Angola loses around $500 million every year due to illegal fishing activities, announced the Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources, who stressed that the country has been making significant progress in strengthening maritime surveillance.
Responding to these illicit activities, Carmen do Sacramento Neto dos Santos highlighted the launch of the Online Desk, a remote mechanism that represents “a concrete step toward greater transparency, speed, and efficiency” in inspection processes.
Speaking recently in Luanda at the 5th edition of the Blue Economy Conference, organized by Economia & Mercado magazine, the minister revealed that in 2023 her ministry recorded 169 cases of illegal fishing across the country.
In 2024, that number dropped by 15%, which she attributed to new mechanisms and policies, such as better coordination of inspections and the adjustment of monitoring projects.
“We deactivated old blue boxes and introduced the VMS [Vessel Monitoring System] and AIS [Automatic Identification System], while also deploying on-board observers to ensure compliance,” she explained.
At the event, held under the theme “Financing and Enhancing the Maritime Cluster — From Protection and Oversight to the Transformation of Marine Resources”, the minister added that inspections will soon be reinforced with night-vision binoculars and light cameras.
“The project starts now. We divided it into three phases so they don’t depend on each other. But we are accelerating oversight, refreshing the inspectors, and opening a complaints hotline,” she said.
The minister emphasized that these measures require the sector to “communicate more, provide more information, and foster greater trust and a better business environment.”
She reiterated that the Online Desk, developed in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is designed to enhance transparency. “The only step left is to adopt a new international paradigm known as fisheries transparency.”
According to her, the platform will also enable the sharing of crew information, allowing shipowners to identify seafarers on vessels operating in Angolan waters.
“This way, we’ll know who employs more people and how those employees are managed,” she concluded. “It is a government commitment — one that our sector must endorse, validate, and that requires everyone’s support.”
Source: Economia & Mercado
