Tuna watchdog set up

New Caledonia

DURING the opening session of the 25th regional meeting on fisheries held at the South Pacific Commission headquarters in Noumea, New Caledonia, in March, Ati George Sokomanu, the SPC’s secretary-general and M George Gwyer, the head of delegation of the commission of the European Communities in the Solomon Islands signed an agreement for the financing of a project called

SPRTRAMP (South Pacific Regional

Tuna Resource Assessment and Moni toring Project) aimed at promoting the sustainable management of the tuna fishery in the region.

Supertramp, as the project is better known, will cost the EC 5,000,000 ECU (US$6,000,000) and will span over five years as part of the SPC’s ongoing Oceanic Fisheries Programme (OFP).

This project will allow the very large tuna fisheries of the region to be subject for the first time to continuous scientific monitoring as part of overall manage ment of this resource.

EC assistance to regional fisheries programmes in the Pacific has been ongoing for the last 10 years. In February, the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), based in Honiara, in the Solomon Islands, had already received 4,650,000 ECU from the European Community to finance a surveillance and management programme including the purchase of satellite transponders and associated hardware to be installed on foreign vessels.

“Tuna stocks are the most important renewable resource of the Pacific Island countries, and tuna catches were esti mated at 1.2 millions tonnes (the largest tuna fishery in the world), with a landed value of around 1,700,000 ECU in 1991,” explains Doctor Anthony Lewis,

the Noumea-based SPC’s chief fisheries scientist. There is a variety of fishing methods - purse-seining, long lining, pole-and-lining, and trolling. Altogether, 95 per cent of the Pacific tunas are caught by fleets from outside the region (Japan, the USA, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia). The fishery has doubled in volume since 1980 and is bound to increase in the future.

Regional bodies sign deal pledging financial assistance to monitor tuna fishing and its sustainable management in the region

Ensuring long term optimal manage ment of the stocks has therefore been the top priority for both the SPC and the FFA for the sake of the small Pacific countries. The two organisations, which have received funds from the EC under the LOME 111 Pacific Regional Marine Resource Development Programme, work on a complementary basis. The SPC provides scientific advice on tuna resource assessment, whereas the FFA within its mandate oversees surveillance and management of foreign fishing activity.

Part of the OFP programme consisted of catching, tagging and releasing 140,000 tunas (yellowfin, skipjack and

bigeye) between 1989 and 1992. About 11 per cent of them were later recap tured, providing useful information about their age, growth, migration and levels of exploitation.

“The objective of the work was to give us a much better understanding of the dynamics of the stock and the status of the resource. The priority information we were after was the current levels of exploitation of the resource. We do that by monitoring the pattern of the returns with time, combined with what we know about the natural mortality of the fish,” says Dr Lewis. On that basis, it appears that even in spite of these very large increases in catch over the last 10 years, the levels of exploitation are still only moderate, at least for the surface fishery.

Dr Lewis says “There is no

immediate danger of over-exploitation.

In the case of skipjacks, the smallest of the tunas, there is considerable scope for even increasing the catches further.”

With the larger tunas (yellowfin, bigeye), which are caught by longline for high value sashimi markets, there is still however uncertainty about the impact of these increased surface catches on the longline catch. This will be an important second phase of the assessment. Unlike the other fishing regions of the world, most of the fish taken in the South Pacific is caught within the limits of the Exclusive Economic Zone of the coastal states. Therefore, the two FFA and SPC “companion programmes”, one aimed at scientific monitoring and provisional advice on exploitation of the resource, and the other at increasing enforcement and surveillance capability will enable South Pacific countries to manage what seems to be one of their main sources of revenue. D