One Of PNA’s Most Productive EEZ’s Now Closed To Tuna Seinersff
31 October 2011
Nauru Source: Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority
The Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority Friday issued a notice to the purse-seiners of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vanuatu fishing under bilateral access agreements with NFMRA, that the limit of allowable purse-seine fishing effort for 2011 in Nauru under these arrangements has been reached. The Nauru EEZ, which is part of the PNA, is considered one of the best purse-seine fishing areas in the Pacific Ocean.
Individual vessels may however continue to fish in Nauru if they are able to purchase additional fishing days from the Office of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement. These entitlements would have to be transferred from the zones of other Parties to the Nauru Agreement with under-used fishing effort allocations and who are willing to transfer vessel-days for fishing in Nauru.
“The trouble is, there aren’t many underused allocations this year,†said the NFMRA Chief Executive Officer, Charleston Deiye. “PNA has really tightened up the vessel-days system after getting some criticism from certain quarters in the USA and Spain. They said we were not able to fully control foreign fishing effort being transferred from the high seas into EEZs after the high seas closures came into effect in 2010. Although we dispute that – the baseline estimate of high seas effort doesn’t take into account the full extent of previous high seas fishing by the Philippines, and it doesn’t take into account the fact that the US purse-seine fleet has doubled its purse-seine effort since the baseline was drawn up – the PNA countries are going to make very sure that we don’t lay ourselves open to similar accusations in futureâ€.
“Nauru had to close its zone to purse-seining in October in 2010 as well,†says Mr. Deiye. “In fact we have never had any unused days left at the end of the year for the entire period of operation of the PNA Vessel Days Management Scheme. This indicates to us that the Nauru EEZ is one of the best purse-seine fishing areas in the Pacific. We need to keep this fishery under tight control because there is a higher density of fishing in Nauru, in terms of number of purse-seine sets per square mile of EEZ than any other Pacific Island EEZâ€.
