ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

Intro music- WAVES EMILY MUSIC  

TEASER QUOTE:

Transform

3:25 – 3:33: So for the Pacific Island countries, it’s not it’s not just a matter of economics. I’ve argued that it is a matter of life and death for them.

Josie

8:21- 8:37: WCPFC is very important the tuna fishery that that comes from, from the region it supplies over they just over 50% of the global tuna supply. About 52% that’s a whole lot of fish.

SCRIPT

Jennifer: Hello, and welcome back to NEGOTIATING THE OCEAN – an Ocean Equity podcast by the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security – ANCORS at the University of Wollongong.

I’m Jennifer Macey

Bianca: And I’m Bianca Haas – your co-host for this episode.

Jennifer: Previously, we’ve talked about marine conservation and the current negotiations for the High Seas treaty. Today, we’re changing tack and going closer to home – to our kitchen tables!

Who doesn’t like a nice can of tuna? I know I do. But even though I try to buy the tuna with the dolphin tick or where it says it’s sourced sustainably on the can – I don’t know if what the label on the can says is necessarily true.  

Bianca: And that’s precisely the aim of this episode. We are doing a deep dive into Fisheries – because if they’re not well managed, they can greatly impact marine biodiversity.

We’ll talk about the importance of tuna for coastal nations and the management frameworks that are currently in place to ensure that these iconic species are fished sustainably.

Jennifer: And we’re going to split our episodes into two parts or two regions, the Western and Central Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

So, the first part, this episode, will focus on the Western and Central Pacific Ocean and then the following week, we’ll release the second part episode which will look specifically at the Indian Ocean.

Jennifer: So Bianca, you often read in news articles or hear in documentaries that fisheries on the high seas are basically the Wild West– It’s lawless out there in the ocean.

Bianca: Let me tell you, that’s not the case.

There are strict rules about what can and can’t be done in terms of fishing for tuna, going back to the 80s where there was big concern for the welfare of dolphins being caught up in drift nets. Of course there are many more conservation issues that were raised at the same time.

These rules have been discussed, debated and agreed to at international meetings for decades now – and countries still meet yearly to discuss the details of fisheries management.

I’ve gone to many fisheries meetings all across the Pacific and Indian Ocean, where I’ve met many experts and stakeholders taking part in the negotiations.

One of those experts is Professor Transform Aqorau from the Solomon Islands.

He has dedicated his life to supporting Pacific Island nations.

Transform

0:38- 0:43: Thank you very much, Bianca. So, I’m Transform Aqorau. Currently, I’m Vice Chancellor of Solomon Islands National University.

1:25 – 1:45: My experience in the in the field started in 1988 and I started getting involved in international fisheries right from two weeks on taking up the position as legal officer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

3:24 – 4:15: So, for the Pacific Island countries, it’s not just a matter of economics. I’ve argued that it is a matter of life and death for them. And the reason is that there are many countries in the Pacific, particularly the small island countries like Kiribati, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands and and Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia, where fisheries constitute a very important part of not just the gross domestic product, but government revenue as well. And that pays for the salaries of teachers. It pays for the salaries of nurses. It pays for government services, and in places like Kiribati, their it pays for the subsidy of the cooper price in in the in the villages, and so it has a huge impact across society here.

Bianca: As Professor Aqorau points out, fisheries management play an important role in day-to-day life, especially in small island developing states.

 To help us understand what sustainable management of fisheries looks like we spoke to Francisco Blaha, regional expert and fisheries consultant to governments and UN agencies.

Francisco

00:11-00:38 – My name is Francisco Blaha. I been in the Pacific for since 1991 initially as a fisherman, and then carried away to many other jobs. At some stage, 95 faculty New Zealand, went in the fishing industry there and then got involved in supporting and sort of a fisheries advisory roles for different organizations, also the Pacific and all through the world.

6:55 – 9:11: imagine fisheries as a as a table with three legs, yep. So you have to have good science one leg, good policy and management, the second leg, and the third leg is monitoring, control and surveillance. So those three legs need to be solid and communicate to each other, yeah. And that keeps the table stable, that keeps the fisheries sustainable. So science is is relatively is very complicated, but the concept is relatively easy, is that basically to analyze how much fish is there to catch, without making it not sustainable, or basically not being able to fish again, the same amount. policy defines, you know, it’s defined in to an extent should be defined by science. And then science tell you how much, and policies say  well where, how, when this, etc, etc, and monitoring, confirmed surveillance. That’s okay. Is it this? What, what it was to be it was was able to be caught. Was caught, how much, what, when, where. So it’s monitoring about civilians. Is a process of responding to the what, the when, the where, the who and the when. That is the monitoring, the control is the rules that comply with that makes you comply that and the surveillance is to make sure that everyone is playing that game. There are much more complicated ways to say it, but for me, that obviously helped me so is to make sure that everyone plays by the rules, but also to make sure that the fisheries have been monitored in terms of the volumes and the species so that can inform science, because science is based on what monitoring provides, and then the outcomes of science feed into policy. And then policy feeds into MCs. MCs feeds into science. Science leads to policy. So those three legs need to be be standardized

JENNIFER – That was Francisco Blaha. As you’ve probably heard there are a bunch of different acronyms when discussing anything to do with governance around the ocean.  M- C- S is short for Monitoring Control and Surveillance.

BIANCA – That’s right, when we talk about fisheries management, we often talk about RFMOs, which stands for Regional Fisheries Management Organisations.  

These are a bit different to the global UN negotiations – they are smaller international meetings that may cover a specific region of the world and most of them are actually independent to the United Nations.

For example, one of these regional fisheries management organisations or RFMOs that oversees tuna fisheries is the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission or WCPFC.

JENNIFER  OMG another acronym – it’s like alphabet soup!

Let’s go next to Dr Josie Tamati from Niue, the acting chair of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission or WCPFC.

Josie

00:01 – 0:33: (Welcome in Niuean). My name is Jose Tamati. I was born and raised in Niue. It is my great pleasure to be part of this podcast and talk about what we do at the western and central Pacific Fisheries Commission. Just as a quick background, I was introduced to the Pacific tuna fisheries and fisheries governance nearly 30 years ago, and at the time I was I can say I was pretty ignorant, and to me, tuna is a tuna, and also comes in, it’s a fish, and also comes in a can.

1:00 – 1:11: So currently my role in the wcpfc, I am the Chair for the wcpfc, and I am currently on my second term as chair.

7:35- 7:56: Because, what I need, I am looking for is positive outcomes for the work of the Commission and one of the work, I mean, one of the main objective is to ensure sustainability of the fisheries. So it’s not just looking at the the coastal state, but the the flag states and all the other interests that at play.

 8:21- 8:37: Um, WCPFC is very important the tuna fishery that that comes from, from the region it supplies over they just over 50% of the global tuna supply. About 52% that’s a whole there’s a whole lot of fish.

JENNIFER – That was Dr Josie Tamati from Niue the chair of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.

BIANCA –  her colleague in leadership is Dr Rhea Moss-Christian. She is the Executive Director of the Western central Pacific Fisheries Commission or WCPFC.

Rhea

00:25-00:34: My name is Rhea Moss-Christian. I am the Executive Director of the Western central Pacific Fisheries Commission. I am from the Marshall Islands and the United States. 

01:50 – 4:15: Well, if we look at the map of the Pacific Ocean and particularly on the western and central Pacific side, so in the fisheries world, we divide the Pacific Ocean in half. And on the eastern side, off the coast of Latin America, or South America and US, there is an organization on that side that handles tuna fisheries, and that’s the Inter American tropical tuna Commission, or IATTC. And on the other half of the Pacific, where the WCPFC is, what we see are a lot of small island nations throughout this part of the Pacific. And as Island communities, the ocean is an important and integral part of of island life, and tuna fisheries, in particular, when you look at the tuna and the way that the tuna swim across the Pacific, they’re in and out of territorial waters and in the high seas and and the nature of the way that tuna behave means that these island nations have to work together to manage these this stock, you could imagine a scenario where different management or different rules are being applied to the same fish, and how ineffective that would be. And so you add into this picture of these Pacific Island countries, these fleets that are coming from Japan or Korea or the US, or even the European Union, and you have this extra layer of cooperation that’s required because they’re also fishing for the same tuna and have an interest in setting the same rules for how you know how these how fishing will take place for these Tuna that are swimming again in and out of territorial waters and high seas areas. So the wcpfc provides that platform for that shared management. It provides the platform for cooperation so that all of these nations that have an interest in these in these different tuna stocks can work together and ensure that the rules that they’re setting are complimentary, that they’re consistent, that they’re not in contradiction with each other, and that’s what’s going to contribute to the long term sustainability of the fisheries. 

5:02 – 6:35: what, what makes WCPFC special, in my view, is the leadership and just the 

the sheer feeling that we cannot fail to manage these fisheries properly in this region, because there are so many lives that depend on good management, so failure is just simply not an option. All of the Pacific island nations have had a leading role in ensuring that in the wcpfc, management measures are designed for success. It doesn’t mean that things are perfect. I mean, by any means, I think we’re far from it. This organization has a lot of room for improvement, but to be able to achieve what the organization has to date, which is to have all of its tuna stocks as biologically healthy and in the green will say, as opposed to the red, which would be bad. Um, that’s a that’s a remarkable achievement for this organization to to be able to say that about its management. And it means that something is working and and, if I go back to that concept about of how failure is simply not an option, I think that really explains why there have just been, there’s just been a lot of progress over the over the last 20 years.  

JENNIFER That was Dr Rhea Moss-Christian from the Marshall Islands. She is the Executive Director of the Western central Pacific Fisheries Commission.

Bianca: There is also another organisation specifically focusing on ensuring that fisheries management is equitable.

It’s called the Parties to the Nauru Agreement or short PNA and is one of the regional success stories because it gives back power to the Pacific Island states.

Professor Transform Aqorau played a fundamental part of this success.

7:01- 8:05: so the Palau arrangement was established by small group of countries now Nauru group, and it was under the auspices of the Palau arrangement that the very first limits that were put in place, was a a limit on the number of vessels that could be licensed. So it was a cap on capacity, vessel capacity. But it did not really work, because what was, what happened was the allocation of the capacity was appropriated to fishing states. And so as the the PNA countries started to grow their fishery, the domestic fishery, they were constrained. And so it became frustrating for for them, it was a matter of design. So having learned from that, they commissioned a study. And they commissioned a person called Jerry Gien, who used to be a former fisheries officer here in Solomon Islands and also a fisheries economist at the FFA, to do something to do, you know, to revisit the whole idea, and he came up with the idea of introducing a vessel day scheme.

9:10-9:55: The biggest impact, the biggest change in the in the instrument that was put in place was that you took the power away from the fishing boats, and you place the market power in the hands of the owners of the resource. And so that transformation is significantly created, all of a sudden a secondary market for for fishing days, but apart from the price of the of the of the fishing license. And so countries realized then that they could do innovative things with their days, like auction. They could pool them together; they could tender them. And suddenly they realized that they had a lot more powers than they used to have.

Jennifer: That was Professor Transform Aqorau, the Vice Chancellor of the Solomon Island National University.

So far, we’ve had a great overview of the current management regime in the Western and Pacific Oceans, especially on the importance of tuna for Pacific Island states and their role in ensuring sustainable and equitable management.

Bianca: We also asked all our guests a question about the future. What does the future hold especially in the face of increased uncertainties like climate change.

Transform

14:16 – 15:26: That’s a good question, because the real, real question that we need to ask ourselves now is, what is the tuna fishery going to look like in 10 years time? And so the situation and the prognosis is that what we are being told by the scientists who have been working on these models and more, they’ve been doing some some modelling and looking at the impact of global warming on productivity of certain zones. And so the models are telling us that certain countries in the Western Pacific, like Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and the Federated States of Micronesia so they said productivity of the EEZ is anticipated to go down and skipjack in particular is anticipated to move towards the east. So the real question therefore, is how do countries like Solomon islands and Papua New Guinea, who have substantial investments in in domestic processing, ensure that they protect the access of the resource in in 20 to 30 years time, and it’s a conversation that these countries need to seriously think about.

Rhea

09:54 – 10:32: I think in 10 years time, we will still be grappling with high seas fisheries management in particular. And what makes it so challenging is that on the high seas, there are multiple flag states who have control over the activities, and that’s different from activities that are happening in in the territorial waters or the exclusive economic zones of a coastal nation, that coastal nation has most of the control over those activities. But on the high seas, it’s just a very different story.

13:08 –  14:07: And so  while the WCPFC has the main international mandate for tuna fisheries management in this part of the world, it really does rely on the support and the collaboration of other organizations, because tuna fisheries exist within a broader ecosystem, and it’s not just the natural environment, but it’s socio economics. It’s the communities that rely on them, it’s the people whose livelihoods are derived from fishing activities. So, all of these things have to come together in just the right way. And WCPFC is no different from any other organization and that it it works within a family of other arrangements to ensure that it can reach its mandate successfully. So I think to think about the tuna RFMOs in the global sense, is to think of them as a piece and a puzzle. But all of these pieces need to come together to be successful.

Josie

10:32 – 10:54:  I am optimistic because, mainly because we’ve done a lot of work, the lot of foundation has been it’s been, has been laid, and it’s matter of now, is that okay? We need to maintain the healthy that is a border for species

9:16 – 10:07: So it’s vitally important for us to make sure that we maintain that that status. So, you know, working from keeping the green is not an easy pass, and especially now as we have all these different challenges that come through. So while it’s people might think that, oh, it’s okay, the wcbfc is in, is healthy. We should be okay, we should go out, there’s fish out there. We should keep on going and harvest, but it has to be managed in a way that they will be sustainable. But it also making sure that everybody who are part of who I participant in the fishery are doing their part as well.

13:40 – 14:04: We are connected. The ocean is connected. So it has talked about people, talked about livelihoods, you talked about, you know, all the benefits, but you also need to look at the the ugly side of things. So I guess that’s what I’m looking at, the balancing, making sure that we are responsible. We’ll continue to be responsible.

Waves

Jennifer: Ok, wow, that was a lot. I didn’t realise how complex and important tuna fisheries management is. It will make me look at a can of tuna very differently next time.

Bianca: Totally. A big thank you to our experts who provided such fantastic insights for this episode

JENNIFER – thank you to:

Dr Rhea Moss-Christian from the Marshall Islands, the Executive Director of the Western central Pacific Fisheries Commission.

Francisco Blaha, fisheries consultant based in New Zealand

Professor Transform Aqorau the Vice Chancellor of Solomon Islands National University.

And Dr Josie Tamate from Niue the chair of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.

Jennifer: We have included links to the work in the podcast show notes, as well as links to the official website for the Western central Pacific Fisheries Commission and the Parties to the Nauru Agreement.

In the show notes you’ll also find more information and resources about the work of ANCORS researchers and a link to the Ocean Equity Research page. And there you’ll find lots of blog posts from all the meetings.

We’d love to hear from you so please send any comments or feedback to inatvw@uow.edu.au.

Bianca: Sound design and editing by Emily Perkins

Communication is by Sunnefa Yeatman.

Thank you to ANCORS and the Nippon Foundation for their support in making this podcast.

JENNIFER Next episode is part two of Tuna fisheries and we’re heading to the Indian Ocean to look at the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission in a bit more in depth.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode and if you think this podcast would benefit someone be sure to share it with your networks.

 I’m Jennifer Macey.

Bianca:  And I’m Bianca Haas. Thanks for listing!

Jennifer: “Sea” you next time!

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