The business programme of Day 2 of VI Global Fishery Forum and Seafood Expo Russia in St. Petersburg was just as full as that of Day 1.
The roundtable ‘Digitalization. No Way Back’ focused on the digital landscape potential in fisheries and its growth prospects.
In recent years, many new information systems and digital services have become available for both the Federal Agency for Fisheries and fishermen. These systems include SIGUR, IVS Permits, IVS Quotas, MOPS, Electronic Fishing Log, Mercury and many others.
Working in synergy, they create a comprehensive digital landscape for providing electronic services to fishermen, distributing quotas and issuing fishing permits, filing and processing electronic reports, and optimizing internal data management processes. It is fair to say that almost all services in the fishery industry are already provided or can be provided electronically.
Even so, development and introduction of digital technologies in the industry is still in full swing.
We can maximize the benefits of digitalization if we understand the key development trends and opportunities digital systems offer and find the best ways to use them in addressing the pressing issues in fisheries and aquaculture. This was one matter discussed by the roundtable participants, who also touched on the challenges they have to face.
Alexander Mikhailov, Head of the Centre for Fishing and Communications Monitoring System (CFCMS), spoke about the first achievements in the industry’s digital transformation and plans for the future.
“The fishery industry first started using digital information systems back in the 1990s and these systems are currently developing in four main areas: improving the regulatory framework for digital technology use in fisheries, developing new government information systems (GIS), ensuring import substitution and information security in IT, and building a professional team where information technology meets industry expertise,” said Alexander Mikhailov.
He gave specific examples of how GIS systems are used to the benefit of fisheries. In 2022, CFCMS calculated orders for aquatic bioresource catch quotas issued to users for the first time ever and submitted the relevant data electronically to the Federal Agency for Fisheries. This helped speed up significantly preparation of relevant quota distribution orders.
GIS MOPS was used for the first time that year for salmon fishing in the Far East, enabling visualization of the catch process in real time.
Fishing vessels are now being actively equipped with electronic fishing logs (EFL).
“Almost 1,000 ships of the 1,200 planned in total have been equipped with EFLs,” Mr. Mikhailov said.
In 2024, CFCMS plans to introduce on vessels a fisherman’s personal account information system containing all the paperwork required for fishing operations.
Other plans include providing ships with medical and remote technical inspection systems, and installing photo and video recording systems on fishing vessels to combat IUU fishing practices more effectively.
Nikolay Vlasov, Advisor to the Head of the Federal Veterinarian and Phytosanitary Supervisory Service, spoke about use of GIS VetIS Mercury in the fishery industry and associated challenges.
“At the moment, GIS Mercury processes around 15 million electronic documents daily. And there are certain problems involved in this. First, while the system is quite good at tracking fishing vessels, it cannot do the same for fish transport vessels because they do not use GIS Mercury.
Second, not all coastal fishing vessels use the Mercury system.
Third, inadequate technical regulations for fish product safety inhibit use of GIS. There are certain fish products that actually contain less than 1% fish,” said Nikolay Vlasov.
He also asked that customers not be misled who buy fish products with trade names on the packaging.
“The Mercury system will soon have a module to check if the names of products correspond to the source materials from which the given products are made,” Vlasov noted.
Alexey Osintsev, President of the Fishery Shipowners Association, pointed out that, in practice, fishermen do not always get what they expect from digitalization.
“Unfortunately, vessels do not have systems for real-time automatic tracking of fish production. Yet, regulators want fishermen to make sure that the weight of manufactured products only differs from the catch weight within a designated tolerance,” Osintsev said.
One problem that digital systems cannot solve, he noted, is the delay in automatic generation of veterinary documents accompanying actual release of products.
“This issue is crucial for new supertrawlers with high-performance fish factories producing large volumes of fish products.”
Referring to the imperative of installing photo and video recording systems on fishing vessels, the head of the Association that unites Russia’s major fishing companies said that fishermen must definitely do this but, in this case, presence of inspectors on vessels at the same time should not be mandatory.
Another interesting presentation was offered by Denis Golnev, Digitalization Director at Russian Fishery Company, who spoke about introduction of digital technologies on the company’s new vessels.
“The new supertrawlers we are building under the investment quota programme are at a completely different level, mostly in terms of comprehensive employment of digital monitoring and automation systems,” Mr. Golnev said.
“That is why new supertrawlers have become a serious challenge for us and, when we ran into this challenge, we also identified a number of problems. These new vessels are, in fact, high-performance fish factories producing a wide range of end products. Yet, their digitalization systems do not enable digital monitoring and control from shore. So, we need to focus on introducing full-cycle production and management automation systems on vessels, such as SCADA, MES, etc.
We also need video-conferencing but we do not have enough communication channels for this at the moment,” the Russian Fishery Company representative outlined.
Denis Golnev said that the crew’s frame of mind was one stumbling block they encountered when introducing digital systems on new ships.
“Unfortunately, there are not as many young people on the crews as we would like to see. And older fishermen think they go to sea to fish, not punch numbers into the computer. This is also a problem,” Mr. Golnev concluded.
Despite the challenges of introducing digitalization systems in the fishery industry, all the roundtable participants unanimously agreed that there really is no way back.