The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) has established the first-ever set of labor standards by a tuna regional fishery management organization (RFMO) and created a new set of interim standards for electronic monitoring.
However, once again it failed to take action on regulating at-sea transshipment.
The WCPFC's jurisdiction covers more than half of the world’s tuna catch and includes 26 member countries. Ahead of its 21st annual meeting, NGOs were calling on the commission to increase its electronic monitoring requirements and tighten its transshipment standards in a bid to enhance the sustainability of the fishery.
International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) Vice President of Policy and Research Holly Koehler told SeafoodSource that the overall feeling from the meeting was one of progress in terms of sustainability in the fisheries.
“There were a number of really good outcomes from the meeting. There were a couple of things that we were really looking forward to as a win that we have been advocating for for some time,” Koehler said.
Chief among those outcomes was the adoption of interim electronic monitoring standards, which took over 10 years of back and forth to establish.
“The WCPFC has been working on this for a number of years now, and they’re the last tuna RFMO to adopt these interim standards,” Koehler said.
Those standards include relatively basic guidelines like angles of camera and the structures needed to implement electronic monitoring, which should enhance the data acquired by the WCPFC. Currently, 100 percent of purse-seine fishing vessels require human observer coverage, but just 5 percent of longline vessels require coverage – leaving gaps in observation and the data that comes from it.
“Now, the WCPFC, like other RFMOs, enters ...
