The United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA) Resumed Review Conference, held at U.N. headquarters in New York City, U.S.A., elicited disappointingly few actionable recommendations that the seafood industry could use to further improve its sustainability performance, according to several attendees.
UNFSA is a multilateral treaty aiming to promote effective, cooperative management of highly migratory fish stocks – mainly tuna, sharks, marlin, and swordfish. The treaty originally took effect in 2001 and outlines principles for managing shared fisheries on the high seas, especially within fishing grounds that straddle multiple exclusive economic zones (EEZs).
It also defines principles for establishing and operating regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), the duties of flag states, mechanisms for the enforcement of conservation and management measures, and the special treatment of developing states.
Periodic review conferences, such as this year’s edition that took place in late May, aim to assess progress, mainly concerning the effectiveness of RFMOs in reducing overfishing. The last UNFSA review session, which occurred in 2016, adopted many strong recommendations to improve the functioning of RFMOs.
However, even though the 2016 session defined several recommendations for RFMOs, a 13 February, 2023, report titled “Report of the Secretary-General to the Resumed Review Conference” found that RFMOs had implemented those recommendations unevenly, making the lack of progress at this year’s meeting all the more disappointing for fisheries representatives.
“The overall status of highly migratory fish stocks and straddling fish stocks has not improved since 2016, despite improvements for some stocks and in some regions,” the report concluded. “Indeed, there were no major changes in the overall state of stocks and fisheries catches since the first review prepared by FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization] in 2005.”
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), an NGO based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, monitored this year’s review conference closely, providing a day-by-day analysis.
For example, the outcomes of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) will both affect the RFMOs for which the UNFSA makes recommendations and will require policy coordination to address effectively.
Following this year’s conference, Grantly Galland, project director of international fisheries for the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.-based Pew Charitable Trusts, told SeafoodSource that an “ecosystem approach was one of our real priorities … I hoped – Pew hoped – that we would be able to move that policy forward with some newer, stronger recommendations, and that ended up not being the case.”
An ecosystem approach to fisheries management accounts not only for the effects of fishing on target species, but also on bycatch species and ones that may prey on target species.
“We also hoped that there would be more mention and consideration of climate change, and that was also not the case,” Galland said. “There was one party that objected to any of that new language on improving the ecosystem approach – including climate change as a new concern for fisheries management. All of that language, while proposed by several parties, was objected to by one, so that was unfortunate.”
Other tactics that parties may take toward fisheries management include a precautionary approach, which entails erring on the side of caution when existing data provides inadequate input in decision-making.
Galland said that while he did not sense a desire by any of the parties to directly regulate emissions of fishing vessels through the RFMOs, Pew was hoping to elicit a statement that the unpredictability introduced by climate change might require a more precautionary approach in setting harvest levels.
Prior to the review meeting, Pew issued a report titled “Governments Make Progress on United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement,” which reviewed the status of the five major RFMOs on a variety of criteria and gave each a green, yellow, or red color rating in specific categories depending on their performance.
The Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT) and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) have fully implemented at least one management strategy evaluation and, therefore, have received a green rating in the category concerning established tested management procedures.
The Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) has adopted a management procedure for bigeye tuna that will take effect in 2024, while the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) adopted one for skipjack in 2022 but has not yet implemented it. Both RFMOs received yellow ratings in the aforementioned category from the Pew report.
The Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) is the only tuna RFMO that has not adopted any MPs, receiving a red rating in that category.
In no RFMO are stocks at or above the size required to produce maximum sustainable yield, though three – the CCSBT, IATTC, and ICCAT – have science-based rebuilding plans in force for any stocks that are below the size required to produce maximum sustainable yield.
All of the RFMOs scored yellow in the ecosystem approach category, as they all have ecosystem approaches to protect some, but not all, bycatch species.
Despite pressure to adopt them, no RFMO yet requires comprehensive port state measures, which mandate inspections of foreign fishing vessels, though all have adopted minimum standards for inspections.
An area of success across the board, according to the Pew report, was the RFMO requirement for fishing vessels to have an International Maritime Organization vessel number attached to it, which helps prevent IUU vessels from simply changing names and flags to evade suspicion. All RFMOs currently require an IMO number or a Lloyd’s Register number, though ICCAT has more exemptions than the others do, so Pew gave it a yellow rating; All others received a green rating.
“You still, in fact, can change the names and you still can change the flags; that happens very often, but the IMO number is not changed. So, you have to bring your record of good or bad behavior with you,” Galland said. “[This] allows enforcement officers, compliance officers, and even fisheries managers to know who the good and the bad actors are. It doesn’t mean an IUU vessel forever remains one. You can get off of an IUU fishing vessel list, but it does mean that you can’t just simply paint over the name with a new one and throw your hands up as having been totally innocent.”
Although the UNFSA failed to make much actionable progress at this year’s review conference, certain nations have taken up the mantle and implemented actions that should help curb overfishing and overexploitation.
Japan – the leading consumer of many premium tuna species – has begun establishing anti-IUU measures, such as electronic monitoring trials for its distant-water and offshore longline fleets in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which have proved promising in successfully collecting catch and bycatch information, including on discards. Electronic monitoring is especially functional on tuna longline vessels, for which most RFMOs require only 5 percent to 10 percent human observer coverage. Other large-scale commercial vessels, such as purse-seiners, require 100 percent observer coverage.
A December 2022 webinar, hosted by Pew, BirdLife International, and Japan-based conservation firm Errhalt Consulting, highlighted Japan’s role in expanding the use of EM, which includes computers and cameras – in tandem with onboard human observers – that record activity on vessels and relay information to central databases.
“Data transparency and sustainability in fisheries will likely lead to better profits for fishers,” Gakushi Ishimura, a 2021 Pew marine fellow and professor of resource economics and policy at Iwate University in Morioka, Japan, said during the webinar. “Japan can lead the way in creating sustainable fisheries worldwide if they ensure transparency.”
Photo courtesy of Osugi/Shutterstock
