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Abstract

A central barrier to effective governance and accountability in fisheries is the limited transparency of corporate ownership. Transshipment – the transfer of catches, fuel, parts or crew between fishing and cargo vessels known as reefers – is often criticised for its opacity and poor governance. Better insight into the beneficial ownership of vessels involved in transshipment and their operational patterns could lead to more effective management. Our study presents a publicly accessible database of reefers’ owners, operators, and flags. We identified 569 individual reefers and found that Russian and Chinese owners control 26% and 20% of the global reefer fleet, respectively. Results also show that 65% of all reefer vessels fly the flags of Russia, Panama, or China. This high level of consolidation suggests considerable leverage for enhancing transparency and governance. Our findings highlight the potential for reforming existing transshipment practices through collaboration among owners, flag states, fisheries regulators, and scientists.

Data

The analysis of reefers in this paper is based on multiple datasets downloaded from the GFW Carrier Vessel Portal between 2017 and 2022. The Carrier Vessel Portal provides the only publicly accessible AIS-based dataset of what GFW defines as carrier vessels used by the fishing industry (see section S1 for GFW definitions). The portal is a living database with a continuously evolving number of vessels added into the database. As of January 2023, it included a total of 868 carrier vessels. We retained all identified reefers that had been active from 2017 to 2022 matching the GFW data. The years 2017 to 2022 were selected due to the poor availability of data before 2017.