Tuna fisheries industry in New Caledonia. Photo: Armement du Nord
The Pew Charitable Trusts international fisheries project has two key goals going into next week's annual meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission in Suva.
Project lead Glen Holmes said the NGO hopes the Regional Fisheries Management Organisation, known colloquially as the Pacific Tuna Commission, will finally implement amendments to improve conservation management measures for catch transshipment between eligible vessels on the high seas. Ammendments that have been worked on for years.
He told Don Wiseman they also want electronic monitoring on vessels to finally be normalised for vessels fishing in the Pacific.
"I think that WCPFC was the first tuna commission to actually start down this road, 10 years ago, and it's one of the last ones to make some progress. To be fair, it did this in conjunction with electronic reporting, and it did get electronic reporting up a while ago. So I think it tended to focus initially on the reporting side."
The reporting is the way the data is sent in to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and to the flag states, rather than using paper log books and pieces of paper sent or faxes - it's much more modern and efficient to report electronically.
Glen Holmes said the Commission has been working out a way to incorporate cameras, for instance, so ship operators can monitor catches, by-catch and so on.
"Essentially a lot of the work that a human observer might currently do. And so in order to be able to do that, and to do that with confidence in the information that those systems generate, you need a bunch of standards. You need to agree on the minimum standards.
"Where cameras will be, and what the cameras can actually monitor, and the resolutions that the cameras are operating at, and that sort of stuff. And it's like a bit of a Pandora's box. It sounds very simple at first pass, and then you start getting into the details, and you realise that there's a lot more things that need to be considered."
He said the complexity involved in these decisions is what has delayed the process.
"The other tuna commissions have managed to agree and move forward on this in a much more timely manner than WCFPC has managed to do. And so I think there is a bit of chain dragging for WCPFC."
But Holmes said he has every confidence "that standards will be agreed this year to allow electronic monitoring to take place in the Western and Central Pacific."
Another issue for Pew Charitable Trusts and other NGOs covering the Commission's work is the failure to date to put in place a workable system for managing the transshipment of fish catch on the high seas.
Holmes said transshipping of fish from one vessel to another is a legitimate exercise, if done under clear parameters.
But on the high seas there is less scrutiny.
They are concerned at the lack of scrutiny. There is less oversight, and so that opens the doors "for nefarious activities to possibly slip through the compliance cracks."
He said the other Regional Fisheries Management Organisations around the world have managed to put improved management of transshipment in place.
"The WCFPC is the last of the tuna RFMOs to lift its transshipping standard up to the guidelines established by the FAO a number of years ago.
"It's high time that the standards were lifted up so that there was better monitoring of transshipment activities, to allow better management of the fishery as a whole."
Meanwhile another fisheries NGO that will be at next week's meeting in Suva, Accountability Fish, want to ensure that outside observers can sit in the full Technical and Compliance Committee meeting where key sustainability data is reviewed and confirmed.
The NGO said it asked New Zealand and a number of other member countries to support their push but they got a blunt no from this country's government.