The Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority today
issued a notice to the purse-seiners of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vanuatu
fishing under bilateral access agreements with NFMRA, that the limit of
allowable purse-seine fishing effort for 2011 in Nauru under these arrangements
has been reached.
Individual vessels may however continue to fish in Nauru if
they are able to purchase additional fishing days from the Office of the
Parties to the Nauru Agreement. These entitlements would have to be transferred
from the zones of other Parties to the Nauru Agreement with under-used fishing
effort allocations and who are willing to transfer vessel-days for fishing in Nauru.
“The trouble is, there aren’t many
underused allocations this year,” said the NFMRA Chief Executive Officer,
Charleston Deiye. “PNA has really tightened up the vessel-days system after
getting some criticism from certain quarters in the USA and Spain. They said
we were not able to fully control foreign fishing effort being transferred from
the high seas into EEZs after the high seas closures came into effect in 2010.
Although we dispute that – the baseline estimate of high seas effort doesn’t
take into account the full extent of previous high seas fishing by the
Philippines, and it doesn’t take into account the fact that the US purse-seine
fleet has doubled its purse-seine effort since the baseline was drawn up – the
PNA countries are going to make very sure that we don’t lay ourselves open to
similar accusations in future”.
“Nauru had to close its zone to
purse-seining in October in 2010 as well,” says Mr Deiye. “In fact we have
never had any unused days left at the end of the year for the entire period of
operation of the PNA Vessel Days Management Scheme. This indicates to us that
the Nauru EEZ is one of the best purse-seine fishing areas in the Pacific. We
need to keep this fishery under tight control because there is a higher density
of fishing in Nauru, in terms of number of purse-seine sets per square mile of
EEZ than any other Pacific Island EEZ”.
Although the fishing is always good
in Nauru, there are however variations. These variations are not seasonal, but
are linked to the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon.
As Mr Deiye explains, “with a La
Nina event under way for the past few months, most of the purse-seiners have
been operating further west, in Papua New Guinea and the southern part of the
Federated States of Micronesia. In fact if this had continued we might have made
it through to the end of the year with the few Nauru fishing days we had
remaining. However, last week a lot of
boats suddenly came back to Nauru, and our remaining days were quickly used up.
We had to close the door at short notice”.
Tracks of Nauru-licenced purse-seine fishing vessels during a La Nina event
The oceanographic event which has
pushed the purse seiners westward during the last two months has also apparently
had an effect on the supply of purse-seine fish to Pacific Island processing
plants towards the east of the region.
“Some are blaming the 3-month
(July-September) FAD closure for reducing the supply of fish to certain processing
plants recently,” said Mr Deiye, “but our data – for Nauru waters at least – shows
that average skipjack catch rates during the FAD closure in 2010 were the same
as catch rates outside the FAD closure, and yellowfin catch rates were even
higher. Of course this may have just been because the FAD closure in 2010
coincided with a period of very good fishing in Nauru waters. We’re still
waiting on the analysis for 2011.”
The main point of the FAD closure
was to selectively reduce the catch of bigeye tuna, because overfishing is
occurring on that species, and the catch of bigeye around FADs is 600% higher
than from free-school sets. In this it looks to be succeeding, as was reported
at Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meetings recently. Most of the
overfishing on bigeye is likely to be removed if current measures, particularly
the FAD closure, are continued.
Skipjack stocks remain healthy and
robust. However NFMRA feels that the time to decide limits is BEFORE fish stocks
get into trouble. Reduced expectations are much less painful than bankruptcy.
The fact remains that zone-closures
by PNA countries toward the end of each year, if they continue, are going to
have an impact on processors, particularly small Pacific Island processors who
cannot afford to build up large freezer reserves to buffer major fluctuations
in supply. Mr Deiye however points out that when all PNA countries start allocating
vessel-days by vessel, rather than managing the whole zone allocation as a
unit, these year-end closures will be no longer necessary. Vessels will be able
to pace their fishing across the entire year, knowing that they hold firm title
to a guaranteed number of fishing opportunities.
Following Papua New Guinea’s lead,
Nauru plans to introduce a VDS allocation system next year and move away from
the current “Olympic” (first come, first served) system. This finer-grained
system has been made possible by the PNA Office in Majuro sponsoring the
extension of the Vessel Days Management software pioneered by the PNG National
Fisheries Authority to the entire PNA membership.
“The next couple of months will be
interesting”, said Mr Deiye. “We’ll see how much purse-seine fleets are
prepared to bid for guaranteed allocations of vessel-days fishing opportunities
in the Nauru EEZ in 2012. We already know what the reserve price is. US$5,000
per purse-seine fishing day. This has already been agreed as the minimum by PNA
Fisheries Ministers through a binding regional resolution. The landed value of
the fish caught by the average purse-seiner in a day is up to US60,000 at
current world tuna prices, so the cost of access to fish in our zones is not
unreasonable. And the price of skipjack can only go higher as conservation and
management limits kick in around the world. It’s a win-win situation for foreign
fishing vessels and for small-island state economies, so everyone should be
happy. Except perhaps the US and EU consumers who buy most of the final product,
since the price will continue to increase. But even they are likely to be happy
if the Pacific Island tuna they are eating is guaranteed to come from a sustainable
source.”
