The Western and Central Pacific Ocean is the world's biggest tuna fishery, producing 60 percent of global tuna, worth nearly $7 billion annually. Photo: 123rf
The 26-member Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) reached some momentous decisions at its recent annual conference in Suva.
That's the view of a member of environmental watchdog group, the Pew Charitable Trusts' international fisheries project, Glen Holmes.
The Commission's job is to oversee the management and conservation of the Pacific's stocks of highly migratory fish, especially tuna.
The agency has now started the process of embracing electronic monitoring of catches, but Holmes told RNZ Pacific one of the most significant developments was the adoption of a set of labour standards for crew.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Glen Holmes: And it's the first tuna RFMO [Regional Fisheries Management Organisation] to have done one. So that's a big step forward, even though it's not one that Pew was following very closely.
Don Wiseman: What are the labour standards? What have they changed?
GH: Well, they've set standards. So they've set a conservation and management measure that determines conditions for crew on fishing vessels. It's something that exists in just about every other workplace, but hasn't existed within the tuna RFMOs yet. So WCPFC has set a benchmark, and hopefully it will have knock on effects to other RFMOs.
DW: Well, that's good. And as far as electronic monitoring, which Pew was very keen on, there's an interim arrangement.
GH: Yes. The Commission has agreed a set of standards for electronic monitoring use. This effectively opens the door to data that's being collected by EM [electronic monitoring] systems to be incorporated into the WCPFC data set. The WCPFC was actually the last of the tuna RFMOs to get these on board.
This is a critical stepping stone to increasing independent data collection across, particularly, the long-lining sector of tuna fisheries. We see it as a really important step forward for the world's biggest tuna fishery and we're very pleased that these standards have been adopted. The next step is to take this further forward and fully incorporate into the management regime, a process for having electronic monitoring as a completely typical operating procedure, in the same way that on-board observers are now.
DW: Why was there a reluctance to go all the way this time?
GH: It's simply the amount of work that's involved. It's that the measure that's been adopted this time involved a lot of nitty gritty, a lot of in the weeds discussions, and so it would have taken more than the amount of time that was available to take it even further in a single year. It's the same process that other RFMOs have followed as well.
DW: Another issue that you and I have talked about, transshipment, and there's been long time a push to improve the transparency of transshipment on the open seas. No progress there or?
GH: No, that was an enormous disappointment. The WCPFC hasn't upgraded or improved its transshipment measure in over 15 years, now. Every other tuna RFMO has improved its management of transshipping at sea and the failure of the commission to come to an agreement after extensive discussions this year and even more expensive discussions last year, it's a failure of the Commission, really.
It is seriously disappointing and I hope that the members that were unable to come to a compromise situation that improved the management of transshipment take a look at what's happened over the last, particularly the last couple of years, and come to the Commission next year, with the intention of lifting the standards for transshipment in the western Pacific. We are very disappointed at that outcome.
DW: The Commission said to us in the past that NGOs love going on about this need for greater accountability, and they make this comparison with the other RFMOs, but - they say - those organisations are for areas where there's very little fish left, so it's irrelevant.
GH: No, that's not actually true. The western and central Pacific is by far the richest tuna fishing grounds in the world. I mean, there are, there are more tuna caught in that RFMO than all the others combined. And it was the case, previously, that the status of stocks in the western central Pacific was deemed to be in a healthier state than the other tuna RFMOs. However, those stock status indicators are no longer like that.
The stocks in the other RFMOs are not deemed to be in as poor a condition as they had previously been thought, either through improved management or through an improved understanding of the science. It's not by any means the case that it shouldn't really be an issue in the Pacific, it should be an issue in the other tuna RFMOs.
Transparency in the management of effectively a public resource is critical. And if people want to have confidence in the processes that are managing where their tuna are coming from, then these processes need to be transparent.
DW: One of the big recent concerns in fisheries around the Pacific has been climate change and the impact that this will have on migratory species. Did they talk about this last week?
GH: Yes, they did. Climate change is a critical topic across the Pacific for a range of reasons, but within the tuna sphere it's very important, because the tuna fisheries is an incredibly important economic resource, particularly for the islands. And there has been work in the past that has shown that with climate change, it is anticipated that the stocks ranges will shift, and that has implications for future planning and for the potential income over the next coming decades.
The Commission has done a bit of work on how it is to address climate change. It will be undertaking a review of the risk that climate change poses to its management regimes. Climate change will be incorporated into the science of the Commission to get a better understanding of the future impacts. And so the Commission is grabbing this with both hands and not ignoring the elephant in the room of climate change.
