World tuna stocks: falling, falling, falling

SEVERAL tuna fisheries have collapsed and others are in steep decline as overfishing continues and world tuna stocks fall.

Amid all these, international fisheries management organizations continue to prove incapable of performing their functions.

In early April, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) concluded its 13th meeting in Bali and failed again to set catch limits (as mandated) and to regulate one of the world’s largest tuna fisheries.

According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), the plundering of coastal fisheries by unregulated foreign fleets has forced some fishers whose stocks it has failed to protect to turn to piracy instead.

“Another stumbling block in the negotiations has been European Union intransigence on large Spanish and French fleets maintaining their swordfish catch levels at dangerously high levels,” said WWF International Marine Director Miguel Jorge.

“The pirates now attacking merchant shipping are from coastal communities that got into the aggressive habit of trying to defend their fishing livelihoods from illegal fishing by foreign fishing boats.”

In December, in what the WWF called ignoring its own scientists’ recommendations for large cuts in tuna catches in the face of falling stocks, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), meeting in Busan, South Korea, over-rode the advice of its scientific committee and rejected the recommendations of its chair in choosing only minor reductions in catch for bigeye and yellowfin tuna, watering down most measures for achieving reduced catches.

The decision came just a fortnight after the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) also rejected their own scientists’ recommendations for significant cuts to catches in the face of declining tuna populations.

The WCPFC decision will see a catch reduction of less than 7 percent for 2009 according to WWF estimates.

It was a rebuff for WCPFC chair Glenn Hurry who recommended a 30- percent cut which he conceded would still not have eliminated overfishing.

Hurry chaired the independent review of ICCAT that found that body’s management of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery “an international disgrace.”

“Collapsing bluefin tuna fisheries world wide that supply the high value sushi market are increasing demand for bigeye and yellowfin tuna,” WWF Fisheries Program Manager Peter Trott said in Busan. “What we are seeing now is an international tragedy where the failure of one fishery adds to the pressure on others.”

WCPFC’s failures will have severe impacts on Pacific island states where mainly foreign fishing fleets are having catastrophic impacts on the viability of their fishers and coastal communities, a point underlined at the meeting when Papua New Guinea announced its intention of denying access to its waters for foreign fishing vessels.

“The implications are disastrous for the small island communities in the region, where millions of people depend on healthy tuna stocks for food and livelihoods,” said Trott.

The WCPFC, ICCAT and IATTC are parts of a worldwide system of regional fisheries management organizations established by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

In 2006, the WCPFC’s scientists estimated that overfishing of bigeye tuna was occurring in the Western and Central Pacific, with a high probability it had been occurring since 1997. Since 1996, the bigeye tuna has been on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List as a “vulnerable” species.

The scientists also warned that urgent action needed to be taken on overfishing of yellowfin tuna in the region.

They recommended a 15-percent reduction in bigeye and yellowfin tuna fishing mortality (broadly equivalent to catch). The commission instead continued with the status quo.

Just two years later, scientists doubled their recommendation for catch reduction to 30 percent, a minimum level that scientists said may need additional cuts to end overfishing.

Measures to reduce the take of bigeye and yellowfin tuna by 30 percent in the Pacific include closing large parts of the fishery to purse seiners and the banning of fish attractant devices from July to September every year.

The concern is that ineffective management could lead to the commercial extinction of the bigeye and yellowfin tuna fishery in the Western and Central Pacific.

“With tuna, it seems we are just not learning—we have lost the fisheries of the North Sea bluefin, the Southern Bluefin, the West Atlantic bluefin collapsed and is failing to recover and the Mediterranean bluefin is now well on its way to collapse with rampant legal and illegal overfishing allowed to go on,” said Trott.

“Scientists have been calling for large reductions in bigeye tuna catch for over a decade,” he added.

“This is not just a warm and fuzzy call to preserve a magnificent open ocean species, it’s about preserving the world’s most valuable tuna fisheries with a landed value of close to $4 billion in 2007 and a market value of $6 to $8 billion every year,” he said.

Illegal tuna catch in the Pacific is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s a fishery that adds considerably to the economies of many of the developing Pacific Island nations in the region and to the livelihoods of millions in the region known as the Coral Triangle,” Trott said.– Worldwide Fund for Nature