April 25, 2017 — Fishing effort in most tuna fisheries has grown steadily in recent years, a trend that has been largely led by the constantly increasing purse-seine harvest. At the same time, these stocks remain in a healthy state and are much less overfished than many other coastal resources, delegates heard at the sixth European Tuna Conference in Brussels, Belgium.
Speaking at the biennial forum, held on the eve of the 2017 Seafood Expo Global, Alain Fonteneau, a renowned tuna fisheries scientist from the French Research Institute for Development (IRD), confirmed that the total global tuna catch has grown to a level of around five million metric tons (MT), with skipjack accounting for around 66 percent the total.
Fonteneau highlighted that the purse-seine fleets’ heightened productivity – averaging 2.5 percent annually over the last two decades – was chiefly responsible for this growth and that their improved efficiency was directly due to the increased number of fish aggregating devices (FADs) deployed in recent years.
Over the last 10 years, FADs have been responsible for approximately 50 percent of the total purse-seine catch, including 53 percent of the skipjack that has been caught during this period.
“If we were to lose all of the FAD fisheries tomorrow, we would lose most of the skipjack catch,” he said.
While the amount of skipjack caught in most fisheries has continued to increase – a trend that Fonteneau said is indicative of healthy stocks – most of which are still not yet exploited to their maximum sustainable yield (MSY), including the 2 million MT currently coming from the Western Pacific. He is, nevertheless, pessimistic about the Indian Ocean’s stock, despite it currently being in “good shape,” as his “personal feeling” is that the next stock assessment, expected in October, will suggest its over-exploitation.