Australia
p. 11 · Read in the full issue
Pacific fishing enters new era
Anew era is dawning on Pacific fishing - an era of tougher com petition and more sophisticated responses from Island nations.
In the past decade and a half, the Pacific has notched up substantial inter national victories, such as the lucrative multilateral tuna treaty with the US (which stopped American poaching) and the banning of destructive driftnet fishing.
While the region’s efforts to protect its fish stocks were generally successful, its attempts to establish local industries were not, and the region has struggled to get fair financial returns from the resources.
Now, as we approach the Year 2000, world fish stocks are in crisis. In resource after resource, stocks have been depleted and then crashed, so much so that the rep utable International Union for the Conservation of Nature (lUCN) now lists 80 per cent of the world’s fish species as either vulnerable, endangered or critical.
Fishing is a major industry in most coastal nations but, as stocks diminish, rather than scale back fishing effort, fleets have simply gone further afield.
Governments have subsidised unprof itable boats instead of accepting the polit
ically unpalatable option of job losses
and, in the process, created huge over capacity. Interest in fishing the Pacific has grown steadily. The Taiwanese and Koreans followed the Japanese and Americans into the region so that now fully half of the world’s tuna is caught here. Recently, Phillipine boats, unable to catch enough fish in their own waters, began moving in.
Compared to the rest of the world, the Pacific has looked after its offshore fish eries well. Stocks of skipjack and yel lowfin tuna are healthy and while bigeye and albacore are listed as vulnerable, it is likely that has as much to do with lack of data as with the state of the fishery.
Until now, Pacific Island nations have managed the stocks themselves and fiercely defended their right to so.
However, because tuna cover vast dis tances and can easily be caught outside the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones of the region, such a management plan may not be effective in the long term, especially as fishing pressure increases.
One of the elements of the new era in the region’s approach to fishing is a recent UN agreement known as the “Implementing Agreement on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks”. Under that agreement, the states of the region and the Distant Water Fishing Nations must come together to come up with a management and conser vation plan for Pacific fish stocks.
At this month’s South Pacific Forum in Majuro, regional heads of government will consider a proposal to call an initial meeting of interested parties.
Key Island players see these negotia tions as “absolutely fundamental” to the future of Pacific fish stocks. There will be highly complex negotiations and risk that the intransigent Distant Water Fishing Nations like Taiwan and Korea might overwhelm the small nations’ legitimate claims. Even apparently simple issues, such as who to invite to the talks, could have major repercussions.. For instance, should, notoriously anti-conservationist countries like Indonesia be invited?
Would such an invitation simply invite more non-compliant vessels into the region or would it prevent poaching by locking the newcomers into an effective management process? The Island nations have a number of factors working in their favour. They are practised and effective at working together as a region on these sorts of issues, their management of their fish stocks, including their reporting and monitoring mechanisms, and their research effort, give them some much needed moral high ground and they have a growing body of highly effective diplo mats, such as Fiji’s Satya Nandan, who played such an outstanding role in United Nations Law of the Sea negotiations.
At the same time as these negotiations are going to protect the resource, debate is hotting up over how Pacific states can get more money out of the fishing industry.
For many nations fish is their best eco nomic resource, and yet in an industry worth SUSI.I billion the region reaped just $6O million in royalties and licence fees and few jobs.
A system of auctioning licences to the Distant Water Fishing Nations has been
suggested by Canberra-based academics
Professor Ron Duncan and Colin Hunt.
Hunt, who is working on a World Bank project to come up with ways of improving Pacific Island fisheries rev enue, believes the auction system would help prevent Distant Water Fishing Nations forcing down royalty rates by threatening to move their operations to another country’s waters and give them an incentive to report illeigal fishing.
During the 1980 s, most attempts to set up local fishing industries were govern ment backed and foundered because of poor management or because boats they bought were old, expensive to run and suffered serious problems such as poor refrigeration systems. There is now a growing realisation that the only enter prises with any longevity are private con cerns. Fiji is home to a number of very successful local companies. Robbie Stone’s Stone Fish Company has been operating since the late 70s. It employs 25 locals on his pole-and-line vessel and more at a small factory. Stone has contin ued to turn a good profit despite static tuna prices and rising costs by increasing the skill and therefore the productivity of his operation. On a larger scale, Graham Southwick’s Fiji Fish has produced hun dreds of jobs and exports of around $3O million a year by selling in the high priced Japanese sashimi market. Because of the differing conditions and species of fish, Stone and Southwick’s success is not directly repicable. What is repicable is the utilisation of the experienced people in
the region to identify specific opportuni
ties and turn them into a genuinely
indigenous industry which provides jobs
and other valuable multiplier effects.
The Honiara-based Forum Fisheries Agency is working on a new set of coun
try-specific development plans which
take account of the fact that each coun try’s opportunities are very different.
Another new initiative (known as the FSM Arrangement) aims to encourage
meaningful joint ventures by awarding
preferential access to foreign boats or companies based on how many points they score against five criteria which add value to the local industry. The criteria include the extent of local equity, the flag the vessel carries, the number of nationals employed, the extent of local provision ing and onshore investment. ■