The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) is urging the Western and Central Pacific Council (WCPFC) to eliminate exemptions and optional clauses in its Conservation Measure 2013-01 concerning the management of bigeye, yellow and skipjack tuna.
In its latest position statement on the issue ISSF has warned that citing ineffective rules and too many exemptions will not work and that a stronger, simpler measure to control the decline of the stock, namely a total fishery closure or an overall reduction in fishing effort.
“Tuna is too important of a commodity to this region to allow any stock to drop below the target reference point without meaningful and decisive action to undo any overexploitation,” said Susan Jackson, ISSF president.
She added that leading scientists agree that more needs to be done to the support the bigeye stock and that so far opaque levels of implementation and politics has stopped this from happening.
ISSF is in agreement with WCPFC that a working group should be set up in order to create the infrastructure needed for FAD data collection and management options.
But among other things, it wants steps taken to address the management of fishing capacity, such as establishing limited entry through closed vessel registries and developing effective mechanisms for capacity transfers to developing nations.
The position statement has been released prior to the 11th regular session meeting of the WCPFC takes place in Apia, Samoa from 1 to 5 December 2014.
