Radio Australia’s Geraldine Coutts spoke with Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, about a major problem in the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) free school purse seine skipjack tuna fishery, which was certified last year as sustainable against the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-label. According to Johnson, PNA officials are calling on the fishing industry to do more to deliver the MSC certified, sustainably caught tuna.
Coutts: The PNA’s purse seine fishery has been sustainably certified as meeting the international standard of MSC, but that certification is bringing problems with it as well because every attempt so far to actually deliver MSC certified skipjack brings higher prices.
Johnson: Well, this is a very interesting problem and it’s what you might call a problem of success. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement now have met MSC certification standards for sustainably caught skipjack tuna and they’ve got onboard observers who monitor the catch, who do the documentation of fish that’s caught without what are known as fish aggregation devices. Without using the FADs, it’s considered more sustainable and customers are willing to pay a higher price for the tuna. But in all the trials that they’ve done this year to try to actually get the tuna from catch into the factory, it just hasn’t worked and the PNA office in Majuro is blaming the industry. And it’s interesting because what they say is that the industry is now making so much money because the tuna per ton has more than doubled in price on the world market in the last couple of years, the thinking is that they’re making so much money they just don’t want to be bothered with dealing with the MSC certification process which is a bit of a hassle.
Do they go hand in a hand, because if the certification is how they’re getting more money so if they don’t bother about it, will that eventually reduce the prices?
Well, no because without MSC certification, the price of tuna on the world market has jumped from USD 1000 a ton three or four years ago to over USD 2400 a ton, so the industry is doing very well just the way it is, and this is an add on. This is a conservation measure of trying to put an incentive to the industry to catch fish without using these fish aggregation devices in a more sustainable manner. And it does bring like a 20 per cent increase in the price that they can get once they land the fish, but PNA officials are saying, well maybe they’re just making so much money right now without certification they just really don’t want to be bothered with doing it and all the paperwork and the hassle. I’m sure at some point it will work, but at least up to now they haven’t even been able to get the first shipment, despite having contracts and demand from buyers, retail, and wholesale outlets in Europe.