Until the 1900s, tuna was considered a “trash fish.” Now, tuna’s ever escalating popularity — driven by increased demand for canned tuna, disposable incomes and per capita consumption — has resulted in a global market that in 2017 was valued at $11.38 billion.
Nearly 60 percent of the world’s tuna catch comes from the waters of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a country composed of 600 islands, along with the seven other island states belonging to the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, have jurisdiction over an expanse of the Pacific Ocean greater than the size of Europe, endowing them with responsibility for and access to between 25 and 30 percent of the world's tuna supply.
Technology for Tuna Transparency Challenge
Given his country’s outsized influence on tuna fishing, the tuna trade, and the Pacific marine ecosystem generally, FSM President Peter Christian announced in November the Technology for Tuna Transparency Challenge, a new monitoring and oversight program that will be implemented with economic and technical support from The Nature Conservancy. The challenge offers new hope for a more sustainable approach to tuna fishing, particularly long-line fishing.
Long-lines are a commercial fishing gear in which thousands of baited hooks are attached to main lines that can run for dozens of miles. One of the problems with the method is that non-target marine life including sea birds, turtles and fish other than tuna are drawn to the bait. The impact of long-line tuna fishing on this by-catch often goes undocumented and unacknowledged. Currently, only five percent of long-line boats are subject to oversight.
The Technology for Tuna Transparency Challenge boats (including long-liner vessels) will be outfitted with video cameras, remote sensors, GPS trackers and hard drives that will collect data around the targeted, retained catch as well as the discarded by-catch. This data is necessary to establish sensible fishery rules, which can better ensure the sustainability of the region’s tuna stocks as well as protect other marine species. The current lack of reliable monitoring data makes it difficult to establish protective fishing limits, let alone enforce them. If successful and taken to scale, the challenge could help revolutionize the management of seafood production globally.
“For the FSM, tools like electronic monitoring are providing new opportunities for driving on-the-water transparency that hasn’t before been available.”
-Mark Zimring, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Indo-Pacific Tuna Program in a Dateline Pacific radio interview.
Through its Oceans and Seafood Markets Initiative, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been supporting work to eliminate the overfishing and coastal and marine habitat degradation resulting from the production of globally traded seafood commodities, including tuna. “The tuna fishery’s economic, cultural and nutritional value is critical to the people of the Pacific Islands, as well as consumers in the US, Japan and beyond. By supporting The Nature Conservancy and its private and public sector partners in the Pacific, we want to contribute meaningfully to eliminating destructive fishing practices and improving the health of tuna stocks,” explains Bernd Cordes, Moore Foundation program officer for the Oceans and Seafood Markets Initiative.
A new era of fishing that's beneficial for island communities
Zimring is confident that FSM’s leadership is what’s needed to motivate the other Parties of the Nauru Agreement member nations to adopt the monitoring technology and help drive a sustainable tuna industry. “The FSM has drawn a line in the sand and made an important commitment,” praises Zimring. “I think that speaks to its confidence that the era of the wild, wild west of fishing is over, and I think the president believes that’s a vision his Pacific Island peers will continue to buy into.”
Beyond its use as a conservation tool, the electronic monitoring and oversight technology promises to provide economic advantages for island communities. By helping to expose illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by foreign fleets, which rob the region of more than $600 million a year, the equipment will allow FSM to better protect its most commercially valuable natural resource.
The Technology for Tuna Transparency Challenge represents the first time a developing country has committed to 100 percent transparency of vessels operating within its jurisdictional waters.
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