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Building Regional Capacity for Electronic Monitoring across Taiwan

By Ho-Tu Chiang and Jeremy Crawford

Sep 30, 2024

Across Northeast Asia, Ocean Outcomes is facilitating the uptake of new technologies such as electronic monitoring to support better fisheries management and improve fishing practices. Taiwan represents a significant proportion of the world’s distant water fleet, harvesting highly valuable commercial fish such as tuna that are vital to global food systems. However, these fisheries are plagued with critical issues: they operate with fewer than 5% onboard observer or electronic monitoring coverage, relying heavily on potentially biased self reporting. Moreover, bycatch and interactions with Endangered Threatened and Protected (ETP) species persist as serious concerns. This situation fosters an environment where many vessel operators engage in Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing practices, including underreporting catches, shark finning, retention of ETP species. Tragically, labor and human rights abuse also stain these operations.