So far, Río Negro is the only Argentine coastal province having enforced on the resident fishing fleet an anti-abuse surveillance system such as SIMPO. One of the goals of the province is to gain the international Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification for its fishing produce, thus increasing its prize and penetration into premium markets..

By request of the Río Negro Fisheries Directorate, INVAP have developed and installed a Fishing and Oceanographic Information and Monitoring System (SIMPO) for a better understanding and controlling of the resources within San Matías gulf, the coastal section of this province.

SIMPO is fed by many independent automatic information sources, both commercial and scientific. This benefits fishermen, who get an exact and updated report about the conditions of the sea.

It also allows the government to prevent overfishing, invasion of restricted areas and tax-evasion practices, as it gives the Fisheries Directorate many independent sources of information which make the “doctoring” of results virtually impossible.

Thus, SIMPO gives the technological basis for certifying Rio Negro’s catch as sustainable. Certification, in this case, is to be awarded by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), an organism founded in 1996 by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever (the biggest global buyer of marine products) to promote “green practices” in an industry with a dismal trajectory. MSC have a name for giving their certification very sparingly, on a case-by-case and species-by-species basis, taking years to study each award. SIMPO therefore empowers the province to more carefully administer its resources and fetch higher prices at premium markets, which are paying up to 25% more for MSC certified products.

SIMPO has had a measurable impact on the industry: unreported captures have practically disappeared, as have statements misinforming the authorities on the quantity or quality of the actual catches, or their export at under-rated tariffs. All in all, SIMPO has proven quite valuable to limit depredation and tax-evasion over a big stretch of the Argentine Sea very difficult to control by conventional means.

SIMPO is based on a private communications network bringing remote data (originated in mobile sensors aboard ships and stationary sensors on buoys) to an operational center, and from this headquarters back to the ships.

The incoming data stream has dual content. It provides navigational information (real-time GPS position of each ship, its speed and course), and video and still images of every capture hauled in on board taken by automated, tamperproof watertight cameras. Other commercially significant inputs are to be added soon: the weight of each catch, the temperature variations in the freezing chambers on board, etc. But the ships also act as oceanographic sensors, giving SIMPO a continuous input of ecologically relevant information: water salinity, temperature, chlorophyll and of other phytopigments concentrations; all of which may result in the success or failure of a fishing outing.

Stationary units on buoys have oceanographic sensors and communication equipments that give SIMPO the seasonal variables of the marine ecosystem around the year. Thus, the Operational Center has an overall picture of all that is happening, and may run specific searches, combine information from different sources, generate alarms and on-line reports, feeding the skippers and fishing companies with useful information on meteorology, the position of their fleet, raw material for data mining, etc.

Using SIMPO, Río Negro fishing authorities monitor in real time the position and speed of each ship in its coastal waters from their headquarters at the Admiral Storni Marine Institute, at San Antonio Oeste. The same data are given to the Coast Guard, (Prefectura Naval Argentina), so that the environment is doubly controlled.