Introduction
Blockchain technology was first introduced in 2009 as the framework for the Bitcoin network. The team behind the project, modernly referred to under the singular alias “Satoshi Nakamoto,” developed the system as a means to “...[send payments] directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”, a much needed implementation following the 2008 house market crash in the United States. To achieve this goal, the developers had to ensure that the network that they created provided anonymity, transparency, and an immutable record, all without the need for a middle-man or third party. This led the team to incorporate PGP (pretty-good-privacy) protocols and hashing algorithms into the network as well as making all transactions on the chain public and accessible to all. Although these groundbreaking developments were initially used solely for the Bitcoin network as a means to administer financial transactions without a centralized institution, the blockchain has rapidly risen in popularity over the past decade, increasing over 70,000 times in search frequency on Google, a concept similar to that of the Stimulus Packet in that it reflects the exponential rise in importance of technology for our daily lives. Indeed, over this decade, the principles developed by Satoshi Nakamoto and his team in the blockchain project have been reworked and integrated into various facets of society, ranging from agricultural irrigation systems to facilitation of multilateral supply chains. In fact, realizing its potential, a number of companies including IBM (International Business Machines) and Twitter have begun to hire teams with the sole task of migrating company data onto a tamper-proof blockchain network in order to ensure its preservation.
However, much like social media, the blockchain’s use depends heavily on the people “who use it - and how they use it”. Nowadays, blockchain for enterprise is more than a simple algorithm to govern independent and anonymous financial transactions, and this paper will focus particularly on its potential applications in the investigation and mitigation of illegal fishing operations in the Asian Pacific, as preservation of our environment is one of the most pressing issues at the moment. However, outcries regarding privacy invasion and infringement upon fishing businesses has sparked a debate in the community, raising the question: to what extent should governments allow blockchain-based operations to collect data in the Asian Pacific in order to reduce illegal fishing? When considering the full transparency offered by the network and the amount of success already achieved from its implementation, blockchain operations in order to reduce illegal fishing should, if anything, be expanded in the Asian Pacific.
An issue on the rise
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is an issue all too common for the repercussions it elicits not just in the Asian Pacific, but in all parts of the globe. To put its impact into perspective, the practice is estimated to cost an annual $23 billion to our global economy, a whopping 34% of fishing is estimated to be IUU, and thousands of innocent individuals are misled into forced labor as a part of these operations. These repercussions affect the economies, governments, and communities of surrounding countries, and the practices’ rapidly growing nature makes the issue all the more pressing. The astounding lack of transparency in fishing, particularly in the Asian Pacific, is the most applicable culprit for the industry’s numerous crimes. With minimal laws or regulations in place to discourage these illicit practices, corrupt businessmen have the ideal opportunity to exploit and manipulate for economic benefit. Up until this point, the industry of fishing in the Asian Pacific has next to no real laws or restrictions to fairly treat and punish these crimes.
With such lenient law codes as the issue is viewed by most as unimportant, illegal fishers are given open ground to plunder, mislead, and smuggle across borders. It is this sharp decline in regulation and observance of fishing companies, particularly in the Asian Pacific, that has opened the door for “slavery, discarding and high grading, smuggling and transshipments, mislabeling, and observer harrasment”. As professor Alastair T. Iles from the University of Berkley writes, “[t]he organization [of fishing] still lacks transparency and accountability in its decision-making and infrastructure-building”. Much like a drug cartel, these businesses scattered throughout China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands thrive off of forced labor, illegal transactions, and unregulated violence toward the innocent. Unfortunately, however, the government has not proven to be as effective in regulating illegal fishing as they have in regulating drug cartels, a disjunct that must be addressed and acted upon in order to ensure a safer, more trustworthy industry. Fortunately, the recent development of the blockchain system of information transfer has provided us with just that: a means to ensure absolute transparency while remaining unintrusive toward legitimate fishing operations.
The first projects
The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) partnered with global technology company ConsenSys, information company TraSeable, and the tuna company Sea Quest Fiji to create the first major blockchain-based operation in the Asian Pacific with a mission to “stamp out illegal fishing and human rights abuses”. In order to combat these practices, the organization developed an application that allows any tuna fish to be scanned and a list of information regarding its “where, when, and how” of production to be returned. This type of protocol allows the public (anyone with a smartphone) to quickly scan and determine the reliability and security of any tuna fish sold commercially. To do this, the company developed the app by leveraging the blockchain’s “tamper-proof” infrastructure alongside RFID technology, allowing the organizations to track the journey of the fish from “bait to plate”, offering an unprecedented layer of insight that has the potential to bring down IUU fishing operations around the globe. The chips work by first being lodged into a number of fish around the ocean. They then relay information to the organization’s global blockchain network specifically designed for this operation and include a set of information about the state of the fish. Once noting that the fish has been caught, the company, boat, location, and time are all recorded onto the blockchain as well, an immutable, transparent, and anonymous means to gather this information. Finally, if any activity at the end of the journey appears to be incriminating, the WWF can determine the exact company that committed the crime.
Moving forward, the WWF has announced that they plan to release a number more of these operations around the globe and expand them to include and gather more information about how these fish are being caught, transported, and sold. By breaking down every step of the journey from bait to plate, we will be able to determine at which point something illegal or suspicious occurred, and how to act on this activity. The appeal of these implementations is, directly, that the fishing industry can clear its name up by eliminating a number of illegal and unregulated operations in it, but on another level, such a shift would also be beneficial for many consumers and legitimate producers. A number of customers and producers are turned away from products when discovering they have unknown or mysterious origins. Indeed, as previously mentioned, the very reason the WWF began these projects was to answer a number of outcries they had been receiving from the public regarding the mysterious nature of many tuna. With a simple integration of these blockchain-backed RFID chips into their fish, companies could also very well benefit at the expense of losing a small margin of privacy. The ease of the application is that it allows anyone with a smartphone to scan the tagged QR code and receive information about the fish, encouraging a safe and secure purpose, and further cleaning the industry and our community. Thus, the use of blockchain-based technology is critical not only ethically, but it also presents a number of benefits to the producers economically.
Addressing opposing views
As these blockchain-based operations to bring down illegal fishing begin to materialize around the globe, a wave of outcry against their implementation and execution have similarly materialized, the leading of which being that these projects violate basic principles of privacy by recording each and every part of the tuna’s journey. Much like the surfacing argument of truck drivers, many companies believe that by inserting chips into these fish and tracking their location with limited disclosure to the fishermen, the organizations organizing these blockchain-based projects may be creating too much transparency, and infringing upon the independence of these companies. While this concern is nonetheless understandable, as it presents a threat to business and has the potential to reveal crucial information to competitors (e.g. locations to fish), one must consider the implications of refusing to sacrifice this small margin of privacy for the overall improvement of the industry.
The information collected by organizations like WWF is completely anonymous, accessible only to them, unless criminal activity is noted. In doing so, the World Wildlife Fund will only reveal the identity of the tuna fish’s catcher in the scenario that the fish was caught under unregulated circumstances. This is not vastly different from the privacy violations assumed as citizens of the United States and most other developed countries; as a citizen, one allows the government to monitor his or her Internet usage or outgoing calls if it is merited and in the interest of the majority of individuals. Similarly, we need a set of regulations in the Asian Pacific that submit rights to privacy rights in order to ensure safe and legal fishing throughout, while allowing businesses to carry on undisturbed so long as they abide by the basic regulations of the region. Thus, because the information collected by these projects is only accessed in the event that IUU fishing is suspected and the information is not a legal violation of privacy in any way, the implementation of blockchain-based technology to mitigate illegal fishing in the Asian Pacific should be expanded more rather than reduced.
A new era for fishing
Early on, blockchain was created for the sole purpose of facilitating decentralized financial transactions over the Bitcoin network. Nowadays, however, finance buffs and geeks are not the only ones reworking this innovation. As this paper has shown, the blockchain’s immutable, anonymous, and transparent nature enables organizations like the World Wildlife Fund to leverage its capabilities in a number of industries, particularly illegal fishing. Illegal fishing is an issue that has existed for far too long and been overlooked by far too many. A third of fishing around the world is unregulated. Twenty-three billion dollars are lost to illegal fishing every year in addition to a few thousand innocent individuals, coerced into labor as slaves. We have sat on this issue for far too long, and it is time we confront it. The simple fact of the matter is that fishing needs more transparency, and the blockchain has the ability to offer that. If anything, the Asian Pacific needs more blockchain projects to ensure a better industry, and with it, a better world.
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