Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission takes two steps forward, one back

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SCOM] — July 28, 2014 — Susan Jackson, Victor Restrepo and Pable Guerrero posted the ISSF's reaction to the decisions at the recently concluded meeting of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, the oldest established Regional fishery management assocation for tuna.

Susan Jackson, ISSF President, said "While a number of proposals that ISSF and WWF consider important were not adopted – or were deferred to an Extraordinary Meeting of the Commission that is planned for October – the IATTC did agree on measures in three areas that are significant steps forward."

The adopted proposals represent small incremental, but needed, improvements.  They include:

-Management strategy evaluation for albacore and tropical tuna.  The ISSF has strongly urged the IATTC to adopt harvest control rules, as setting a specific target is the first step in controlling fishing mortality, including interim species specific targets for the Eastern Tropical Pacific.  This was not agreed to, but the decision to study the issue was seen as positive, and possibly laying the groundwork for some type of harvest control measures in 2015.

-IMO vessel control numbers:  " This year, IATTC adopted a requirement for all eligible vessels to provide an IMO (International Maritime Organization) number in order to be on the IATTC Regional Vessel Register by 2016. In recent years, ISSF and its partners have spent a great deal of time appealing to tuna RFMOs and their member countries to require vessels to obtain a unique vessel identifier, such as an IMO number, and to provide that number to the RMFO. In fact, at the end of 2011, only 12 percent of large-scale purse seine vessels targeting tropical tuna had publicly available unique identifying numbers registered with the IMO. Today, close to 90 percent do. With this decision, IATTC fills a needed gap in this area – a big win for efforts to combat IUU fishing activities and manage global capacity."

VMS "Going into Lima, ISSF and WWF supported the proposals of the European Union on port State measures and reforming the IATTC Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). These monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) measures help to combat IUU activities on the water, prevent IUU catch from getting to markets, and ensure that all nations are playing by the same rules. While the port State measures proposal, once again, was not adopted, the IATTC did adopt much needed changes to its VMS measure. The IATTC program still has much room to improve to align with best practices for such programs, but this is a step in the right direction."

The areas where the IATTC clearly fell short, according to ISSF, include no action on capacity management, and failure to control rampant overfishing of bluefin tuna.  The ISSF is urging capacity reduction in tuna fisheries, and the IATTC did not take action on any capacity reduction measures.  Current harvest capacity exceeds the sustainable harvest capacity of Eastern Pacific stocks.

Finally, no action was taken on Bluefin, despite clear evidence that the species is highly overfished.

Despite these failures, overall the ISSF felt the commission did move forward, and they hope more progress will be made in 2015, and at an extraordinary meeting to be held this October.