Tuna Management In The Pacific Islands

In May this year, Fiji hosted the fourth meeting of the Preparatory Conference for the establishment of the Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. More than 200 delegates from 25 Pacific Islands countries and territories and fishing states, including the European Union, participated. Paradoxically, the region with the most tuna resource is perhaps the last to establish such a body to oversee the management and conservation of tuna. The Pacific Islands countries have a lot to gain from the new commission because for the first time all countries with an interest in tuna will be working together under the framework of the commission to manage the resource. It will ensure that every country that fishes for tuna in the region play by the same set of rules.

The challenge... to ensure we do not lose sight of the importance of tuna.

For a long time Pacific Islands countries have complained about how the fishing states have often played them off against each other often resulting in different rules applying to the same set of fishing vessels in different countries. It will therefore serve to strengthen the exercise by Pacific Islands countries of their sovereign rights over the tuna resource.

At the same time, the commission is threatening because the larger countries will want to take away the rights that the Pacific Islands countries have and vest these in the commission through which such rights will be exercised collectively. Careful negotiations will therefore need to take place in the commission to ensure that compromises reached that mutually acceptable to all the participants in the fishery.

Serious issues

Already the new commission will be facing some serious issues when it is up and running. There are concerns being expressed from various quarters that the tuna stocks may not be as healthy as earlier thought. Within the regional process itself, the fear that there might be far too many of the large fishing vessels known as the purse seine vessels in the region prompted a number of Pacific Islands countries to develop as far back as the 1980s an arrangement to cap the number of purse seiners.

The arrangement, which is known as the Palau Arrangement for the Management of the Western Pacific Purse Seine Fishery has had a somewhat mixed success. While it has attempted to place limits on the number of purse seine vessels, the number has steadily crept up as a result of new vessels being licensed by the parties. There is still a gap between the rhetoric of the limit and the actual will to comply with both the spirit and letter of the arrangement.

In recent months, some fishing states have said that they have noticed a decline in catches which might be attributed to the large number of fishing vessels operating in the region.

Several attempts have been made collectively to constrain efforts at a reasonable level. Effectively this would seize the number of vessels at existing levels and close off new entrants.

In 1999, at the end of the fourth session of the Multilateral High Level Conference, which was negotiating the Convention for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory of Tuna, Japan introduced a resolution to keep fishing effort at a reasonable level. Whether they had got wind of something is not known, but it was introduced at a time when the European Union was showing interest in fishing in the region. Two months after agreeing to the resolution, Kiribati agreed to license a number of Spanish-owned vessels.

The quandary facing the Pacific Islands has been whether to accept these constraints in effort as a genuine attempt to cap the harvesting of the stocks at existing levels to protect the stocks or whether they were simply intended to keep new entrants out and lock the Pacific Islands from entering the fishery.

The debate on capacity, and what constitutes the appropriate capacity in the region is an interesting one because some of it has not necessarily followed the spirit of the Food and Agricultural Organisation¹s International Plan of Action on Fishing Capacity.

The question that needs to be asked is whose capacity are we talking about? The answer seems to me to lie with the fishing states. The largest capacity in the region belongs to the fishing states and if recent reports are true, more boats are being built in Taiwan which will only increase the capacity. China is also increasing its capacity and with the European Union entering the region, the capacity of the foreign fishing fleet will definitely increase.

Declining catches

At the third meeting of the Preparatory Conference in Manila, and also in Nadi, Japan reiterated its call to decrease the number of fishing vessels. It cited reports from its industry of declining catches. These calls have been echoed recently in Fiji where the Minister for Fisheries in a notification published in all three daily newspapers reported that the tuna industry in Fiji recorded very low catches in the first six months of this year. Are we listening seriously enough to the warnings about the impact that fishing is having on the tuna resources? Perhaps, we are not listening as hard as we should, but Pacific Islands would not dare to ignore the warning sounds at their peril. Usually the first to notice a decline in catches are the industry. It is their vessels and captains who know the difficulties of finding tuna, and they are the first to realise that the size of the fish landed is smaller. Pacific Islands governments will need to work more closely with the industry to develop strategies to prevent the slide in catch rates if there is indeed a stock problem.

The problem facing Pacific Islands countries is the need to balance their budgets and often cutting back on the number of licenses is perceived as loss of economic benefits rather than as a means of conserving the resource. This is borne out of the fact that for a long time, the Pacific Islands countries have viewed both the ocean environment and the tuna resource as an economic resource, and have treated it as such.

Conservation considerations have been secondary to economic objectives. The danger is that for many of the Pacific Islands countries, the tuna resource is their only renewable natural resource from which much of their budgetary revenue is derived. There is often a general reluctance to reduce the number of licenses especially those of foreign fishing vessels. The licensing of foreign fishing vessels often has a socio-economic and political dimension and this has often negated decisions to cut back on effort.

Fiji is one of only a handful that has taken the deliberate step of actually cutting back on fishing licenses under its Tuna Management and Development Plan.

The Pacific Islands countries can ill-afford to allow the tuna resource to be overexploited. The establishment of the new Tuna Commission should provide the framework whereby some of the pressing conservation issues can be discussed. The challenge for the Pacific Islands countries however, is to ensure that they do not lose sight of the importance of the tuna resource to their peoples.

The business of fisheries conservation is complex and requires technical skills that often we do not have in the region. The danger facing the Pacific Islands countries is that we might not have the kind of skills and technical knowledge to deal with complex issues that will be discussed at the commission. This underscores the importance of strengthening our current regional organisations to provide the technical resources that would enable the Pacific Islands countries to discuss at the same level of comfort with fisheries scientists and experts from the fishing states.

Once again it underlines the importance of co-operative approaches to tuna management by the Pacific Islands countries even within the commission. As a case in point, we do not as yet have a Pacific Islands national qualified at doctoral level in the field of fisheries stock assessment and modelling. Every fisheries scientist from the fishing states is usually a doctoral level graduate.

Working within the new Tuna Commission will not be easy for the Pacific Islands countries. The Pacific Islands countries have been concerned about developing an organisation in which the small islands developing states, in particular, can participate effectively in the commission because of its importance to their economies. They have been keen to avoid the establishment of similar fisheries organisations that operate in other regions of the world in which the developing countries who are members of those organisations are effectively bystanders while the developed countries dominate the organisation.

Two factors, however, differentiate the western and central Pacific region from other regions which have fisheries organisations. Firstly, the new fisheries convention is already a very comprehensive agreement in which fairly detailed rules and guidelines are already provided as to how the commission will organise its core business. Secondly, the Pacific Islands countries are more dependent on the tuna resource than the developing countries who are members of other regional fisheries organisations. Thus, Pacific Islands countries have been keen to ensure that the commission to be established for the western and central Pacific operates in a different way from other regional fisheries organisations.

Much has been written about the tuna resource and the failure of Pacific Islands countries to get more financial benefits from the resource. There are a number of factors responsible for this which are both physical, in the sense that because of constraints and limitations not every Pacific Islands country can develop a viable local tuna industry, and historical because most of the fishing that has taken place in the region has been by foreign fishing vessels. It is therefore paradoxical that given their sovereign rights over the tuna resource in the waters, the major beneficiary of those rights are the foreign fishing vessels.

Sovereign rights

In other words, Pacific Islands countries have failed to recognise the need to exercise their sovereign rights over the tuna resource on behalf of Pacific Islanders. This needs to be turned around beginning with the adoption of a policy to ensure that the direct beneficiaries of the sovereign rights of the Pacific Islands countries are actually enjoyed by Pacific Islanders, and not exercised in a way that benefits foreign fishing vessels.

This will require some creativity to develop innovative fisheries management models different from the current approaches to the tuna fisheries at present. The ground work has already been done through some of the work being undertaken by the Forum Fisheries Agency to explore options for a rights-based fisheries management regime.

Pacific Islands countries must accept that change is inevitable, and the current open access regime to the licensing of foreign fishing vessels will only result in the overexploitation of the tuna resource. The national institutions charged with fisheries management need to be strengthened. Fundamental to all these also is political will and good governance. Too often stories abound of corruption by fisheries officials some of which may well be true given the perceived high lifestyle of some licensing officers. Corruption in fisheries not only impacts on those countries where such officials work but also its neighbouring countries because its effects are also trans-boundary. In the management of a migratory resource such as tuna, it is important that a homogenous management regime applies to all the vessels fishing in the region whether they be domestic or foreign fishing vessels. If vessels that fish in more than one Pacific Islands country is subject to different management regimes, it tends to undermine the effectiveness of whatever measures are put in place by one country because no one can manage tuna unilaterally.

The case of the regional satellite based vessel monitoring system is a classic illustration of how the failure of some countries to apply it to foreign fishing vessels fishing in their waters in spite of a clear mandate from the Forum is undermining the effectiveness of the system. Whatever the system¹s technical shortcomings may be, it does not detract from the principle that a shared resource can only be best managed regionally and cooperatively.

Over the past year and months, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of fishing vessels fishing in the region. It is not beyond the realms of one¹s imagination to know that there is a point where the fish can be overexploited. Even if the region has not reached a stage yet where the tuna resource except for bigeye is fully exploited, it is possible for economic exploitation to occur even before the tuna resource becomes biologically overexploited.