The global environmental group Greenpeace says the results of last weeks Pacific regional fisheries meeting are incredibly weak and failed on many fronts to stop overfishing of tuna.
Delegates at the annual Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meeting in Cairns, Australia, agreed to reduce longline bigeye catch by 10-30 percent for foreign fishing nations, and put off other major decisions about fishing beyond 2014, but many conservationists say the outcomes do not go far enough.
An oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, Karli Thomas says some countries even walked away with a mandate to increase tuna catches.
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One clear example is the European Union's purse seine fleet. It's only a few vessels but they have a very high catch on the high seas. They agreed back in 2008 to limit that to 100 days and they've walked away from this meeting allowed to fish more than 400 days in the high seas. So there are some real areas where things are spiralling out of control.
Karli Thomas says the goal of limiting tuna catches was hampered when discussions were only open to as few as one observer from environmental NGOs.
