PACIFIC – Pacific Island countries are increasingly serious about protecting their marine resources.

Amid ongoing warnings about the unsustainable harvesting of tuna in the Pacific, a more intense debate has emerged about how to manage fish stocks.

While there’s a lot of talk about fisheries problems, some Pacific states are getting on with solutions.

At their annual summit this month in Port Moresby, Pacific Islands Forum leaders were given the latest grim reports on various tuna stocks.

They were told the bigeye tuna catch had been unsustainable for some time and that taking action couldn’t be further delayed.

Palau’s President, Tommy Remengesau said regional response was crucial.

“We are indeed faced with a very critical regionalism decisions to make, maximising the values of our fishing resources while at the same time ensuring that it’s a sustainable commodity for our people and our future as island people. So that’s going to take some regional understanding of the peoples livelihood,” he said.

The summit resulted in a New Zealand-led push to help shift the Pacific’s stock management away from daily catches via the Vessel Day Scheme arrangement used by the Parties to the Nauru Agreement.

The PNA’s scheme has succeeded in extracting greater fisheries revenues for its Pacific Island member states, and the PNA head Transform Aqorau bristled at suggestions of a quota-based fisheries system.

“There are complexities in the Pacific that are not really and readily transferable from, from a developed country like New Zealand to a developing country fisheries where you have got multi-species, multi-national, multi-zone,” he said.

New Zealand’s Ambassador for Pacific Economic Development Shane Jones says Forum leaders have mandated a year-long study into the future of tuna fisheries management in the region and the PNA should heed their wishes.

“What we have at the moment, predominantly in the skipjack fishery is a system where days are sold enabling harvesters from a host of different fishing nations, some distant some in the Pacific, to harvest fish.

“You can harvest as much as you like within a given day. The difference in New Zealand’s system is that you can only harvest up to a sustainable maximum catch.”

Ensuring the catch remains within sustainable levels is difficult for Pacific island countries with their limited resources to police the seas.

However, Nauru has issued a ban on the practice of transhipment in its exclusive economic zone, after a Taiwanese ship was caught fishing illegally near its waters by Greenpeace this month.

Transhipment involves vessels transferring catch to a bigger ship out at sea, allowing them to stay in ocean fishing grounds for years on end and dodge monitoring mechanisms.

A Greenpeace campaigner, Lagi Toribau, says given there are some 3500 longliners authorised to fish in this area of the Pacific, Nauru’s ban is the right move.

“One of the things we’re encouraging Pacific island countries – it is well within their rights and they will be able to completely change the dynamic and help with the limitation in policing – is to ban this practice of transhipment and have them all do it in port and that way it’s also an economic return for Pacific governments.”

Meanwhile, in eastern Polynesia, Chile is planning to create a massive marine reserve to protect the fish stocks of Easter Island.

At some 447,000 square kilometres, the reserve would be the world’s biggest, if created before another one proposed by the UK around the Pitcairn Islands.

The message is clear, the Pacific islands are taking new measures to counter large-scale illegal fishing in their waters.