23 fishing on Somalia’s GDP Fig. 6 concluded that eliminating it would increase Somalia’s GDP
from four to six percent.
Figure 6: Potential increase in GNP that Somalia might accrue by eliminating IUU fishing. Source: MRAG, 2005
4.4 Global Occurrences of IUU Fishing
IUU fishing is a global problem and affects many developing countries as well as developed nations Fig. 7. The type of IUU fishing, duration and intensity varies from region to region and
country to country. The Indian Ocean has one of the highest intensities of IUU fishing and Somalia has one of the highest impacts.
IUU fishing is a global problem and needs to be dealt with globally. The impacts of this problem, however, are felt more by the small and weak countries that are directly affected and lack the
means to protect their territorial waters and EEZs. A study examining illegal and unreported marine harvests in the United States found that up to 32 percent of imported wild shrimp, crab,
salmon, pollock, tuna and other catch is caught illegally
Ganapathiraju et al., 2014.
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Figure 7: Number of IUU fishing vessels incriminated between 1980 and 2003. Source: Based on Sea Around Us IUU database;
www.seaaroundus.org Some European Union EU actions may have unintentionally encouraged IUU fishing. Between
1994 and 2010, the EU gave more than €26 million to over 130 Italian, French and Spanish fishing boats, many of which had already been convicted of serious infringements
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. In 2005 and 2006 Spain, received 46 percent of the EUs aid and public money. In June 2010, the
Spanish fisheries company Albacora, that owned the Albacore Uno vessel, was fined €5 million by the US government for illegal fishing in US waters. Four months later, the Spanish
government gave it €307,000 to improve its security to protect its fleet from the risk of Indian Ocean piracy
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. Similarly, the European Commission banned imports of fish from Sri Lanka as it had failed to tackle illegal fishing by its vessels FishFile Lite_2014. On June 17, 2014, US
President Barack Obama established a Presidential Task Force on Combating Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud
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to ensure that seafood sold in the United States was legally and sustainably caught and to combat the negative impacts of
seafood fraud.
4.5 IUU Fishing and Links to Piracy:
