NEW ZEALAND – About 40 Pacific fisheries ministers and officials are in New Zealand to learn about this country’s approach to fisheries management.

Tuna is the key resource for most of the Pacific nations and a commitment was made by New Zealand at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum to help improve sustainability.

At the Pacific leaders’ summit last year, New Zealand prime minister John Key put US$50 million on the table towards the Forum’s Roadmap to Fishing Sustainability.

“That fifty million will be used in areas like transitioning to a quota management system away from a daily catch and that requires far more sophisticated ministries. It requires equipment. It requires scientific research. We think actually we’ll end up spending more than that,” he said.

Key was championing New Zealand’s quota management system over the Vessel Day Scheme, or VDS, operated mostly by the eight countries making up the Parties to the Nauru Agreement.

Part of that process is now underway with the study tour starting in Wellington where the virtues of the catch-based system is being extolled – but New Zealand’s Pacific economic ambassador, Shane Jones, says it is not about trying to get rid of the VDS.

Jones says by encouraging a catch-based fisheries management system, his country is not advocating that other methods should end.

The Partner to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) has welcomed this apparent change of heart.

PNA controls waters where 50 per cent of the global supply of skipjack tuna is caught.

Its members are Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau.

The PNA sells fishing days to distant-water nations and has turned this into a highly lucrative source of income from the purse seiners that fish for skipjack in their respective EEZs.

But reports coming out of the gathering in New Zealand said there is no talk now of pressuring the VDS to end.

The head of the PNA, Dr Transform Aqorau, says he welcomes this apparent change of emphasis.

“I think that has to be explained properly and it’s good there is a reversal in how it is being characterised now.”

PNA members agreed last week to stay with their VDS system after a review by a New Zealand based company called Toroa Strategy Ltd.

It concluded the VDS is a fully functioning fisheries management regime without peer for its class of fishery.

It said there was no clear benefit from changing to a catch scheme now or in the near future.

The company said the purse seine VDS was a very successful fisheries management regime by any real world standard.

Pacific economic development ambassador Jones said he welcomes the financial success the PNA has had and says New Zealand is supportive of that. But he says there are other fisheries’ challenges.

“Not the least of which is the long line fishery where the level of regulation is woeful and unfortunately the level of high seas fishing threatens to ruin the sustainability of the long line fishery.

“And a lot of what we are doing this week is actually focussing on those problems.”

The prime minister of the Cook Islands, Henry Puna, who is also that country’s fisheries minister, has been singing the praises of the New Zealand catch-based system. He says it is one of the best in the world.

“We all share a common objective of making sure that fisheries in the Pacific is sustainable well into the future and we believe that the quota management system will deliver that for us,” Puna said.

The week-long fisheries study tour will involve some time in Nelson, including a visit to the Maritime training school there.

- RNZI/PNC