PACIFIC VIEWPOINT By Michael Field Nikkei Asian Review Environmentalists and Pacific Island nations are calling for new measures to force Asian fishing nations to rein in overfishing of dwindling tuna stocks that account for 60 per cent of the world’s catch.

Two species of tuna – bigeye and Pacific bluefin – face total collapse in large part due to overfishing by Asian boats.

Attempts to address the problem at a six-day Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meeting in Bali involving the European Union and 24 other governments in early December were inconclusive.

Greenpeace is now calling for the unilateral banning of tuna fishing boats in the Pacific and warning companies that they must take responsibility for the future of their own businesses.

Lagi Toribau, global political tuna project leader at Greenpeace, said that it was “unbelievable that faced with scientific evidence the countries here have done nothing to help conservation.”

Amanda Nickson, tuna conservation programme director general at the Pew Charitable Trusts, blamed “a singular lack of political will to really compromise”.

The 12-year-old Pacific Fisheries Commission, which controls access to fish stocks on the high seas, meets just once every December but has been criticised for being a lumbering bureaucracy.

The bigeye and the Pacific bluefin are favoured by the Japanese, but it is the albacore stock that is being exponentially depleted by the Chinese and Taiwanese. In fact, the Chinese albacore catch increased by more than seven times between 2000 and 2014, to 14,507 tons.

China was indeed the “main issue,” said Wez Norris, deputy director-general of the Forum Fisheries Agency which is made up of 17 resource-owning countries in the Pacific. He said that the Chinese fleet expanded by 400 efficient vessels from 2000 to 2014, when it reached the maximum quota allowed.

“They are quite small — fiberglass,” he added, referring to the Chinese vessels. “They have low operating costs but the ability to set very large numbers of hooks.”

Norris said the “huge ramp-up” by China made it difficult for the commission to achieve anything by consensus and called on China to work with the Pacific nations.

“Simply avoiding management is not in anyone’s interests; it’s not in the interests of the Chinese fleet because while they may be operating economically at the moment, if the stock continues to decline, they certainly won’t be,” he added. Norris called the deadlock “deeply frustrating.”

Chinese delegates did not respond to questions.

Membership in the Pacific Fisheries Commission includes resource-owning nations and deep water fishing nations such as Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea.

Diplomatic sources said that there was no political will to act as each country was only concerned with its own catch.

The figures are worrying. Overall tuna catch in the commission’s area in 2014 reached a record 2.9 million tons, up eight per cent on the previous year, according to an estimate by the Pacific Community, a regional aid and science body based in New Caledonia.

Scientists have calculated that bigeye tuna stocks have fallen drastically to just around 16 per cent of what they would have been, absent fishing.

The calculation is derived from studying current spawning biomass, a method that is considered controversial by some.

By that same calculation, Pacific bluefin stock is found to be four per cent of non-fished biomass.

Skipjack and yellowfin stocks are faring better; both are not considered to be overfished, despite being caught in much larger volumes than Pacific bluefin and bigeye.

The Pacific Community calculated that in 2014, 1.99 million tons of skipjack and 600,699 tons of yellowfin were caught, compared with 128,050 tons of albacore and 161,064 tons of bigeye.

An eight-nation group of Pacific countries, the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, sells the right to fish each day inside the members’ exclusive economic zones.

Group CEO Transform Aqorau said the small Pacific nations were bullied into carrying a “disproportionate burden” in allowing Asian nations to fish in their waters but had received little in return.

Despite the concerns, some fisheries are currently booming due to the effects of El Nino.

Tuna are attracted into the large stretch of warm water around Kiribati and the country stands to earn a record $109 million in 2015 from fishing licenses alone.

This would be about twice the amount projected at the start of the year and equivalent to nearly 80 per cent of its gross domestic product.

Kiribati’s gain, however, is Papua New Guinea’s loss; the latter’s normal catch has moved north.

In the face of such uncertainties, a global fisheries enforcement training workshop in New Zealand in March is now seen as the next opportunity to pressure the Pacific Fisheries Commission to act or to change the way it operates.

But some are pessimistic about the odds of a positive outcome. “It’s a long shot because the fishing nations do not want change,” a diplomat said.

- Michael Field