Saving Seafood

Pacific Islands US Tuna Treaty Signed

April 17, 2024 — On March 28, 2024, in Suva, Fiji, the United States State Department and the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) signed a tuna treaty that will allow the US purse seine fleet to continue fishing in the EEZs of 17 Pacific island nations that are party to the agreement.

The South Pacific Tuna Treaty originally went into effect in June of 1988, and the latest renewal will continue the agreement until June 2033. The memorandum of understanding allows the United States fleet operating under the Treaty to continue fishing in the EEZs of the Pacific Island Parties in 2024, pending the formal adoption of the agreed amendments and revised text of the Treaty for 2025 onwards. In exchange for access granted to US tuna vessels, the revised Treaty package includes an annual $60 million payment from the United States Government for the next ten years (2023-2033) and a further amount paid by the industry. In addition to this annual payment, the United States Government had agreed to provide US $10 million in 2023 to be distributed equally to the Pacific Island Parties for economic development, including climate change-related projects.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

House committee moves South Pacific Tuna Treaty Act forward

October 28, 2023 — The U.S. House’s Natural Resources Committee has approved legislation that would finally bring America’s regulations into alignment with amendments to the South Pacific Tuna Treaty signed in 2016.

The 1987 treaty enables American tuna purse-seine vessels to fish in the exclusive economic zones of 16 Pacific Island nations and is key to the ongoing operations of America’s South Pacific tuna fleet. In 2016, the treaty signatories agreed to several amendments to the treaty. However, those changes have not been reflected in U.S. law, leaving South Pacific tuna fishermen in a state of uncertainty for years.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

U.S. Tuna Treaty Brings No Special Benefits For American Samoa Industry

December 7, 2016 — PAGO PAGO, American Samoa — While the new six-year South Pacific Tuna Treaty does not appear to provide any special recognition or benefits to the American Samoa’s tuna industry, Commerce Department Director Keniseli Lafaele says the Treaty is a way forward and the territory hopes to find opportunities under the Treaty that will benefit American Samoa.

Lafaele is also hopeful that the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump will concentrate more on finding ways for the locally based US flag boats to compete in the global tuna industry.

Signed Dec. 3 (Saturday) during a ceremony in Nadi, Fiji, the new Treaty is valid through 2022 and is between the US and 16 Pacific Island countries. It allows the US purse seiner fleet to fish in waters of these Pacific countries. The Treaty was approved in “principle” during another round of negotiations held in Auckland, New Zealand in June this year.

Signing of the new Treaty came two days before the start Monday in Fiji of the week-long Western and Central Pacific Fishery Committee meeting in Nadi, for which American Samoa has a delegation that is part of the U.S. delegation.

Leading the local delegation is Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources director Dr. Ruth Matagi-Tofiga, who told Samoa News that signing of the new Treaty “is indeed an exciting occasion, being that it took 7 years to sign the Treaty with amendments.”

And the Treaty is “important for American Samoa because it sets operational terms and conditions for the U.S. tuna purse seine fleet to fish in waters under the jurisdiction of the Pacific Island Parties, which cover a wide swath of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean,” Matagi-Tofiga said via email from Nadi, over the weekend responding to Samoa News inquiries.

She points out that the U.S. purse seine fleet “operates under the highest commercial standard and subject to strict U.S. enforcement authorities… that curtails illegal and unregulated fishing.”

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

U.S. fleet gets long-term deal in tuna-rich Pacific

June 29, 2016 — American fishing companies will have access to some of the most tuna-rich waters in the world until 2023.

Negotiators from the U.S., island nations and American fishing companies agreed to a new South Pacific Tuna Treaty on Saturday in New Zealand that reduces the number of days that U.S. boats can fish but also gives them the option of buying as many fishing days as they need, instead of a set amount per the previous agreement.

The U.S. State Department announced in January it would pull out of a treaty for a vast area of the Pacific Ocean — source of 60 percent of the nation’s canned tuna — after some American boats said they could not pay fees owed to a cluster of Pacific island nations.

“(The new treaty) gave us pretty much what we hoped for,” said J. Douglas Hines of the Global Companies, a group of three Nevada-based firms with offices in San Diego. “This is behind us for now.”

Although negotiations are officially over, the deal still needs final approval from the nations’ governments. Most people involved in the negotiations do not predict any issues because representatives have already signed off.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Tuna treaty restored

March 22, 2016 — After a heated debate over high fishing fees and an announcement that the U.S. would pull out of the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, negotiations have restored the treaty and U.S. fishing vessels are back at sea.

Due to a bad 2015 season, the 37-boat American tuna fleet said they couldn’t afford the fees for the fishing days they had agreed to buy in August. They sought to lower the number of fishing days for the fleet and reduce their bill, but the Solomon Islands-based Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, the administrators of the treaty were holding the fleet to their initial agreement.

The U.S. Department announced in mid-January that it intends to pull out of the 27-year-old treaty, effective immediately, and U.S. boats were headed back to port along the California coast.

Now the department has announced that they’ve negotiated, lowering the number of collective fishing days from 5,959 to around 3,900 and the fleet’s tuna tab from $90 million to $66 million. The unused days will be resold to other nations, according to the treaty agency, but those deals will not be as profitable as the original deal with the U.S.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

U.S. to pull out of Pacific tuna treaty

January 19, 2016 — The U.S. State Department has announced its intention to pull out of a nearly 30-year treaty that allowed American boats to fish tuna in a vast area of the Pacific Ocean.

Prompted by some U.S. boats saying they could not pay fees to a cluster of Pacific island nations, the 37-boat fleet — many with ties to San Diego — were not issued licenses at the start of 2016.

The department gave formal notice this week to island nations in the South Pacific Tuna Treaty that it planned to pull out of the world’s biggest tuna fishery.

Pressure on the island nations will likely build as Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, plans to introduce legislation in Congress at the end of this week to cut $21 million in foreign aid to 15 of the countries in the treaty.

Brian Hallman, executive director of the San Diego-based American Tunaboat Association, said the treaty has one year to expire and he was hopeful a new deal could be worked out.

“During that year, I believe there will be efforts and negotiations to try to get a restructured treaty,” Hallman said Tuesday, “and we support that.”

He said it was hard to say how many American jobs would be lost because many local fishing captains can transfer to boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean. However, he said the U.S. territory of American Samoa employs thousands who work in canneries and other jobs related to the U.S. fleet.

Read the full story at The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

State Department: Amid impasse, US could withdraw from Pacific tuna treaty

January 7, 2016 — Though there appears to be no immediate end in sight to a dispute over unpaid fees for fishing access that has seen the US tuna fleet grounded in the Pacific, one thing is clear: the parties involved agree that the existing treaty should be renegotiated in favor of a more flexible, permanent solution.

In statements to Undercurrent News, US State Department and the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), which manages access to the tuna fishery, both said they see serious issues with the existing system and would like to see reforms to the South Pacific Tuna Treaty.

“Longer-term, we are increasingly concerned about whether the treaty can remain operationally viable and believe a new approach is required,” a State Department spokeswoman wrote in a statement to Undercurrent.

She added that the US has told the PNA that it is weighing a pull out from the existing arrangement.

“The United States previously informed Pacific island parties that it was considering the possibility of withdrawal from the treaty as the terms offered in negotiations continued to deteriorate and commercial differences threatened to negatively affect our positive cooperation with the region,” the spokeswoman said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Fed fishery council calls for better terms for tuna catches

June 23, 2015 — The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council is calling for improved terms in the South Pacific Tuna Treaty (SPTT) for the Pago-based purse seiner fleet. Winding up its 163rd meeting on Thursday in Honolulu, the Council made several recommendations to address increasingly restricted catch limits on US purse seine and longline vessels in the Western and Pacific Ocean (WCPO).

In a press statement made over the weekend, the Council recognized that the combination of the US high seas purse-seine effort limits by the international Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) and the removal of historic levels of fishing days in Kiribati waters available under the South Pacific Tuna Treaty (SPTT) may be resulting in reduced supply of tuna offloaded directly to the Pago Pago canneries by US purse-seine vessels.

The Council recommended that NMFS and the State Department improve the current terms of the SPTT with regards to Pago Pago-based US purse seiners. The Council also recommended that NMFS consider developing regulations that would allow fishing effort or catch from Pago Pago-based US purse vessels to be attributed to American Samoa but without an increase in bigeye landed by these vessels.

Read the full story at Samoa News