What genuine tuna experts say:

What interests us most is the running debate which always seems to show a massive disparity between presumed stock and actual catch. The evidence provided at KL by Dr. Robin L. Allen, director of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC)'s, hammers more nails into the coffin of the presumption, which found its way to the pages of Nature (see: 'Nature Stumbles', World Fishing August, 2003).

The theory expounded by the authors of the Nature article alleged that the number of predatory fish (that's mainly tuna), had plummeted to one tenth of their original stock size. This, they said, was due to the introduction of industrial fishing

Jumping jacks

Yet, Allen's data shows that these intensively-fished stocks have been producing catches which jumped by factor of seven between which between 1961 and 2000.

Allen's graph, reproduced here, shows that the total catch, of all tuna during the second half of the last century, has continually increased. The only species which has not followed this pattern, and which, early in the industrial game, evidently reached the upper levels of 'fishing mortality' (in other words production) are the bluefins. Bigeye and yellowfin reached such levels more recently -- skipjack's landings keep growing.

Allen's KL data, in his paper reviewing the state of the world's tuna stocks ('Global tuna resources: limits to growth and sustainability' do not differ from those of the FAO report, by Helga Josupeit, entitled 'Overview on world tuna trade'

Allen advocates international management of shared and migratory tuna and concludes: "Management by the tuna commissions should prevent reductions in stock sizes due to overfishing. However we can continue to expect annual and longer-term fluctuations in catches with environmental changes. While the world's tuna fisheries have been expanding, it has not always been easy to see the effect of environmental changes on the stock. Nevertheless it is clear that short and long-term (decadal) changes will have significant impacts on the catches".

Too much, too little

There are other factors in the game, picked up by Ms. Josupeit in her FAO report. She points out that tuna landings, of almost four million tonnes in 1999, produced an oversupply a collapse in market prices. Subsequently, tuna catches dropped back, to about 3.6mnt, in 2000-1 and the prices recovered.

This market movement is reinforced by J.T.P. Tsai of Taiwan who said at KL that, in 1999, skipjack prices in Bangkok dropped to US$500/t and then, in May 2000, to US$300/t. This led to a voluntary reduction in fishing effort by the World Tuna Purse Seine Organization (WTPO). The result was that, in 2001, the price went up to US$650/t.

Ms. Josupeit, not surprisingly, concludes that more fresh and frozen tuna would be turned in to sushi and sashimi in many western countries, and less would find its way into cans. She also concludes that consumption was not expanding in all countries, that new products found a growing market in the US market and Europe was lagging behind. She suggests that more value-added products should be developed and believes the tuna trade and production will end up concentrated in fewer hands.

F.P.Tiu-Laurel, Jr., president of a Filipino company, used his KL paper to complain about the unfair advantage, given by the EU to a number of nations, at the expense of the majority of Southeast Asian packers. The latter faced a 24 per cent tariff, he said, compared to zero per cent on products from former European colonies. He complained about the US Andean Trade Promotion Act, saying it would give preference to Latin American tuna products and this would have a 'devastating impact' on the Filipino tuna industry.

Another speaker, E.F.H. Faleomavaega, of American Samoa, backed up Tiu-Laurel's position.

Since, the KL meeting in 2002, things have moved on a little.

From July 2003 the Philippines and Thailand were given a joint, 25,000t export quota to the EU, at a 12% rate of duty. However, the numbers are hardly large. Thailand alone produces more than 200,000t of canned tuna per annum.

C.R.M. Reid and colleagues at the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), based on Solomon Islands, represent and monitor fisheries of most, if not all, the Pacific island nations. In their KL paper, 'Western and Central Pacific Tuna Industry and Resources Situation' they stated that the tuna resources of the WCPO (Western-Central Pacific Ocean) are healthy, with only bigeye exploited at its maximum sustainable level.

The FFA countries, aware of the risks of a continued expansion of fishing effort, have organised a Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the WCPO. Another stock management instrument is the WCP Convention, signed by the Pacific island nations with some of the other countries fishing in the area.

* Edited by S.Subasinghe and Sudari Pawiro, published by INFOFISH).