GNVNews April 20, 2025

In February 2025, the island nation of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa became the first country to comply with the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI) standard, which aims to improve the transparency of national fisheries management.

FiTI framework is an international standard that, through 12 requirements, specifies the information about a country’s fisheries sector that public institutions should publish online. Opacity in fisheries can conceal overfishing, poor labor standards, and unfair agreements. As a means to eliminate such opacity, which makes the sustainable management of national fishery resources difficult, 2016 saw the official FiTI launch, and countries such as Mauritania, Ecuador, and Madagascar are moving forward as candidate countries.

This standard includes information on fisheries-related regulations, transactions that grant foreign operators access to the country’s fishery resources, employment statistics, and information on the beneficial owners of businesses in the sector. However, it has also been pointed out that shortcomings remain, including a lack of publicly available information on employment and labor standards, on agreements that allow foreign entities to fish in the country’s waters, and the absence of public information on the beneficial owners of fisheries operating in Seychelles.

Learn more about ocean-related issues → “Human rights abuses at sea”

Learn more about oceans and reporting → “‘The Ocean Decade’: Are the media capturing global developments?”

(Photo: Marc Taquet / Wikimedia Commons [CC-BY-4.0] )