NZ has a lot to learn about Pacific Tuna: PNA

Transcript

The chief executive of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, Transform Aqorau, says a quota-based fisheries system won't work in the Pacific.

Dr Aqorau was responding to a New Zealand-led push at the Pacific Islands Forum to help shift the region away from daily catches via the Vessel Day scheme.

The scheme has brought rising incomes to PNA countries but New Zealand says advances in technology and bigger fishing boats are resulting in larger catches which could render the scheme unsustainable.

Dr Aqorau says the only areas in which unsustainable catches are occurring are those outside the control of its Vessel Day Scheme.

TRANSFORM AQORAU: We are actually moving and getting a study that we are looking at catch limits because that is the recommendation from the VDS review that we had. And the recommendation is that we should look at it but it recommended that we should be very careful about moving in that direction because we are very successful at the moment with the moment with the purse seine fisheries. And so we will find that I think the lessons that they are trying to teach us, I think it is probably the other way round I think we have some lessons to teach them about the way in which the economic rent from a purse seine, a multi-species purse seine fisheries works in a multi-national fisheries. So I am not really flustered by the New Zealand proposal to move into catch quotas. Yes there are lessons to be learnt there but I think 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.

KOROI HAWKINS: In announcing this the Prime Minister of New Zealand and the fishing New Zealand fishing delegation have said that with the PNA vessel day scheme there is the danger of overfishing because the boats that are fishing there technology is improving all the time and there are bigger vessels coming into the region. Is that a legitimate concern do you think?

TA: I don't think so what we have and we have been able to show to the, we have provided a report to the scientific committee of the Western Central Pacific Tuna Commission to show that catches in the PNA waters under the VDS have remained relatively the same over the last five years. The increases that we have seen in catches have come from regions that are outside of the of our control and thats where we are saying that there has to be better control. So there is a, I think a large degree of misinformation and misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the fisheries. And that is what I said, I think a lot of those statements that are being made they are not made with a good understanding of what is happening on the ground in the fisheries. I think we have got a Vessel Day Scheme that has proven to be really effective in terms of managing the resource. We are also moving towards, we have got limit reference points in place and we are putting in proposals again for a target reference point that would lead to harvest control rules, so I am pretty confident that management framework is being strengthened and improved and largely these are PNA driven initiatives. And so as I said probably over enthusiastic bureaucrats from New Zealand I think their hearts in the right place but they need to learn a little bit more I think about our fisheries and some of the issues that we have. Not just simply apply what they think can work in New Zealand to the Pacific Islands.