A Pacific island fisheries bloc has unanimously decided to maintain its Vessel Day Scheme (VDS) management system.
Fisheries officials from the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) agreed at their annual meeting in Kiribati last week to recommend to their fisheries ministers that the system be maintained, despite criticism by countries outside of this western and central Pacific fishery of a management system used to regulate the tuna industry.
The decision followed review at the annual meeting of an independent study of the PNA’s VDS, which manages a multi-tuna fishery by controlling fishing effort and has increased revenue to the islands by over 500% in the past six years.
The independent review by Toroa Strategy Limited of New Zealand compared the effort-based VDS to a quota limit system and concluded: “The VDS is a fully functioning fisheries management regime without peer for its class of fishery…There is no clear benefit from changing the VDS from a day scheme to a catch scheme now or in the near future.”
“No one in the PNA is asking to change the VDS,” said PNA chief executive Dr Transform Aqorau. “It is coming from countries outside of PNA. The VDS is not something we are going to give away. This is a system with a value of US$450 million annually — why would we replace it with something we don’t know?”
PNA controls waters where 50% of the global supply of skipjack tuna is caught. Its members are Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. Tokelau is not a full member, but has joined PNA in enforcing the VDS in its fishery.
After detailing pros and cons of both effort and quota limit systems, the independent review said: “There is no evidence that, for practical purposes, the present sustainability performance of the VDS is inferior to the quota management system given the nature and current state of the tuna fishery.”
To other countries in and outside the region Dr Aqorau said, “Learn to respect different legal arrangements that govern different fisheries. Only the parties to the Palau Arrangement (which established the terms of the VDS) have authority to change the VDS. The Pacific Islands Forum and the Forum Fisheries Agency have no legal authority to change the VDS. By the same token PNA has no authority for other fisheries systems that have their own governance arrangements.”
Since full implementation of the VDS in 2010, fisheries revenues to PNA nations have risen from US$60 million to an estimated US$400 million last year.
