The buccaneering world of high seas fishing

Michael Field

IT IS FLAVOURED WITH BYZANTINE DIPLOMACY, ASIAN UNDERWORLD connections, and some dodgy practices which produce heavy profits for shadowy players while threatening the world's last great undamaged maritime resource-South Pacific tuna.

Fishing vessels in Suva...next to the red painted ship is a United States purse seiner.

On top of "Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported" (IUU) fishing and "tuna laundering", big new technologically armed boats stand accused of vacuuming up vast quantities of juvenile fish for the lucrative sushi and sashimi trade.

Tuna is the only truly global resource and the only significant money earner for most Pacific states. Most of the tuna is taken by aggressive and unsympathetic distant water fishing nations (DWFNs), including Japan, Taiwan, China and Korea.

While politicians, diplomats and environmentalists win big headlines for their battles over whales of little commercial but significant emotional and tourist value, the fate of Pacific tuna has gone unnoticed despite its profound significance to global food security and South Pacific economies.

This year, a powerful new international organisation based in Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, will attempt to bring order to the often buccaneering world of high seas tuna fishing. The Tuna Commission has had a long gestation, which first saw the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Convention signed in Hawaii in 2000, after five years of negotiations.

This was followed by four years of torturous preparatory conferences ("PrepCon" in diplomatic speak) under the chairmanship of New Zealand diplomat Michael Powles, climaxing last December with the establishment of the Tuna Commission headed by Briton Michael Lodge.

Powles presided over a drag-them-out and knock-them-down battle involving DWFNs and the otherwise powerless Pacific Islands nations. These fishing nations were also at war with each other.

The commission is not so much the last best hope for tuna. But Powles says "it's a fact that it's the only regime which is currently on the table, already in operation, which attempts to seriously provide for the sustainable management of the tuna resource of the Pacific. It has to succeed-or this resource will certainly disappear."

Lodge told ISLAND BUSINESS that increasing sophistication in catching fish was not a problem.

"The human race is endlessly inventive, so obviously technology is making it easier to catch fish," Lodge says.

"The issue is not to try to hold back technology, but to ensure the rules take into account the greater fishing power of vessels compared to 20 years ago."

Around two million tonnes of Pacific tuna worth around US$2.6 billion is taken each year. The Food and Agriculture Organisation says almost one third of all the tuna landed in the world comes from the Pacific Islands region, which supplies 60 percent of all canned tuna and about 30 percent of the sashimi market.

The Tuna Yearbook, published by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea, says four main commercial species are caught in the Western and Central Pacific (WCPO which includes New Zealand and Eastern Australia): skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis) which is 56 percent of the take; yellowfin (Thunnus albacares) 32 percent; bigeye (Thunnus obesus) seven percent; and albacore (Thunnus alalunga), six percent.

Bigeye favoured for sashimi

The yearbook shows that in 2003 Japan was the biggest tuna fisher in the WCPO taking 366,783 tonnes, followed by Indonesia 302,101 tonnes; Philippines 297,434 tonnes; Taiwan 235,188 tonnes; Korea 208,592 tonnes; Papua New Guinea 159,923 tonnes; United States 94,003 tonnes; and New Zealand 22,073 tonnes. Purse seining was used to catch 61 percent of the fish, followed by pole and line fishing 15 percent, and long-line 11 percent.

Fishing our waters...Taiwan is getting around our waters by the use flags of convenience.

The Asian Development Bank says the annual tuna catch out of the region is worth around 11 percent of the combined gross domestic product of all the Pacific countries.
Pacific countries get just a fraction of it, around US$60 million in access fees, along with 25,000 jobs and fishing company expenditure in their ports totalling around US$130 million.

"In the future, Pacific Islands climate of continued economic stagnation, very high population growth, fully exploited inshore and coastal fisheries, severe economic shocks, and massive unemployment-the currently under-exploited tuna resources of the region will inevitably assume a much greater importance than they now have," the bank says.

In the last year, fury has mounted over Taiwan's actions in building a new "super purse seiner" which Japanese delegates told PrepCon could take up to 11,000 tonnes of tuna a year, twice the amount of other tuna boats. One Taiwan super seiner took 20,000 tonnes a year.

A total of 205 purse seiners are allowed to operate in the Tuna Commission area. But Taiwan is getting around it with bigger boats and re-flagging some of its fleet to the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu.

"In short, it is surprisingly evident that the Taiwanese fishing industry increased its purse seine fishing capacity dramatically by use of (flags of convenience)," a Japanese government submission to PrepCon said.

The new holding companies in Vanuatu shared the same name as fishing companies in Taipei, some of them linked to the Taiwan underworld.

South Korea and the United States wanted an urgent moratorium on the building of new boats, while Fiji called for a complete ban of the big boats. Taiwan was able to fling out its hands and say the boats were foreign and they had nothing to do with them.

New generation "fish aggregation devices" (FADs) are causing alarm. On the open ocean, tuna congregate under floating objects such as palm trees, logs, weed mats, dead whales or half sunken boats. Purse seiners have taken it to a sophisticated new level by dropping large drifting FADs in the ocean, complete with position transmitting devices and leaving them for several days before returning. They attract mostly juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna which are then virtually vacuumed up by the purse seiners. Adult bigeye are attacked by longline fishing boats.

One regional expert told ISLANDS BUSINESS there was "major concern" around the expansion of European Union purse seining in the Pacific as they would target juvenile bigeye.

The Spanish purse seine fleet is particularly productive, using FAD fishing techniques and sophisticated technology.

"The fleet is also known to account for relatively high catches of bigeye using these methods."

The Spanish are in the Pacific because they have exhausted their own Atlantic fishing grounds.
FADs have made it possible to open up a vast area of the Pacific to exploitation-the otherwise untouched tuna rich waters between French Polynesia, Kiribati's Line Islands and the Galapagos Islands.

PrepCon's scientific coordinating group (SCG) warned that FAD fishing had much higher catches of non-target species than purse seine nets on unassociated tuna schools.

"FADs may alter the movements, feeding and other behaviour of tuna resulting in a range of negative impacts," the scientists warned.

They say bigeye tuna is slow growing and less resilient to exploitation than skipjack and yellowfin tuna.

Scientists say there is a "single Pacific-wide stock of bigeye tuna" rather than independent populations; so take tons of juvenile bigeye from under a FAD in the open ocean, and the boats are also taking stocks from the Solomon Islands, Fiji and the rest of the Pacific.

Each year, 115,000 tonnes of bigeye are caught. "In the late 1990s, the biomass is estimated to have been 35 percent below the level it would have been if fishing had never occurred," scientists say.

The Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC-the eastern Pacific's equivalent of the new Pacific Tuna Commission) has ordered Japan and Korea to limit their bigeye catch sizes to 2001 harvest size.

"In the Eastern Pacific, the populations are below the maximum sustainable yield, and consequently the IATTC has taken action to restrict the fishery," Robin Allen of the IATTC says.

Lodge acknowledged there were sustainability challenges ahead with technology and new entrants, as well as an "apparent belief by some PICs in inexhaustible supplies in EEZs.

"The situation is not yet dire, but the commission has to act fast and decisively to prevent it from getting out of hand.

"Given the pressures to increase access, I think the commission is going to be hard-pressed to put in place restrictions on fishing effort. Historical precedents in other regions are not good."

The estimates on the size of the tuna stocks are, at best, little more than guesses. Tuna schools travel right across the Pacific and while the catch is mostly known in the South Pacific, scientists have no idea how much of the tuna stocks are taken when they are in Indonesian and Philippines waters. Around the Philippines there are an estimated 4000 fixed FADs (known there as payaos), one in every 55 kilometres. The Bismarck Sea has hundreds of scattered FADs.

While bigeye tuna is the most desired fish, around 1.2 million tonnes of skipjack tuna are taken and scientists believe that while they don't know the size of the catches at the Asian end of the Pacific, the skipjack and albacore stock "appears to be capable of sustaining the current catch without any adverse effect to the overall stock".

But as Powles told PrepCon in December, there was a lot of uncertainty around yellowfin and bigeye tuna: "Significant management implications flow from this uncertainty."

Fogging the scene more are what Japan says are around 100 second-hand large-scale tuna longline vessels (LSTLV) that Taiwan has moved out onto the market.

Some of them have been scrapped, others re-licensed, but Japan believes most of them are engaged in IUU (Illegal Unregulated, Unreported) fishing.

Japan reckons these pirate fishers now "showed more problematic behaviour involving illegal conducts than in the past". Instead of just changing registry, owners in Taiwan simply forge documents from places like Tonga and Myanmar. Some of the pirate boats are legally flagged in the Seychelles, Vanuatu and Bolivia, although the boats are owned and operated by Taipei companies.

Lodge said it was difficult to quantify IUU fishing in the WCPO. "It is probably not as bad a problem as in the Indian Ocean," Lodge says.

"Illegal fishing is expected to be present in most Pacific Islands countries' EEZs, where enforcement is lacking and we know that under-reporting and non-reporting is a significant factor for many fleets. Efforts to prevent such practices as trans-shipping at sea by requiring vessels to enter ports to trans-ship have reduced the extent of non-reporting, but it is still present."

Japan says "fish laundering" was occurring on a wide scale. The tuna pirates meet shadowy cargo vessels on the high seas and transfer their catch. It is then taken to Japan where, depending on the state of quotas and placement of legal ships, the cargo ship declares the fish came from the South Atlantic or the Indian Ocean. Mostly it has been illegally taken out of the South Pacific.

Tokyo gave the example of Lung Yuin, a Taiwanese company-owned freezer cargo ship flying a Panamanian flag, carrying frozen bigeye tuna to Japan.

When authorities inspected it, they found that the tuna had been caught by 25 Taiwanese vessels and three Vanuatu flagged fishing boats owned by Taiwanese companies. All 28 boats had given false information about where they had caught the fish, while Lung Yuin had two log books-one true, the other false.

They found another ship hiding excessive Atlantic bigeye catch that had been relabelled to the Pacific, adding: "this sort of organised laundering activity is widely conducted not only in the Pacific, but also in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans".

Japan claimed around 18,000 tonnes of IUU bigeye had been laundered this way.

Powles says the new regime will work. "I believe that not for reasons of idealistic optimism, but because all sides know that if it doesn't work, they will be worse off. Pragmatically, that's a pretty good reason for optimism."

Powles said during "tense and difficult" negotiations, some problems were resolved, such as major issues of principle.

"When you're talking about such an enormously valuable resource, hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the fishing countries and a significant proportion of their annual revenue to the islands countries of the Pacific, it's only natural that all participants will have their own national interests uppermost in their minds," Powles says.

The natural division was between the coastal states-the Pacific Islands countries and, to a degree, New Zealand and Australia and the United States-and the DWFNs, and, to a degree, again the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

"And this was always in the forefront of everyone's mind because of the blatant inequality between the two "sides". That the negotiation has been as successful as it has is a tribute to the unity which the coastal states have been able to maintain in most critical issues and to the recognition on the part of the fishing states that, at the end of the day, they would prefer a fisheries regime sanctioned at international law by all parties than a kind of law of the jungle on the high seas."

The commission's new Pohnpei office is one of the most intriguing and little understood places in the Pacific; mysterious Nan Madol, the abandoned 80-hectare temple city, spread over 92 man-made islets. Its fate offers a lesson for the Tuna Commission.

A priestly class known as the Saudeleurs or masters, began construction of the Nan Madol in the sixth century, using log-like heavy basalt columns formed by volcanic activity. Much of the materials had been hauled over long distances, suggesting the Saudeleurs had large boats. Around the 16th century, the Pohnpei people revolted against the Saudeleurs and the Nan Madol was abandoned. When European sailors showed up in the 19th century, the city had disappeared back into the mangroves and lush forests of the island.

The Saudeleurs disappeared and their temples became irrelevant; the Tuna Commission will, for the sake of all Pacific people, need to avoid that fate.