The fishing boat flew a Singaporean flag as it sailed toward Batam Island in Indonesia. But when Indonesian Navy officers intercepted the vessel and boarded it in February 2018, they discovered that the boat, and its four-person crew, were actually from Taiwan. Flying a false flag wasn’t the only offense customs officials also found 41 rice sacks packed with a ton of methamphetamine, or crystal meth, hidden beneath food supplies in the vessel’s hold.
The use of fishing vessels to transport drugs is a fairly common occurrence, according to a new study published in Fish and Fisheries. In fact, the study found that drug trafficking on fishing vessels has actually tripled over the last eight years, accounting for about 15% of the global retail value of illicit drugs.
Dyhia Belhabib, the paper’s lead author as well as the principal fisheries investigator at Ecotrust Canada and founder of Spyglass, an online tool that maps out vessels involved in maritime crimes, said there’s actually a distinct lack of data on drug trafficking in the fisheries sector. This study aimed to bridge that gap.
To investigate the relationship between the drug trade and global fisheries, Belhabib and her co-researchers gathered all of the available data on 292 reported global cases between 2010 and 2017, and used estimation techniques to fill in any missing information. For instance, when they had the amount of drugs, but not the price, they calculated prices based on data on the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) database.
The second step was to use what we call a Monte Carlo approach, Belhabib told Mongabay. We simulate how much of that is caught versus how much it has never been caught because there was no monitoring or because monitored has failed in catching them and with that, the amount, and the price, we actually infer the maximum value of drugs that could be in circulation to the seafood sector, and the average between that maximum value and minimum value gives you an estimated 15%.
When Belhabib began her research, she said she expected to find vessels trafficking drugs to also be involved in other maritime crimes like illegal fishing, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. One possible explanation is that drug traffickers may want clean vessels that have not been involved in anything before, so they don’t raise suspicion with coast guard or navy officials when entering territorial waters, Belhabib said.
Belhabib and her co-investigators also found that drug trafficking tended to involve small vessels, such as dhows, pangas, pirogues and artisanal boats, rather than larger, industrial fishing vessels. While the study says more research needs to be done to understand the reasons for why small-scale fishermen get involved in the drug trade, it surmises that collapsing fish stocks and marine conservation measures like fishing restrictions could be pushing them in this direction. In other instances, drug traffickers will threaten fishermen to cooperate or even hijack their vessels. With this in mind, Belhabib said it’s important not to implicate the fishermen who may have unwillingly gotten involved in the trade.
While fishermen themselves may not be involved in illegal fishing, drug money may be reinvested into large-scale illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities, which may lead to unsustainable fishing and entire fisheries collapse, the study suggests.
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