Tuna

The state of the world's only healthy tuna fishery is high on the agenda for Pacific leaders, who are in Papua New Guinea's capital Port Moresby for the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting.

Prime Minister John Key and Foreign Minister Murray McCully arrive today ahead of the main talks tomorrow and Thursday.

Pacific leaders will be putting their heads together to work out how to maximise revenue from the Pacific's US$4 billion a year tuna catch – and ensure more of it stays in the region.

A four-day meeting in Sapporo, northern Japan, of countries that monitor stocks in most of the Pacific Ocean, made no progress towards helping fish populations recover from decades of overfishing, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Faced with the collapse of bluefin stocks, last year members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission decided to halve the catch of tuna under 30kg from its average level in 2002-2004, although conservation groups had called for a moratorium to give stocks time to recover.

The study focused on the production of Indonesian tuna fisheries in selected provinces, with the aim of  helping dispel any confusion over the size of the country’s pole-and-line catch and to clarify how much of the production enters commercial supply chains.

Recent reports have been circulated claiming Indonesia’s pole-and-line tuna catch fell to 10,000 tonnes last year, which is just one-tenth of the total volume that is generally accepted and reflected in the most recent Government capture fisheries statistics for 2014.

The 1987 South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which provides US purse seine vessels access to the Western and Central Pacific Ocean fisheries, has been extended through interim agreements since 2013, but a longer-term renewal hasn't been agreed to.

At a meeting this week in Brisbane, Australia, the United States and Pacific island nations party to the treaty agreed to an extension through 2016, said Doug Hines, executive director of South Pacific Tuna Corp., which represents 14 purse seine vessels fishing under the treaty. Company owners attended the Australia meeting.