Asaro MCV had previously owned the Twenty under an Italian flag, before a Gambian company bought it between 2021 and May 2023. However, local company records show that Asaro MCV owns the Gambian company that owns the boat.
Gambia’s fisheries department told the FT that the boat was fined $33,000. Asaro MCV did not respond to requests for comment, but the Twenty is just one example of the murkiness surrounding many vessels of European origin that fish abroad under local flags, as the continent’s demand for seafood increases.
Campaigners say foreign boats — also from China, Russia and elsewhere — taking local flags have become a major driver of overfishing and subsequent harm to the livelihoods and food security of artisanal fishing communities that compete with larger ships, especially in Africa. They also question how much of the profits reach local people.
“Foreign boats take our fish,” said Moustapha Gueye, a fish wholesaler based in Dakar, Senegal, adding that sometimes artisanal boats stayed out for six days and came back with nothing. “All the fishers are leaving to go to Spain.”
Changing a fishing vessel’s national registration enables it — whether intentionally or not — to operate under authorities with weaker standards or enforcement powers than the EU or to skirt local restrictions on foreign boats.
European companies argue that they invest in these countries by setting up joint ventures with local partners to access these flags, that the boats supply markets beyond the EU, and that they do not export everything they catch.
But some experts say a lack of transparency around foreign boats that join local fleets makes it impossible to track how much fish they are extracting. North-west Africa loses an estimated $2bn in revenues per year to illegal and unregulated fishing and recently recorded a steep decline in sustainable stocks, driven both by fishing and environmental changes.
The FT, working with the NGO Oceana, found 39 industrial fishing vessels that were flagged to Gambia, Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau as of July this year despite having ownership or management links to European companies. Over half were licensed to bring seafood into the EU.
Twenty-seven of these boats have fished for an estimated total of 2,200 days across the four countries’ waters so far in 2024, according to location data provided by Global Fishing Watch (GFW).
In total, at least 350 industrial vessels of all nationalities have fished off the coast of the four nations so far this year, according to GFW. Of these, 71 carried an EU flag while 108 were registered to China. Tens of thousands of artisanal boats also operate in the region.
Rashid Sumaila, professor of fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, said the amount of fishing carried out by locally flagged vessels of foreign origin “is a problem we’re all trying to understand”.
“We want to know the amount of effort being used to target the fish and know how much is being taken out,” he added. Without the fish, he said, it would be “game over” for everyone involved in the region’s fishing industry.
Some African governments have encouraged foreign boats to join their fleets in order to develop their industrial fishing capacity. Gambia’s fishing ministry told the FT it charged foreign companies higher rates and had minimum requirements for the number of Gambians they employed.
The fishing ministries of Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau did not respond to questions. The European Commission declined to comment.
In some cases, local flags have allowed vessels to fish in ways that are off-limits to European-flagged boats.
In 2021, a trawler called Alpha Peche 2 was reflagged from Spain to Mauritania. This allowed it to get a licence the following year to target cephalopods including octopus, a valuable species that European-flagged boats cannot target under the bloc’s fishing agreement with Mauritania.
Local stocks of common octopus, the species predominantly targeted in the region, were assessed as overexploited by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 2022.
Alpha Peche 2, which is licensed to export to the EU, travelled to Spain several weeks after fishing for 40 hours in Mauritania that year, according to GFW.
Spanish fishing group Pescapuerta, a partner in the Mauritanian entity that owns Alpha Peche 2, did not respond to requests for comment. There is no definitive evidence that the boat fished for octopus after obtaining its licence to do so.
Taking a local flag “can be a way of getting around the formal fishing agreements”, said Patrice Brehmer, a marine ecologist based in Senegal for the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development.
Such vessels “take fish from the local fishermen without real consultation”, added Bassirou Diarra, a campaigner at the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) who previously worked at Senegal’s fishing ministry. He said these boats can also access local subsidies and lower port costs and taxes than those carrying foreign flags.
Last year, EJF discovered that half of the 100 bottom trawlers flying Senegal’s flag were controlled by foreign beneficial owners, with the top nationality being Spanish.
Seven of the 39 locally flagged foreign vessels found by the FT and Oceana were listed on the website of Spanish fishing company Grupo Pereira as part of its fleet. Six of the seven have licences to bring seafood into the EU.
Grupo Pereira says it targets more than a dozen species in Senegal. Two of those, common octopus and horse mackerel, were assessed in 2022 as “overexploited” or “fully exploited” in Senegal.
Several of the others have not been recently evaluated, according to Brehmer.
Brehmer said that species were normally only included in EU agreements after research into the health of their stocks. In contrast, locally flagged foreign boats can sometimes “target species that have not been assessed properly or are indeed overexploited”.
Grupo Pereira’s vessel Kanbal III has also used the Senegalese flag to fish for a rare species of red shrimp in nearby Liberia, where European-flagged boats are not allowed to operate.
Beatrice Gorez, co-ordinator of the Brussels-based Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, said the boats trawled in areas containing “fragile” coral. “It has implications for the resilience and health of the ecosystem,” she said.
A spokesperson for Grupo Pereira said that it was not the beneficial owner of the seven locally flagged vessels and that it held a minority stake in a Senegalese company that owns them. They added that they were not authorised to disclose the size of Grupo Pereira’s stake or how much of the Senegalese entity’s profits the company received.
They said Grupo Pereira had been “invited by the Liberian government to conduct experimental fishing” and had complied with authorities’ requirements, adding that the company’s investments in joint ventures were not intended to circumvent European regulations or agreements.
The spokesperson said there would be no basis for suggesting that Grupo Pereira engaged in unsustainable fishing in Senegal, adding that it always strictly complied with local rules.
Selling boats to joint ventures majority-owned by local partners is one of the key ways in which foreign companies can access west African countries’ flags. European fishing groups say this brings much-needed investment.
“Local communities are getting ownership in what’s being created,” said Daniel Voces de Onaíndi González, managing director of Europêche, which represents EU fishing companies. “It’s not about bending the rules.”
In January, the University of Vigo found that the country’s fishing joint ventures with companies outside the EU paid €70mn per year in taxes and generated €1.2mn in annual turnover in third countries. But the study also found that they generated between 3.5 and 5 times these amounts inside the EU.
“The beneficiary of the trade is not usually Senegalese,” said Diarra, the Senegalese campaigner. He echoed other campaigners and academics in arguing that opaqueness around the joint ventures’ financial arrangements made it hard to know how much of the proceeds ended up with local people.
The solution, according to several advocates and researchers, is for the EU to publish a register of foreign-flagged fishing boats with links to the bloc.
Knowing vessels’ owners would help authorities and civil society to “assess the risk associated with the vessel”, said Dyhia Belhabib, principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada. Sumaila, the fisheries economist, argued a register would also reveal whether powerful local political actors were involved.
In 2020, a Mauritanian parliamentary inquiry report alleged that a company owned by “people close to the former president” enabled three locally flagged boats to “fraudulently” transfer 280,000 tonnes of fish to a Norwegian-flagged vessel over eight years, avoiding local taxes. A person with knowledge of the case and online records suggested links between the boats and a company in the EU.
Ife Okafor-Yarwood, a sustainable development lecturer at the University of St Andrews focusing on west African fisheries, added that the EU could also “make it more difficult” for boats to deregister from its fleet.
The industry argues, though, that EU authorities would need strong reasons for new rules.
“Our vessel owners report data on a daily basis on many things,” said Voces de Onaíndi González of Europêche, adding that the EU is one of the “few regions of the world” working to help governments of developing countries build better fishing enforcement powers.
Earlier this year, the EU banned boats owned or managed by European companies from registering in countries to which the bloc has issued a “red card” for non-cooperation in the fight against illegal fishing, currently Cameroon, Cambodia, Comoros, Trinidad and Tobago, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
This has led to four boats with links to EU companies that were previously registered in Cameroon reflagging to Guinea-Bissau, according to Oceana.
Ultimately, it is local people who say they suffer. “Ten years ago, there was a lot of fish,” said Yatma Dieye, a fisherman in St Louis, Senegal, blaming “big ships” for the fact he now has to travel 100km out to sea to catch anything. “This is why all the fishers are leaving.”