Controversial plans to close vast areas of the Pacific to tuna fishing were up for discussion in December 2010. What role will New Zealand play?
Ginger and wasabi with your share of a $3 billion Pacific tuna fishery?
Far away from the flashest sushi bars (and humblest school lunch boxes), battle lines are being drawn for the right to fish in what were once lauded as the world’s last healthy tuna grounds.
Delegates from 25 countries, including New Zealand, have met in Hawaii for the seventh annual session of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commision (WCPFC).
Up for discussion at the December 6-10 meeting was the closure of vast areas of the Pacific high seas to purse seine fishing vessels – boats with large nets that surround schools of fish and cinch at the bottom, like the drawstring of a purse.
It’s controversial. Environmentalists want total bans, encompassing all forms of fishing. Fishing nations say bans are a bad way to manage a highly migratory species. Some island nations simply want more stringent monitoring.
One thing everybody agrees on: there is no longer enough tuna left to do nothing.
Provisional data puts last year’s purse seine catch at 1.8 million metric tonnes, the sixth straight record catch, in a region where bigeye tuna is in serious trouble, and even the once apparently inexhaustible skipjack may be under stress.
The problem with purse seine fishing, say opponents, is it’s indiscriminate. Juvenile stock, turtles, sharks – “almost the entire cast of Finding Nemo,” wrote Charles Clover in The End of the Line – gets caught and killed in the net. And now the impacts of overfishing are starting to show.
A recently released report, The Future of Pacific Island Fisheries, commissioned by two agencies involved in the management of Pacific fisheries, says tuna takes are too high overall. It presents three possible future scenarios – including total collapse of the industry in 25 years.
“Two of the four important species of tuna in the region cannot support increasing catches. Biological limits are being approached and/or surpassed,” the report says.
“Given the poor state of knowledge of the pelagic ecosystem, there is some concern about the irreversibility of the bigeye decline. Even the potential of skipjack, thought to be the largest fishery resource of the region, is not infinite.”
Environmental lobby Greenpeace is calling for 40% of the world’s oceans to be declared marine reserves.
In the Pacific, Greenpeace says “desperately needed measures” include halving the number of tuna taken, a ban on the offloading of catch at sea and the creation of what it will call the Pacific Commons, a network of reserves in the international waters between national country waters.
Fishing nations, predictably, disagree.
Thousands of vessels, mostly longliners, operate in the Pacific.
The tropical purse seine fishing fleet (historically dominated by Japan, Korea, China-Taipei and the US) averages 250 boats.
New Zealand is, relatively speaking, small fry. Sanford Limited operates three purse seiners in the region, and Talleys, just one. In January, Eric Barratt, managing director of Sanfords, told the company’s annual meeting that catch volumes of skipjack tuna in the Pacific were in line with expectations, but “future access and management measures in this fishery will be challenging”.
This week, Barratt said fishing bans in the high seas could, ultimately, force the company out of the region.
“Are they really wanting to reduce catch? Or are they saying that Pacific states get no revenue from fish caught in the high seas, and therefore closing the high seas and forcing vessels to fish inside their zones will increase their revenue? Those are two different things.”
The Exclusive Economic Zones of just eight Pacific nations supply an estimated 70% of the region’s purse seine tuna catch. In 2008, those nations – the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, which are known collectively as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) – scored an international coup, banning boats licensed to fish in their waters from purse seine fishing in several High Seas Areas.
The PNA has now announced it will extend that ban, regardless, into two new areas from 2011 – but it’s hopeful the move will also be adopted by the WCPFC in December, which would mean the measure would apply to every vessel fishing in the region, not just those licensed by PNA countries.
At the same meeting is a proposal from the Cook Islands, for one area to be designated a “special management area” – with no fishing ban, but more stringent vessel monitoring and no trans-shipments of fish stocks between vessels. “The eastern enclave is a launching pad of illegal fishing into the adjacent coastal state waters of Cook Islands,” says Ben Ponia, secretary for marine resources.
“The proposed measure is simple and practical and directly in alignment with the conservation and management purposes of the commission. If members fail to see this then it really does not speak well for the future of our tuna stocks.”
How important is New Zealand’s role in this debate?
Geographically, the WCPFC covers 20% of the earth’s surface. Its governing body is divided into two chambers comprising Fishing Forum Agency members (all Pacific nations including New Zealand and Australia) in one and fishing nations in the other.
Decision-making is generally by consensus and when a vote is required, it must win a three-quarters majority in both chambers to pass.
Greenpeace says New Zealand (whose boats all have PNA licenses) must support the total fishing ban. “By not supporting the closure of the remaining high seas areas, the New Zealand government is letting down our Pacific neighbours and allowing foreign fleets operating without Pacific fishing licenses to exploit the lesser regulations in place in the high seas, while our own fleet operates under the more sustainable management of PNA countries,” says Karli Thomas, local oceans campaigner.
Lagi Toribau, based in the lobby group’s Suva office, says tuna fishing is the “backbone” of the Pacific economy.
“In countries like Kiribati, about 40% of their GDP is from licensing fees. You either have tourism, or you have fish.
“The Pacific needs attention. That’s a vast ocean out there. If you take the continental USA and put it in Kiribati waters, it’s not even a perfect fit, and they only have one patrol boat. It’s like asking one police officer in all of the United States to find one drug smuggler.”
High seas bans, he says, make it harder for boats that have fished illegally in exclusive economic zones to “escape” into the high seas, and transfer their unrecorded catch to mother ships.
“Operationally, it is not viable for fleets to become high seas fleets only. There’s more fish inside the EEZs.”
Robert Gillett, marine resource consultant, and co-author of the recent Future of Pacific Island Fisheries report, agrees.
“We have a rule here that says `he who controls the zones controls the fishery’. No body and no boat and no country can survive in purse seining in the high seas alone.”
Speaking from Fiji, Gillett said he’d give New Zealand an “A-minus” rating for its fisheries work in the Pacific.
“New Zealand doesn’t have roving bands of pirate fisherman that are lusting after high seas. It does a lot of good things but it also has the interest of its own industry to look at. It has invested a lot in institutional strengthening programmes, notably in the Cook and Solomon Islands. It’s a benevolent, altruistic donor country in the fisheries sector but it is also an embryonic distant water fishing nation. It has good reason to sit on both sides of the fence.”
Previously, Fisheries Minister Phil Heatley told the Sunday Star-Times the extended PNA closures would reduce bigeye tuna catch by purse seine vessels and further the economic development of member countries through increased returns from foreign vessels.
“PNA member countries have made it clear they intend to apply the closure unilaterally through license conditions for fishing within their EEZs, regardless of whether WCPFC agrees to the closure or not,” Heatley said.
“New Zealand supports the PNA’s high seas closure proposal being agreed as a WCPFC conservation and management measure where the Commission’s monitoring, control and surveillance frameworks can be applied in support of the measure and the measure will apply equally to all vessels fishing in the region.”
Heatley noted the proposal encompassed the same area of high seas where the Cook Islands will be attempting to gain the Commission’s support for new conservation and management measure.
“FFA member countries will need to consider how to best advance the two proposals within the WCPFC. Certainly the PNA closure proposal, because of its scope and implications, is likely to be far more contentious than the Cook Islands proposal for a Special Management Area.”
Is New Zealand – as per earlier Greenpeace accusations – still guilty of sitting on the fence?
Matthew Hooper, head of the New Zealand delegation to the WCPFC, said some issues were raised when the first PNA closures were proposed back in 2008.
“Closing the areas is quite a blunt way of trying to manage highly migratory stock, but there were some real benefits for the PNA countries going down that route and New Zealand is supportive of their objectives.
“Whether the closures were the best tools for the actual conservation measures of the Commission is still something there is a lot of debate about.”
Fisheries management, said Hooper, “is always about a race or a balance to get economic outcomes”.
“But the first thing you have to do is ensure the fish are going to be there.”
It will be interesting to see what the Pacific Fishery meeting actually achieved this weekend.