PNA plans to charge more for use of FADs

Transcript

The countries that make up the Parties to the Nauru Agreement will start charging more for the use of Fish Aggregating Devices in a trial to begin next year.

The plan was agreed upon at PNA's annual meeting in Federated States of Micronesia last week.

FADs are currently managed at the level of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission with a four-month closure, aimed at reducing the number of juvenile bigeye, yellowfin and other by-catch being caught.

But the PNA says small countries like Tokelau and Tuvalu find the closure to be a crippling burden as it reduces fisheries revenue.

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community's Oceanic Fisheries Programme manager, John Hampton, told Mary Baines about the new restrictions on FADs set in PNA waters and other issues raised at the meeting.

JOHN HAMPTON: The ministers agreed to the Total Allowable Effort levels for 2015 and 2016 in the purse seine fisheries. They also agreed to the new measures involving the tracking and charging of sets on Fish Aggregation Devices by purse seiners operating within their Exclusive Economic Zones. Essentially what that has done is create a small incentive for vessels to not use Fish Aggregation Devices, which as you probably know, is the main way in which purse seiners catch Big Eye Tuna which is a species of some conservation concern at the moment. So they've created a $1000 differential in fees for days on which FAD sets are undertaken as opposed to days on which vessels are utilising other techniques involving setting on free schools which tends not to catch very much if any Big Eye tuna. They also agreed on a trial for the acquisition of electronic satellite data on the locations and numbers of FADs that vessels are deploying. So that will become a requirement as a part of this trial for purse seine operators to authorise their satelitte service providers to make that data available to the PNA office. That will be quite an important new set of information for monitoring compliance for some of these measures involving the use of FADs, but it will also have quite significant utility for some of the scientific work that my programme, the Oceanic Fisheries Programme at SPC, undertakes in knowing what the numbers of these FADs are and their densities in any particular parts of the region. Other sorts of decisions that were made - we were looking at the economics of the fishery, in particular the minimum benchmark for charging by PNA countries, part of the Vessel Day Schemes that the ministers agreed to maintain the $8000 per day as the minimum benchmark for licensing of vessels in the EEZs, and there were various other considerations with regard to crewing, encouragement of fishing partners to take on Pacific Islanders as part of their crews, and some other considerations with national issues like the Palau proposal to close their EEZ, so quite a diverse meeting.

MARY BAINES: So in terms of all of these outcomes, pretty positive from your perspective?

JH: Yes, I think so. I mean it's good to have the agreements in place for stable levels of purse seine efforts, although I think at some point in the not too distant future the PNA will need to consider the fact that even though the numbers of days that they're authorising is being held at a fixed level, that the efficiency of those days is increasing through the use of new technology, bigger and better boats and so on, and if they want to maintain primarily the Skipjack stock, which is the main target species of the purse seine fisheries, if they want to maintain that stock at a stable level which they said they do, they're going to have to give consideration to reducing those numbers of days that they're allowing, if indeed as it seems the actual efficiency of those days is increasing steadily over time.

MB: And in terms of these new restrictions around FADs, what are the merits?

JH: Well, this proposal is going to be used on a trial basis starting in 2016 for a year just to see how it might work in practise but it is something that has been talked about now about for a while. And as I said it is basically being implemented to create an incentive for vessels to not use FADs as much as they might otherwise do by charging slightly more for days on which FADs are used. So this $1000 differential is sort of an initial level to see how things might work in practise, and of course if this is to be adopted over a longer period of time the PNA would be able to configure that differential appropriately so they get the balance of FAD sets versus non FAD sets to a level consistent with their objective. It's obviously in the first instance an attempt to help with the problem of the Big Eye catch by purse seiners to try and reduce that, on the other side of the coin though is that FADs obviously add something to the economics of the fishing operations, reduces cost to an extent and higher catch rates overall are obtained from FAD sets. So it's a delicate balance on the need on one hand to reduce the Big Eye catch but not impact overly the economic performance of the fishery. Because it's on that basis that these countries in fact are able to derive economic benefits from the fisheries through the charging of access fees.