A summary of our report - Revealing the Supply Chain at Sea: A Global Analysis of Transshipment and Bunkering Vessels

Every day thousands of fishing vessels roam the world’s ocean, combing the most lucrative fisheries for catch to bring back to market. Some of these vessels don’t return to port for several months. Thanks to a practice known as transshipment—the transfer of catch between vessels—fishers can stay at sea for months at a time without ever having to take a costly and time-consuming trip back to port to offload catch. 

The supply chain at sea relies on two types of vessels: refrigerated cargo ships, or carriers, that take on fresh catch from fishing vessels and transport it back to port for processing; and bunker vessels, which are large tankers used to refuel fishing vessels so they can avoid transiting back to port and the crew can continue fishing. 

To better understand this complex network of support vessels, Global Fishing Watch applied its machine learning technology to analyze billions of global position system (GPS) data points broadcast by fishing, carrier, and bunker vessels from 2012-2019. By studying their positions and behaviors, we were able to identify when and where these vessels met up at sea. 

In our recently published report, “Revealing the Supply Chain at Sea: A Global Analysis of Transshipment and Bunkering Vessels,” we built out the first-ever public database of support vessels made up of 1,350 carriers and 963 bunker vessels. Using automatic identification system, or AIS, data we pinpointed over 24,000 carrier encounters and 14,000 bunker encounters to see what happens when these vessels meet up with ships from the world’s long-distance fishing fleets. 

Our key findings include:

• Between 2012 and 2020, a total of five fishing entities account for the majority of the 24,000+ encounters with carrier vessels and 14,000+ encounters with bunker vessels. To ascertain these numbers, we developed the first-ever public, global dataset of fisheries support vessels that includes both carrier and bunker vessels. Between 2012 and 2019, we identified 24,760 encounters with fishing vessels by carrier vessels and 14,585 encounters with bunker vessels. These events are widespread across the ocean but are mostly carried out by a few fishing fleets, including the Russian Federation, China, Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei and Japan.
• Discrepancies between the number of encounters and number of loitering events suggest transshipment activities whereby fishing vessels were not broadcasting AIS. Using an expanded vessel database, we applied our model identifying loitering events to reveal where carrier vessels may be transshipping with fishing vessels that are not broadcasting their locations. Between 2012 and 2020, we identified 78,493 loitering events by carrier vessels and 78,512 loitering events by bunker vessels that were unmatched to comparable encounters. 
• A small number of ports are integral in supporting the transshipment network at sea. While distant water fleets visit ports all over the world, there are a handful that are particularly integral to the at-sea supply chain. Half of transshipped fish, regardless of where it is caught, travels to only five ports; about 90 percent travels to only 30 ports.
• There is a high risk of labor violations in longline vessels that transship. Drawing on recent research, we find that drifting longliners frequently engaged in transshipment activity have a higher risk of harboring forced labor on board. Moreover, the majority of voyages involving transshipment vessels that support drifting longliners had at least one encounter with a high-risk vessel. By analyzing relationships between vessels and port visits, we identify networks supporting these higher-risk vessels. 

More information, more application

In the world of transshipment, the information we don’t know far exceeds the information we do know. Establishing clear rules for transshipment is critical to ensuring a legal and verifiable seafood supply chain and to mitigate the risk of illegal activities taking place. To do that, effective monitoring and controls are needed, and that’s only possible with transparency of information. 

Our work continues, and in the coming year, we hope to broaden the scope of our research to better understand the global network of transshipment. By identifying the central members of this social network--the members that play the greatest role in setting the structure--we can build a more comprehensive network structure to represent vessels and examine the way they interact. This will help us identify key characteristics of networks that include high-risk vessels and eventually reveal and interpret the structures that are fueling illicit activities worldwide. By identifying the central members of the social network—the members that play the greatest role in setting the structure—we can try to determine how the system might shift in response to external forces like environmental, policy or regulatory changes.

The path towards transparency

Transshipment and bunkering help underpin the economic viability of the world’s distant water fishing fleets and is an integral part of the seafood supply chain but it is poorly governed and without better diligence, it is likely to imperil sustainable fisheries by enabling illegal activity. Our findings are just an initial slice of information that can be extracted from the dataset we studied. We hope others will use this work to build on our findings, which is why we make the data behind this report—and others—publicly available.