ViewPoints Africa Editorial Team MOMBASA, Kenya — On the final day of the 11th Our Ocean Conference, fifteen countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific signed their names to a document that, if honoured, could begin to change the governance of one of the most plundered marine territories on earth. The Mombasa Declaration, adopted on Wednesday and named after the Kenyan coastal city hosting the summit, commits its signatories to a set of transparency reforms aimed at exposing and ultimately dismantling the opacity that allows illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing — IUU fishing, in the shorthand of the ocean governance world to persist at industrial scale across African waters.
The signatories span Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, and Somalia on the African continent, alongside Belgium, Chile, the Dominican Republic, France, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and South Korea. Together they commit to modernising vessel registries, publishing fishing authorisations, improving data sharing, and implementing the ten principles of the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency — a framework developed from 2023 by the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency, a consortium of environmental non-governmental organisations. The declaration aligns with the conference theme of “Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future” and follows a long line of commitments made at Our Ocean gatherings since 2014. The question, as always, is what happens when the conference ends and the cameras leave.
The Crime Behind the Catch
To grasp what the Mombasa Declaration is responding to, the scale of the problem must be stated plainly. IUU fishing is not a peripheral nuisance. It is an organised, transnational criminal enterprise operating at a scale that dwarfs many of the headline crimes that dominate international policy debates. An estimated one in five fish consumed globally is caught illegally, a practice that experts estimate costs the world economy up to $50 billion annually, while the continent of Africa alone loses $11.5 billion every year to the practice, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition.
West Africa has become the global epicentre of the crisis. An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s illegally caught fish come from waters near The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone, with the region losing between $2.3 billion and $9.4 billion annually. The most heavily implicated distant-water fleet is China’s — the world’s largest which commands an estimated 400 or more vessels off the West African coast alone, raking in over €400 million annually from the region. One-third of the vessels engaged in IUU fishing across Africa are Chinese-owned, and eight of the world’s top ten companies most frequently implicated in illegal fishing are Chinese firms, with Pingtan Marine Enterprise and China National Overseas Fisheries Corporation among the most cited.
The mechanism by which these operations evade accountability is worth understanding in detail, because it reveals exactly why transparency measures like those the Mombasa Declaration proposes are both necessary and, on their own, insufficient. Chinese firms have routinely used local companies as legal fronts to circumvent fishing licence laws that prohibit foreign vessels from operating within national Exclusive Economic Zones. A vessel nominally registered under an African country’s flag — a practice known as “flagging in” — can fish in sovereign waters with the appearance of legality while its beneficial ownership remains effectively concealed. Without mandatory disclosure of beneficial ownership who ultimately owns and profits from a vessel — the fiction of legality is maintained and the fraud continues. The Mombasa Declaration directly targets this opacity. Whether it can dismantle it is another matter.
An Old Plunder with New Consequences
The history of foreign extraction from African coastal waters stretches well beyond the modern era of Chinese distant-water fleets. European nations — Spain, France, Portugal, Russia have fished West and East African waters under bilateral agreements for decades, many of which were signed by governments under significant economic pressure and on terms that, in retrospect, were demonstrably disadvantageous to the coastal states. A study examining EU sustainable fishing agreements with West Africa found that these deals often resulted in unequal outcomes, with the financial compensation received by West African nations far below the value of their marine resources.
What has changed since the 1980s and 1990s is the scale and technological sophistication of the extraction, and the degree to which that extraction has depleted stocks once considered inexhaustible. Ghana’s small pelagic fish populations — the sardinella and related species that are the everyday protein of coastal communities across the Gulf of Guinea have dropped 80 per cent in the past two decades. One species, sardinella aurita, has fully collapsed. Artisanal fishers in Ghana have seen a 40 per cent decline in income per canoe over the past fifteen years. Illegal fishing has resulted in the loss of over 300,000 artisanal or traditional fishing jobs across West Africa.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent the destruction of a livelihood system that is, for millions of coastal Africans, the only economic system available. Ghana’s fisheries minister, Emelia Arthur, speaking from the Mombasa podium on Wednesday, captured the stakes with unusual directness: “In my country, our very existence depends on fish. Over 60 per cent of our animal protein comes from fish, and 10 per cent of our population depends on the fisheries value chain for livelihood.” She added, with equal bluntness, that her country had not won the war against IUU fishing yet: “Those who operate in IUU fishing are highly coordinated and highly resourced.” Ghana, notably, has already incorporated some of the Global Charter’s transparency principles into its Fisheries and Aquaculture Act of 2025, including provisions on publishing fishing vessel licences and beneficial ownership — a concrete legislative step that other signatories have not yet matched.
What Transparency Can and Cannot Do
The Mombasa Declaration’s central instrument is transparency: better collection and dissemination of vessel information, open access to fisheries data, published fishing authorisations and strengthened information-sharing among governments. France’s Minister Delegate for the Sea and Fisheries, Catherine Chabaud, stated the coalition’s founding logic plainly from Mombasa: “This initiative is based on a simple conviction: we will not be able to effectively combat IUU fishing without greater transparency and international cooperation.”
The logic is correct. Illegal fishing thrives precisely in conditions of informational darkness — unknown vessel ownership, untracked movements, opaque catch reporting and transshipment records that obscure the journey of fish from illegal extraction to supermarket shelf. The Chinese-owned Tian Yi He 6, documented operating as a fishmeal factory near Guinea-Bissau’s protected Bijagós archipelago for more than five years, was able to persist partly because Turkish vessels working alongside it routinely switched off their Automatic Identification Systems — the transponders that allow satellites to track vessel location to avoid detection. AIS manipulation is now standard practice among IUU operators. The Global Fishing Watch organisation, which monitors fishing activity via satellite, has documented this behaviour across thousands of vessel-days in African waters.
Transparency reforms, vessel tracking mandates, published licence databases, beneficial ownership registries — address this directly. If it becomes technically and legally impossible to operate an unlicensed vessel in African waters without that vessel’s identity, ownership and movements being recorded and accessible to enforcement agencies, the operational model of large-scale IUU fishing becomes significantly harder to sustain.
But the gap between information and enforcement is not filled by declarations. It is filled by patrol vessels, maritime surveillance infrastructure, trained inspectors, functioning courts, credible penalties and governments with both the capacity and the political will to impose them. Here, the structural conditions across much of African coastal governance remain deeply challenging. Boubacar Ba, head of the Monitoring, Control and Surveillance Department of the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission, has noted that a single patrol vessel costs billions of CFA francs — a sum beyond the operational budget of many coastal states’ fisheries ministries. In the Republic of the Congo, the entire Kouilou divisional fisheries inspection directorate operates with just two patrol vessels, covering a coastline where Chinese vessels make up almost all of the industrial fishing fleet in operation.
The Oceana Vice President Beth Lowell, one of the declaration’s supporters, acknowledged the structural gap on Wednesday: “For too long, fisheries have operated far from shore, with inadequate oversight and opaque supply chains. These fishing practices have depleted fish stocks, undermined coastal communities, and enabled IUU fishing and human rights abuses.” The statement is accurate, but it also begs the question of why, after years of similar declarations at successive Our Ocean Conferences, the situation has continued to deteriorate.
The Human Rights Dimension That the Declaration Barely Names
Among the declaration’s more striking omissions is any substantial engagement with the human rights crisis embedded within the IUU fishing economy. More than 120,000 fishers are currently trapped in situations of modern slavery at sea, according to estimates cited at the Mombasa conference itself. The Environmental Justice Foundation documented in 2022 continuous instances of IUU fishing and human rights abuses by Chinese-owned fishing vessels operating in West Africa, particularly in Ghana where vessels employed forced, bonded and slave labour, trafficking of crew members, physical abuse, deplorable living conditions and work without written contracts. Interviews with Ghanaian crew members found that 94 per cent had received inadequate medicine or witnessed verbal abuse. One fisherman described treatment as a “slave”: beaten, spat on, starved, forced to drink dirty water, and a witness to the deaths of three African colleagues due to neglect.
This is not a marginal phenomenon. It is embedded in the commercial logic of IUU operations: vessels that pay no licence fees, no taxes, and no meaningful penalties for environmental destruction have a competitive advantage over legal operators — and part of that advantage is extracted directly from the bodies of the workers trapped aboard. Transparency in vessel ownership and licensing, if implemented seriously, would make it harder for vessels with documented abuse histories to reobtain authorisations under different flags. But the declaration does not include any explicit mechanism for connecting fisheries transparency databases with existing frameworks for tracking labour rights violations at sea, an omission that limits its reach.
Somalia’s Presence: A Symbolic and Strategic Complication
Among the Mombasa Declaration’s African signatories, Somalia’s presence is both symbolically significant and analytically complex. Somalia is among the signatories of a framework that aims, in part, to protect coastal communities from illegal foreign fishing. It is also a state that has, over the past decade, signed fishing agreements permitting Chinese vessel access to its waters on terms that local artisanal fishermen and independent analysts have described as exploitative. The Somali government often ignores the needs and demands of locals and artisanal fishermen, with significant levels of Chinese fishing combined with inconsistent governance meaning Somalis are not benefiting from the exploitation of their marine resources at a local or national level.
This contradiction, a government simultaneously signing a transparency declaration and maintaining agreements that benefit the operators the declaration targets is not unique to Somalia. It is the structural reality of ocean governance across much of the developing world, where economic dependence on revenue from fishing access agreements creates a political incentive to maintain relationships with the very fleets whose activities the same governments publicly condemn. Belt and Road financing, bilateral development loans and diplomatic relationships complicate the calculation for any African government considering whether to genuinely enforce its new transparency commitments against Chinese-flagged or Chinese-owned vessels.
What a Credible Response Would Require
The Mombasa Declaration is, on its best reading, a useful normative instrument: it establishes standards, creates a political commitment that can be cited and measured against, and gives civil society organisations and opposition politicians a benchmark against which to hold governments accountable. The Global Charter’s ten principles — publishing vessel licences, disclosing beneficial ownership, mandating AIS transponder use, strengthening transshipment monitoring are individually achievable at relatively low cost, and Ghana’s incorporation of several into domestic law demonstrates that the legislative path exists.
What a credible response to Africa’s IUU crisis would additionally require goes beyond declarations. It requires sustained investment in maritime surveillance capacity — patrol vessels, drone monitoring, satellite AIS tracking infrastructure for the coastal states that currently cannot enforce any rules because they cannot see what is happening in their own waters. It requires genuine regional integration of enforcement, building on promising models like the joint patrols established by Benin, Togo and Ghana under the EU’s PESCAO programme, which trained 766 agents and conducted 17 joint patrols before concluding in 2023. It requires the renegotiation of bilateral fishing access agreements on terms that reflect the actual value of African marine resources rather than the fiscal desperation of governments negotiating from weakness.
And it requires an honest conversation about the geopolitical dimension that the Mombasa Declaration diplomatically elides. China’s distant-water fleet is the dominant force in African IUU fishing. Any framework that does not engage Beijing directly, whether through bilateral diplomatic pressure, World Trade Organization processes targeting the state subsidies that make Chinese distant-water fishing commercially viable, or multilateral transparency mechanisms that specifically target Chinese beneficial ownership structures will close some loopholes while leaving the largest ones intact.
Maisie Pigeon, director of the Coalition for Fisheries Transparency, said on Wednesday that there is growing recognition that a productive and sustainable blue economy depends on strong ocean governance. That recognition is real. Whether it is sufficient to move fifteen signatures from a conference declaration to the kind of institutional and diplomatic architecture that actually protects African waters is a question that the next several years will answer.
The fish are not waiting.
