Publication Details
Q. Hanich & M. Tsamenyi. Progress in the implementation of conservation and management measures for bigeye and yellowfin tunas in the western and central pacific: sharing the conservation burden and benefit, in M W. Lodge & M. H. Nordquist (eds) Law of the Sea: Liber amicorum Satya Nandan. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Nijhoff Publishers, 2014. Pp358-380.
Introduction
The Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) stretches approximately
6,000 nautical miles across numerous jurisdictions, from the archipelagos
of Southeast Asia to the remote atolls of Kiribati in the Central Pacific. This
vast ocean is home to the world’s most productive tuna fisheries, supplying
global markets with skipjack, bigeye, yellowfin and albacore worth approxi-
mately US$5.5 billion.3 These fisheries are critically different from other tuna
fisheries in that 87 per cent of all reported WCPO tuna catches are harvested
from waters under national jurisdiction.4 Unlike the high seas tuna fisher-
ies of the Eastern Pacific, Indian Ocean and North Atlantic, the WCPO tuna
fisheries are predominantly owned by a small group of developing coastal
States.