In a recent edition of a Swedish television magazine, investigative reporters have shown how a member of the country’s dominating fishing family sold his Swedish transferable quota, then registered his vessel under convenience flag and went on fishing off occupied Western Sahara.
Sweden introduced the Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQ) system late in 2009, aimed at reducing the prevailing fishing overcapacity and meanwhile make the remaining fisheries more profitable.
The popular and respected show Uppdrag granskning (“Mission: Under scrutiny”) said Ove Ahlström of Fiskebäck near Gothenburg sold his allotted TAC, then disappeared from his home harbour. The reporters traced him to Dakhla, Western Sahara, where his vessel was now operating under the flag of Cook Islands, a small nation in the South Pacific.
Also in that port were almost a dozen other Scandinavian vessels, including another Swedish boat under convenience flag that could consequently continue fishing legally with no regard even to the European Union’s controversial agreement with Morocco.
According to the reporters, those two vessels would today have been Sweden’s biggest fishing vessels if they had remained under Swedish flag. Their daily catches were between 300-600 tonnes each, Uppdrag granskning claimed.
Ove Ahlström himself said in a rare interview that he operated under a deal with the Moroccan government “to teach modern fishing technology”. Asked about the morals of striking a deal with a government that has been identified by the UN Security Council as an occupying force, he said that he was not concerned with “politics”, and added that “according to Moroccan maps I’m fishing in Morocco”.
The Swedish Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Eskil Erlandsson, who introduced the ITQ system late last autumn, said that this loophole – selling your catch shares, then moving your business, under another flag, somewhere else – was “legally correct but morally wrong”.
A university economist, asked for comments in the program, said that European fishing vessels registering under convenience flag to fish under private agreements with African governments was a “growing problem that I don’t think anybody had thought of”.
Western Sahara, originally a Spanish colony, has been occupied by Morocco since 1975. The UN Security Council adopted a peace plan in 1991, but little has happened since, and few nations have recognised Morocco’s sovereignty claim as legitimate.
A controversial fisheries agreement between the European Union and Morocco went into effect in 2006. The agreement provides for the benefits to be transferred to the West Saharan people, 160,000 of which living in refugee camps since more than 30 years, but critics say there is no proofs that such has been the case, and the European Parliament’s legal experts found last February that the agreement was contrary to international law.