Taiwan's Super Purse Seiners A Threat

Taiwan is using a new technology to plunder one of the South Pacific's richest resources‹ tuna.

And quietly, behind closed doors and for the past couple of years, other nations including Japan have tried to resist the threat poised by "super purse seiners", a new class of Taiwanese fishing boats.

Japan's Ministry of Fisheries claims that Taiwan "might well ruin the sustainability of tuna resources", while Taipei argues that what they are doing is "sustainable exploitation".

And as the boats are flying Marshall Islands and Vanuatu flags-of-convenience (FOC), Taiwan claims they are also helping South
Pacific nations.

Around two million tonnes of tuna are taken out of the South Pacific each year, 75 percent of it skipjack, mostly caught by purse seining. Tuna are herded by dropping explosives into the sea and then trapped in huge purse nets.

A standard purse seiner catches around 2000 tonnes a year but the new boats take around 11,000 tonnes. Japan claims one particular super purse seiner was taking around 20,000 tonnes a year.

Under a United Nations convention on migratory fish, the Pacific Islands Forum nations plus the fishing nations have agreed to the creation of the "Tuna Commission" which formally came into effect on June 19. It will eventually be headquartered at Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. For four years ahead of the establishment of the commission, preparatory conferences (PrepCon) have been held with chairman Michael Powles, of New Zealand, saying "capacity" of the stock had become central.

"The background is that people up until this point have regarded the resource as more or less self-sustaining, it has not been ravaged like others," he says responding to fears over the new boats.

"But there are now those who say it has reached a really crucial point," he says.

"There is a very real issue here...It is such a critical resource." Powles says that without the existence of the convention, this issue would not have been noticed until it was too late.

"It's quite remarkable that the giant industrial powers of the world sitting around the table with the likes of Kiribati and Tuvalu and negotiating the management of this extraordinarily valuable resource that not so long ago they were just taking."

The technology advantage was not all one way, Powles says, because sophisticated new technologies, particularly from France, allowed observers like the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) to "monitor every fish caught by every single boat".

It meant small nations that could ill-afford to buy patrol boats would still be able to know what was going on in its exclusive economic zone. The FFA has set a ceiling of 205 tuna boats in the South Pacific but Taiwan has managed to keep to the quota but doubled the size of its boats, while moving many of its super purse seiners under FOCs, while the company ownership stays in Taiwan.

Last October, PrepCon urged nations "to exercise reasonable restraint in respect of any regional expansion of fishing effort and capacity." In April, in Bali, Indonesia, Japan named 28 super purse seiners Taiwan had under Marshalls and Vanuatu flags. Each of them was taking 10,000 tonnes of tuna a year.

"In short, it is surprisingly evident that the Taiwanese fishing industry increased its purse seine fishing capacity dramatically by the use of FOC," a Japanese paper said.

They name seven Taiwanese companies involved saying they intentionally circumvented licensing controls "so as to have their excessive fishing capacity for tuna in the Convention Area."

Taiwan denied they were having any impact on the fishery and said the FOC arrangements were to support Pacific Islands countries.

"We feel uncomfortable that Japan seems to have concluded in advance that there is an overcapacity in purse seine fishery in the region and requesting to take action accordingly," a Taiwan paper.

It added that Taiwan had "serious talks with vessel investors and shipbuilders, pointing out that continued increase in the number of purse seiners would undermine the sustainability of tuna resources."