The Irminger Sea, near Greenland and Iceland, is home to the beaked redfish – a large-eyed, orange creature that typically grows up to half a metre long and lives for about 60 years. It has come to epitomise just why Russia ranks so poorly on the Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Index – second-worst out of 152 countries in 2021.
Until recently, the beaked redfish was hunted widely in the Irminger Sea. Every three years, scientists from Iceland, Germany and Russia surveyed the state of the two stocks in the Irminger Sea, and in 2020, they concluded the redfish population was declining rapidly.
As a result, the International Council of Exploration of the Sea (ICES) – a regional fishery advisory body based in Denmark – recommended that all fishing stop. Almost all the countries and economic zones that caught redfish – the EU, UK, Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Greenland – complied. All but one.
Russia categorically refused to stop catching redfish in international waters. It told the members of the countries that hunt redfish – known as the the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) – that it rejected the evidence, didn’t agree that there were two stocks and said it had conducted its own “serious scientific research” in 2021 (twice, it claimed), which “proved the reliability of its stock assessment results”.
When asked by the Guardian to provide these results, the Russian Federal Research Institute Of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO), which made the claims, said to request the data from ICES. However, the report from the ICES working group noted that members felt the Russian approach to assessing stocks was not “sufficiently documented”. Nor, according to an EU representative, did it offer the NEAFC negotiations any scientific evidence for its position.
Figures show that Russia, which was suspended from ICES activities in March 2022 because of the invasion of Ukraine, continues to catch redfish at worryingly high levels. In 2017, before ICES recommended all fisheries cease, Russia caught 24,361 tonnes of redfish. In 2021, after other countries had stopped fishing, it still hauled in nearly 22,000 tonnes.
Russia is not legally bound to follow the NEAFC’s decisions. The group’s members meet annually to discuss how to manage shared stocks, but any nation can protest against the quotas and simply catch as many fish as it wants.
Some states already do this with other species, such as herring, mackerel and blue whiting. Even when they agree about total catch allowance, members often quarrel over who gets what share – so they all set their own quotas that, combined, exceed the overall limit.
But they usually all agree on the science, even if they cannot agree on how to share stocks. This is why the redfish case different.