China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vanuatu can continue fishing in Nauru waters provided extra fishing days are purchased. (Photo: Stock File/FIS)

Govt imposes limits on foreign fishing vessels

NAURU
Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 04:00 (GMT + 9)

The Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority (NFMRA) has notified purse-seiners of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vanuatu fishing under bilateral access agreements with NFMRA that the limit of allowable purse-seine fishing for 2011 in Nauru has been reached.

Individual vessels can continue to fish there, though, if they purchase additional fishing days from the Office of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA). These entitlements would have to be transferred from the zones of other PNA with underused fishing allocations and who want to transfer vessel-days for fishing in Nauru.

“The trouble is, there aren’t many underused allocations this year,” said NFMRA CEO Charleston Deiye. “PNA has really tightened up the vessel-days system after getting some criticism from certain quarters in the US 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,” he continued.

The area sees variations linked to the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon and which affect fishing. The oceanographic shift has the purse seiners westward during the last two months and impacted the supply of fish to Pacific Island processing plants.

“Some are blaming the three-month (July-September) fish aggregating device (FAD) closure for reducing the supply of fish to certain processing plants recently,” said 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.”

If zone-closures by PNA countries continue toward the end of each year, they will affect processors, particularly small Pacific Island processors who cannot afford to build large freezer reserves to guard against fluctuations in supply.

Deiye noted, however, that when all PNA countries start allocating vessel-days by vessel these year-end closures will be no longer necessary.

Nauru plans to introduce a VDS allocation system in 2012 and drop the “Olympic” (first come, first served) system.

“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. It’s a win-win situation for foreign fishing vessels and for small-island state economies, so everyone should be happy,” said Deiye.

“This is so except for the US and European Union (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,” he pointed out.

Related article:

- Ongoing conservation measures will end the overfishing of bigeye tuna: scientists

By Natalia Real
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

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