Management agencies

In Russia there is already a well-established, comprehensive legal and policy framework aimed at developing sustainable fisheries.

Russian fisheries management is organized through a common coordinating agency - the Federal Fisheries Agency (FFA) that operates under the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA). The Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for developing high-level policies and fishing industry strategic development. The FFA provides operation management of fisheries.

FFA has the following key functions:

The Fishery Monitoring System (FMS) provides a central platform for data storage, analysis, and dissemination of fisheries data and statistics. FMS is designed to collect, process, store and represent data of the fishing and transport vessels and information on production activity of the vessels and fishery companies.  It is available to FFA, FSB, fishery scientific institutes like VNIRO and TINRO, Customs, users plus others approved by the FFA.

According to the regulations, each vessel (fishing trawler or transport vessel) and fishing company is obliged to register in the FMS, with unique FMS code being assigned to the vessel (company) which is needed for such vessel’s (company’s) reports processing.

Data of vessels’ activity is based on the Daily Vessels Report (DVR).  All information is transmitted by satellite or radio communication channels.

DVR includes information on:

The CFMC also performs satellite tracking of fishing vessels with mandatory installations onboard each vessel.  Each vessel (fishing or transport) with output at least 55 kW and tonnage at least 80 tons must be equipped with satellite control equipment (VMS). Information from the VMS is transferred through satellite communication (by means of Agros and Inmarsat systems) to the earth station of the telecom provider and further to the FMS.

The CFMC is planning to introduce an electronic logbook system for the pollock fisheries within the Far East in 2016.

FFA coordinates a network of fishery scientific institutes which annually accomplish a wide range of scientific research in the north-western part of the Pacific, including surveys of walleye Pollock stocks in the West Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Japan Sea.

The leading role in fisheries science is played by VNIRO (All-Russian fishery Scientific Institute). There are 5 fisheries scientific institutes within the Russian Far East which are engaged in survey and research activities in the pollock fisheries:  TINRO, KamchatNIRO, SakhalinNIRO, and MagadanNIRO . These regional research centers perform scientific functions  on an autonomous, scientific and objective basis being inter-connected and coordinated through both formal discussion through several consulting schemes internally and decision making processes at industry level.

VNIRO (Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography) plays a leading role in fisheries science and serves from the studies of abiotic and biotic ambient conditions of commercial species to evaluation of biological and fishery productivity of water bodies, to the identification of regularities in the distribution patterns and reproduction of aquatic living resources, forecast of the state of their stocks and estimation of the allowable catch, protection of interests of national fisheries at the international level.

North Pacific research institutes include the TINRO-Center in Vladivostok (as a center fishery scientific institute for the Far Eastern Fishing Basin), KamchatNIRO in Kamchatka, SakhNIRO in Sakhalin, and MagadanNIRO in Magadan.  These scientific institutes operate under the FFA Department of Science and Education. 

To oversee and coordinate Pacific research programs, TINRO, established in 1925, and other research institutes have conduced annual expeditions since 1982 to survey biomass, distribution and ecological processes related to zooplankton, benthos, nekton, and nektobenthos in the Far-Eastern Seas, including the Sea of Okhotsk and West Bering Sea.  They have identified and tracked key ecosystem processes over several oceanic-climactic cycles and measured impacts on a range of communities and species.  

References:

Russian Fisheries Management System. FFA. 2011

Center for Fisheries Monitoring and Communication. CFMC. 2011

Information about Fisheries Monitoring System. FFA website

Presentation about VNIRO

Presentation about TINRO. 2011

State Fisheries Register. FFA website

Cooperation between FFA and Federal Customs Service. FFA website

FFA international cooperation in fisheries management and stock assessment. FFA website

Plan on Sea of Okhotsk pollock fishery management in 2015. FFA website