It’s not yet dawn, but the dock is already busy with people and trucks moving fish and containers, while provisioning vessels for the next voyage. The sea birds are nearby – always hopeful for a scrap or two. As the wind picks up, the air carries a familiar blend of ocean, diesel, and fish.
Given how long our waterfronts have been working, the scent seems almost like memory woven into the fabric of so many communities for so many generations. The hard work and dedication of so many people really makes one appreciate what goes into every can of tuna, fillet of cod, and every other necessary food that comes from the ocean. For millennia, supplying traders, communities, and families with nutritious food has taken the blood, sweat and tears of commercial fishermen working hard to make an honest living, but now – it also takes a lot of data.
Today, seafood producers need data about the catch to ensure ethical sourcing, reduce regulatory burdens, and to uphold the long-term sustainability of fish stocks and ecosystems – which play a crucial role in human health and livelihoods worldwide. To support seafood producers in their efforts to build sustainable supply chains, we must finally:
(1) adopt modern, reliable technologies into fishery assessments,
(2) expand access to exempted fishing permits that promote fishing opportunities,
(3) improve the responsiveness of fisheries management.
To meaningfully unlock the benefits of new technology in USA fisheries, managers of existing technology permitting programs must provide a timely pathway for USA commercial fishermen to access technologies proven in similar, international fisheries. Given that recent studies have found active under-harvesting of important USA fish stocks due to data uncertainty, the glacial pace of technology permitting at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) continues to place USA commercial fishermen at a widening economic disadvantage to global competitors.
Furthermore, the sole-source, monopoly Electronic Monitoring (EM) technology provider model that has been favored by some fisheries managers, industry associations, and environmental NGO partners has led to per-sea day observation costs for USA fishermen that are nearly twice those of competitive, multi-provider models within important USA fisheries. To break the downward cycle of curtailed quotas and spiraling compliance costs, FlyWire offers a proven solution to resolve the unsustainable fiscal trajectory of fishery monitoring: a low-risk program that improves stock assessment precision, fills observer data gaps, and slashes up to 50% of existing top-line fishery monitoring costs.
Simply put, FlyWire thinks – and acts — differently. We offer a “fisher first” approach to EM that centers fishery monitoring solutions and services around the things commercial fishermen need to succeed. FlyWire’s commitment to working directly with fishermen remains unmatched. We believe that earning the trust of producers is required to modernize data collection and analytical practices within USA commercial fisheries, which ultimately improves the responsiveness of fisheries management and unlocks access to fishing opportunities nationwide. FlyWire delivers fishery monitoring services, including hardware, technical services, and data insights to commercial fishermen domestically and internationally. Our proven EM solution for commercial fisheries:
(1) creates supply chain value,
(2) improves stock assessment precision,
(3) cuts the top-line cost of observing a fishery in half.
The portable EM technology we invented in 2015 and have continuously improved can be efficiently shared among a pool of vessels, which further stabilizes and improves coverage of fishing activities within a fishery. Producer partners use FlyWire’s EM data services to refine fishing practices, reduce bycatch, improve crew outcomes, and reduce compliance costs for vessel owners and operators. Our commitment to validating fishermen’s lived experience creates the conditions for extraordinary progress. For USA commercial fishermen, FlyWire offers a better, cheaper, more reliable technology solution to cooperatively fill data gaps in critical fishery assessments.
FlyWire’s patented EM technology combined with unrivaled EM know-how has been a game changer for seafood producers, particularly those that source catch from distant-water tuna longline vessels. In an industry-led initiative, Bolton Food Tri Marine and fleet owners partnered with FlyWire to develop an EM program to support fisheries assessments, such as MSC assessment of the Atlantic Albacore Tuna fishery. FlyWire’s patented EM solution reduced EM program costs by 41%, compared to traditional EM tools within twenty-four months of program launch – a market-moving milestone. “It is amazing to see what’s possible with a different approach to EM. Because our team is focused on fishermen, we are succeeding in driving down costs, increasing value and managing data risk,” said Christa M. Svensson, Global Sustainable Fishing & Healthy Oceans Manager at Bolton Food Tri Marine. Through this industry-led initiative, FlyWire’s solution significantly reduced costs over traditional EM, demonstrated a value-add EM model, achieved ongoing MSC conditions, and helped shape RFMO technology policy. Today, this industry-led catch monitoring program for distant-water tuna remains a key source of data for assessments within the Atlantic Albacore Tuna fishery with expansion to the Pacific Ocean underway.
FlyWire’s proven technology and unmatched customer service enables seafood producers to meaningfully contribute to: (1) improvements in stock assessment precision, (2) unlocking larger sustainable catch limits, and (3) significant reductions in compliance costs for on-the-water monitoring.
Unlocking this value for commercial fishermen benefits the entire seafood supply chain by ensuring that the catch ultimately sold to consumers is harvested responsibly, sustainably, and transparently. Unfortunately, these critical benefits remain out of reach for too many USA commercial fishermen and producers, as well as the businesses they supply – from local restaurants to big-box retailers, due to limited access to exempted fishing permits and the exclusion of data provided by many cooperative research groups in fisheries assessments.
NMFS’ outdated process of approving technology innovations via exempted fishing permits has left industry stakeholders that seek to modernize their vessel’s data collection stuck in open-ended holding patterns, waiting years for permit applications to wind their way through mercurial Regional Fishery Management Councils. Many American fishermen have just given up and quit.
For example, the NMFS regulates each commercial fishery individually within eight regions throughout the USA. Although this approach has been beneficial in many key contexts within fisheries management – it has proven to be a uniquely ill-suited approach to modern technology implementation. In USA fisheries, the regional and individualized approach has created a regulatory landscape where each piece of new technology must be individually approved for hundreds of individual fisheries, for each of the eight regions, every time a new innovation occurs. Furthermore, because of the Magnuson–Stevens Act’s (MSA) statutory silence on digital alternatives to manual data collection, the NMFS has maintained a decades-old policy requiring fisheries stakeholders to wait through a three-to-seven year-long exempted fishing permit process before receiving an approval for any individual piece of new technology within an individual fishery. Given the sheer volume of NMFS and Regional Fishery Management Council resources consumed by each technology approval, and the concurrent explosive pace of technology innovation – it is understandable that over the past ten years, the NMFS has failed to approve high-volume use of EM in fisheries throughout the USA despite active Congressional mandates to modernize data collection in the Nation’s commercial fisheries. The NMFS’ outdated process of approving technology innovations via exempted fishing permits has left industry stakeholders that seek to modernize their vessel’s data collection stuck in open-ended holding patterns, waiting years for permit applications to wind their way through mercurial Regional Fishery Management Councils. Many American fishermen have just given up and quit.
Ultimately, the reason modern technologies such as EM remain underutilized in USA fisheries is because the NMFS’ permitting and approval processes have not kept up with private-sector innovation over the last two decades. Currently, the NMFS has only approved human observers to collect data in almost every USA fishery, however, these same fishery managers have yet to create a credible pathway to incorporate modern data collection technologies, such as EM, at scale.
This lack of timely approval and permitting of modern technology has resulted in senseless costs to fishermen and taxpayers as well as lower observer coverage overall due to staffing challenges facing many human observer programs. Considering that the MSA was last reauthorized in 2006, combined with the impact to fisheries post-Chevron in 2025, it is even more imperative that USA seafood producers have meaningful access to the best USA technology so they can respond in real-time to ocean conditions.
Furthermore, just like in other USA food producing industries, the NMFS should broaden its interpretation of MSA’s statutory silence to explicitly approve the uptake of modern technology. Consistent with other food producing industries, USA seafood producers should be allowed to use proven technology that poses no systemic risk to existing data systems, without being forced through redundant multi-year permitting and exemption processes. If a new generation of fisheries stakeholders are empowered to succeed through these commonsense reforms, then we can all be confident that USA fisheries will continue to thrive for generations to come.
Jacob Isaac-Lowry is CEO of Flywire. He welcomes your questions and can be reached via email here.
Our Industry Focus series profiles companies that are helping to evolve fisheries management through the application of innovative technologies. If you’re interested in highlighting your company on EM4Fish, please reach us at info@em4.fish.
