The Fisheries Committee for the West Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC) hosted members of the West Africa Task Force (WATF) Technical Team from Stop Illegal Fishing (SIF) to conduct a review consultation workshop from 6-11 May 2024 in Tema, Ghana, to observe the implementation of the national level Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for fisheries Monitoring, Control and Surveillance (MCS) that were jointly developed by Ghana’s fisheries stakeholders and SIF.
The review consultation workshop was a follow-up to the initial consultation workshop on 9-19 October 2023, when the team from SIF met with stakeholders in Ghana responsible for the Advanced Request for Entry to Port (AREP) process in the Agreement on Port State Measures (PSMA) to develop SOPs specific to Ghana’s implementation of the PSMA processes: risk assessment and foreign fishing vessel port inspection.
This workshop was organized to observe how the SOPs are being used to carry out these processes, to identify any shortcomings, and to revise the SOP as required to address challenges. The initial SOPs had already improved the MCS workflow significantly, reducing the risk of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fish being landed in Ghanaian ports.
A key component of the review was also to reintroduce the Vessel Viewer application that Global Fishing Watch and TMT jointly developed which has become a crucial tool in the risk assessment process for researching vessel and owner history. The workshop participants were informed of the new features that have been introduced in the latest update of the software could enhance their capabilities to perform risk assessment.
The workshop concluded with amendments to the SOPs to tailor them to address lapses that were observed. The revised SOPs will be tested further for an additional period before they are finalized.
Kofi Taylor-Hayford
Communication Officer, FCWC