Seychelles becomes first country to comply with fisheries transparency standard

In February, Seychelles became the first country to comply with an international standard that aims to make governments’ management of their fisheries more transparent. The goal of the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI) standard is to improve oversight and public accountability.

Seychelles, with an exclusive economic zone of 1.37 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles), has an economy built on tourism and fisheries, including a thriving tuna fishery.

The FiTI framework, through its 12 requirements, lays down what information about a country’s fisheries sector public authorities should publish online. This includes fisheries-related regulations, deals that give foreign actors access to a country’s fisheries resources, employment statistics, and information about beneficial owners of businesses in the sector.

“We’re very good at providing statistics on the catch, the revenue is well accounted for, fisheries legislation and policy are all available,” Philippe Michaud, chair of the National Multi-Stakeholder Group tasked with implementing FiTI in Seychelles, told Mongabay. “We are a little bit lacking in information on employment and perhaps even labor standards. We need to improve on that. The information on beneficial ownership is available but not necessarily public,” said Michaud, who is also a consultant to the Seychellois fisheries ministry.

Opacity makes sustainable management of a country’s fisheries resources challenging. It can conceal overfishing, poor labor standards and lopsided agreements that privilege foreign actors at the cost of domestic fisheries and revenues.

The idea for FiTI as a way to eliminate this opacity first gained traction at a conference on transparency and sustainable development in Africa held in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in 2015, and the initiative was officially launched in 2016. “The FiTI must push us to manage our resources in a better way,” Senegal’s then-president, Macky Sall, said at the launch. “We must urge our partners in the EU, Russia, China, and Japan to help African countries enhance their fisheries management.”

The FiTI secretariat, the initiative’s administrative headquarters, is in Seychelles, an archipelagic nation off the eastern coast of Africa. Five “candidate countries,” four in Africa, are currently on the path toward FiTI compliance. Another six nations, four in Africa, have committed to implementing the FiTI standard, according to the FiTI website.

By committing in 2016 to becoming FiTI-compliant, Seychelles signed up to provide complete and up-to-date information on its fisheries sector that would be useful not just to policymakers but also to civil society organizations and the public.

This February, it was granted compliant status by the FiTI International Board, the initiative’s global supervisory body responsible for verifying participating countries’ progress. The board assessed the country’s performance from January 2022 to July 2024 based on the annual reports it submits to FiTI.

The board evaluates the fisheries information a country publishes online based on its availability, accessibility and completeness. But, as the board’s validation report for Seychelles noted, compliance is not a question of a country checking all the boxes, but rather a recognition of its progress. “The FiTI does not expect all countries to have all the data for every transparency requirement from the beginning or even when a country is declared compliant,” the validation report said.

Michaud said having all the information publicly available “means that possibilities of corruption are really, really diminished.” For example, the names of the license owners for Seychelles’ sea cucumber fisheries were previously not in the public domain. Now, this information is widely shared, he said.

Michaud said there was no corruption in the issuing of licenses, only the “perception” of misconduct.

However, critics like Pierre Failler, director of the Centre for Blue Governance at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., question the usefulness of the data Seychelles made available under FiTI. Failler said that while FiTI is a good idea in theory, “in practice, nothing is moving forward in the direction of the transparency in the Seychelles.”

He said FiTI requires consultants to duplicate the efforts of Seychellois government agencies to collect data. “It is more or less putting in one document what exists in different documents or different locations,” he said. “It doesn’t create any new information.”

Michaud denied the charge of duplication, saying the objective of the FiTI standard is for “national authorities to develop and strengthen their systems for collating and publishing information online in a complete and accessible manner.” He added that the island nation has “made important improvements” on this front, including launching a Fisheries Information Management System.

Failler and his colleagues conducted an initial baseline study for FiTI commissioned by the Seychellois government that was published in 2018. The report assessed what information required under the FiTI standard was already available and what was missing.

Among other gaps, the study identified a lack of public information about foreign fishing access agreements that allow foreign entities — such as governments, industry associations or private companies — to fish in a country’s waters. In the Western Indian Ocean region, many such deals have come under scrutiny from civil society organizations and the media. The opacity surrounding these agreements makes it difficult to grasp their potential benefits for countries (such as revenue, employment or sustainable fisheries management) and their potential harms (such as compromising marine biodiversity or inhibiting fishing by residents).

For example, questions have been raised about how the series of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements (SFPAs) Seychelles has signed with the EU has affected the sustainable management of the country’s tuna fisheries and the development of domestic tuna fisheries.

At the time of the baseline study, SFPAs were available on the European Commission’s website but not via Seychellois authorities. They are now available on the website of Seychelles’ Ministry of Fisheries and the Blue Economy. Meanwhile, pacts between Seychelles and Taiwanese companies that were not available in 2018 have recently been made public.

Seychelles has foreign access agreements with the EU, Mauritius, Taiwan Deep-sea Tuna Longline Boatowners and Exporters Association, and another Taiwanese company called Top Fortune Marine International Limited, which are now accessible on the fisheries ministry website. An agreement with South Korea-based Dongwon Industries Co. Ltd was not available on the website.

“In this region, very few countries make their fishing agreements available,” Michaud said of the Western Indian Ocean, which includes coastal nations like Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, and island nations like Madagascar and Mauritius.

However, Failler said getting the FiTI stamp hasn’t made it easier for independent experts to evaluate these agreements, and Seychelles itself has not properly assessed the deals either. “It is good to know the frame of the agreement, knowing that you can take 15,000 tons or 10,000 tons, how many boats are allowed, but that doesn’t tell you anything about what, in fact, is going on,” Failler said. “You don’t know how many boats have been fishing, and you don’t know how much fish they caught.”

The summary of Seychelles’ latest FiTI report notes that the “number of studies or reports that provide evaluations or oversight of these agreements” is zero. FiTI requires such assessments, where they are carried out, to be made public, including information on the fishing authorizations issued, the reported catch, and parties’ compliance with the terms of the agreement.

“They don’t know anything about the pros and cons of the different agreements,” Failler said of the Seychellois fisheries authorities. “So, more or less, they don’t know what they are talking about when they come to the negotiation table.”

Mialy Andriamahefazafy, who served on FiTI’s International Board from 2022 to 2024, told Mongabay that “through the FiTI standard, it was the first time that fishing access agreements with Asian countries and companies were publicly available for countries like Seychelles.” Previous agreements between the island nation and Taiwanese companies included nondisclosure clauses, which were removed when Seychelles renegotiated the deals.

“This is one step forward to know that they exist and their content,” said Andriamahefazafy, now an ocean governance researcher at the University of Geneva. “The next step is to mobilize the vast information available now to improve management in tangible ways, for example, by conducting cost-benefit analyses on these agreements to inform decision-making on all fishing access agreements.”

Another major gap is the absence of public information on beneficial owners — those who ultimately control and benefit from an enterprise — of fisheries businesses operating in Seychelles. “The beneficial ownership information is available for certain key fisheries, such as the sea cucumber fishery and the semi-industrial tuna longline fishery,” Michaud said. “While this information is provided by the industrial tuna fishery, it is not yet publicly accessible.”

Mongabay has reported in the past on Spanish and French companies that are the beneficial owners of Seychelles-flagged tuna purse seiners. There is still no publicly available documentation of these arrangements.

Banner image: In Port Victoria Seychelles, a stevedore prepares tuna to be lifted off of a vessel via net and crane. Image by UN Women/Ryan Brown via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Citation:

Drakeford, B. M., Failler, P., Toorabally, B., & Kooli, E. (2020). Implementing the fisheries transparency initiative: Experience from the Seychelles. Marine Policy, 119, 104060. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2020.104060

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Rebecca Kessler Editor

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