside of territorial waters or exclusive economic zones) and regulations in 17 regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), and assessed the potential advantages of stopping the practice altogether. While there have been more regulations created in the last 20 years and improved enforcement, according to the studys lead author, Christopher Ewell, there also has been a "huge influx into the high seas by fishing fleets. As coastal waters have become overexploited, theyve ventured off into the open ocean. People call it the 'the last frontier.'"

This uptick in open ocean activity has prompted a slew of new tracking efforts, including The Pew Charitable Trusts project managed by OceanMind (originally Eyes on the Seas), Fish-i and Global Fishing Watch.

Global Fishing Watch was launched in 2016, and is a collaboration between conservation nonprofits Oceana and SkyTruth and Google. It uses automatic identification system (AIS) messages the tracking system most ships have onboard to avoid at-sea collisions to track commercial fishing and uncover possible transshipping events. The organization created a database of refrigerated cargo vessels and then analyzed ship movements and behaviors to identify likely transshipments. The project has created the most comprehensive picture of ocean fishing ship movements to date.

John Amos founded Shepherdstown, West Virginia-based SkyTruth in 2001 to use satellite and aerial imagery to monitor environmental issues. (The organization revealed the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.) Global Fishing Watch came about after Google invited SkyTruth to explore ways of combining SkyTruths expertise with Googles technology, including the companys cloud infrastructure, for ocean conservation. Separately, Oceana approached Google with interest in also using AIS data, and Google connected the two organizations.

Global Fishing Watch just released the first round of results. It gathered 21 billion AIS messages broadcasted between 2012 and 2016, and mapped 91,555 potential and likely instances of transshipment.

Despite the increased attention to IUU fishing and human rights issues on boats, transshipment hasnt been banned in most places.

"As we worked with the data, we realized we could tell in many cases what a vessel was up to based on way the vessels were moving on the water," said Amos. "It didnt really hit home until we put their AIS data broadcast on a map."

Lacey Malarky, an analyst of illegal fishing and seafood fraud at Oceana, and co-author of a report based on Global Fishing Watch data,"No More Hiding at Sea: Transshipping Exposed," said that collecting this data at a global scale hasnt been possible until now.

The biggest remaining challenge, however, is that boats can turn off AIS systems, meaning these results only provide a conservative estimate. "This data is just showing fishing vessels and refrigerated cargo vessels that had their AIS on, so its likely transshipping is happening on a much larger scale," said Malarky.

Vessel monitoring systems (VMS) are another type of vessel tracking technology, but these are proprietary, expensive, and the data is usually kept private. Indonesia recently announced that it would be the first country to make all its flagged vesselsVMS data public, and its included in Global Fishing Watch data. Peru followed with a commitment to make its VMS data public.

Governments benefit from sharing this information because it can help monitor their own waters by increasing access to shipping data and put more eyes on vessel activity. In Indonesia, it could help make the countrys recent fishing reforms more lasting. "VMS data is an obvious way to give the public the ability to engage and monitor whats happening and have the public participate in exerting Indonesian sovereignty of Indonesian waters," said SkyTruths Amos.

Despite the increased attention to IUU fishing andhuman rights issues on boats, transshipment hasnt been banned in most places. To date, only one regional fishery management organization has instituted a total ban, and six have partial bans. The biggest concern is the economic losses that could be incurred by making vessels return to port. And, as Ewell points out, the voting members of many management organizations are the heads of fishing companies. However, while ecological conservation and labor problems may not be at the forefront of their decisions, they tend to be sensitive to market forces.

"As those companies face pressures based on consumer activism or increased attention around this issue, there could be a shift towards these kinds of bans," said Ewell.

The best hope for cleaning up transshipment, said Pews Long, is to focus on the seafood economy, beginning with the markets. Explaining how illegal transshipping transactions potentially could taint every step of their supply chain, thereby putting their companies at risk, could persuade fishing companies to voluntarily commit to ethical transshipping contract terms.

The next step would be to convince policy-makers to comply as well, which is what thePort State Measures Agreement does, effectively creating a system of premium ports that commit to step up their patrolling for and seizure of IUU catches. (Japan recently ratified the agreement; the most populartransshipping ports have not.)

The good news is that some big companies are paying attention to transshipment. Nestl, Mars and Thai Union which brings Chicken of the Sea tuna to American grocery store shelves and also provides fish products for major pet food brands are a few major companies that have pledged to improve supply chain transparency and "reduce or eliminate" transshipped products.

The Global Fishing Watch site is free to the public, designed with the goal of making this information available to anyone who needs it, including curious consumers. Oceanas Malarky hopes the tool takes off.

"We hope everyday citizens use it to become aware of where seafood is coming from, governments to monitor their waters and see where vessels are fishing within their [exclusive economic zones], and NGOs to advance their work," she said.

Link:

A high-tech solution to end illegal fishing - GreenBiz