Taiwan’s Tuna Stake In The Pacific ff

Every year, Taiwanese fishing boats scoop more than 200,000 tons of tuna out of the Pacific for sale around the world. In the US$2-billion-a-year tuna industry, Taiwan, with its fleet of large, modern fishing vessels, is a force to be reckoned with.

However, despite the payment of millions of dollars of access fees by Taiwanese fishing companies, Pacific Islanders see a tiny fraction of the money eventually paid for the fish.

Taiwan’s roughly 600-strong longliner fleet is second only to that of Japan. These vessels target mainly yellowfin, bigeye and albacore, attracting them with thousands of baited hooks on lines up to 100km long. It's a controversial method as the hooks ensnare whatever tries to eat the bait and because the kinds of tuna longliners catch are in some places already overfished. In particular, there are concerns that stocks of bigeye and bluefin, which are the staple of Japanese sashimi, are being overexploited.

The root cause of overfishing is overcapacity, and since the mid-1990s, steps have been taken to address the problem. In 2005, Taiwan unilaterally announced it was reducing its longline fleet by 120 vessels, or 20 percent. The cost of scrapping the longliners over two years-73 in 2005 and 47 in 2006-will cost the government about US$120 million.

According to Wu Shinn-charng, a senior specialist in the Deep Sea Fisheries Division of the Taiwanese government's Fisheries Agency, even though Taiwan was not obliged to cut the number of its vessels, there was pressure from other fishing countries to bring capacity in line with the fishing quotas set to ensure fishing companies would not be tempted to catch too many fish. “As a responsible fishing country, we have to take measures to protect fishery resources,” Wu says.

However, nearly 80 percent of the tuna caught in the Pacific is skipjack, stocks of which are still thought to be underexploited in the region. More than 200 purse seiners-the vessels that catch them-operate in the Pacific, but few compare to Taiwan’s fleet of 33 of the newest, largest and most efficient harvesters of skipjack on the planet.

Attempts have been made to better manage not only the operations of fishing vessels but also of fish stocks, most recently through the West and Central Pacific Fisheries Council. The WCPFC is one of the few organizations that Taiwan has been a member of from the beginning, quite an achievement considering it is not a member of the United Nations or even the World Health Organization.

However, even in the world of fishing, poltics is still apparent. As it is not recognized as a country by most other nations, and because China is also a member, Taiwan had to join the WCPFC as a “fishing entity” under the name Chinese Taipei. It is bound by all the obligations of membership, but as it is not a contracting party, it cannot hold the positions of chairman or vice chairman, nor can it decide on the appointment of the executive director.

”That is the reality of international relations,” says Peter Ho, president of the Overseas Fisheries Development Council, a non-profit organization partly funded through Taiwanese government research contracts. “Whether you like it or not, you have to put up with it.”

Despite its reduced status, Taiwan enjoys considerably more rights in the WCPFC than it does in other regional fishing organizations, where it is often only an observer and has little say over the formulation of the rules it must follow.

Failure to abide by the regulations can jeopardize the ability of Taiwan's fishing companies to sell their catch.

In the international network that is the tuna industry, however, little of the profit goes to the source of the fish.

Opportunities for investment in the Pacific are few. Loining plants and canneries require stable supplies of electricity and water, which few Pacific Island countries can guarantee. Moreover, cans would have to be imported, and the transport network in the Pacific is currently not up to the job of transporting hundreds of thousand of tones of tuna around the world. These factors, combined with the fact that global canning capacity already far exceeds demand, make any investment seem unnecessarily risky.

“I’m a businessman, and I've got to run a business,” says James Tsai, chairman of the Fong Kuo Fishery Group and a leading member of the Taiwan Tuna Association. “If Pacific Island countries can offer more financial incentives, then I could invest. But they only have fish.”

Nevertheless, Tsai has invested in a US$20 million loining plant in Papua New Guinea. The plant, owned by the South Seas Tuna Corporation, opened in February 2004 and employs more than 1,000 people.

The incentive to invest in this project is access to the EEZs of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), signed by seven Pacific Island countries in 1982. Vessels granted fishing licenses under this agreement can fish in any of the signatories' EEZs, and the total number of licenses is capped. Investment isn't a requirement to get a fishing license, but the agreement gives priority to companies that contribute to local economies.

Tsai says the plant still loses money, which he blames on an unstable electricity supply and the tendency for workers to disappear after receiving their paychecks. He adds that his attempts to use Papua New Guinea sailors also failed because, although at sea they worked hard, when in port they would disappear and not show up at departure time. He says Kiribati crews are more reliable, but even now most of his foreign crew quota comprises Chinese.

There are other examples of how Pacific Islands have managed to leverage control over their economic zones to attract investments. Taiwanese businessman Koo Kwang-ming, who is also a senior advisor to Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, invested US$600,000 in the Bank of Marshall Islands, securing licenses for his six purse seiners.

More recently, an investment plan by Ching Fu Shipbuilding, the owner of which also owns purse seiners, ran into problems when the floating dry-dock it wanted to establish in the Marshall Islands was rejected on environmental grounds.

A spokeswoman from Ching Fu said that the floating dock was still in Taiwan, but refused to comment on what might happen to it.
 

However, Wu at the Fisheries Agency warned that these types of investment often took advantage of looser regulations in poorer countries, and that the government did not encourage them.

“In our experience, we don’t know if they are really investing or just expanding their fishing capabilities,” Wu said. “Some countries may want investment, but if their fishing management capabilities are inadequate, it will increase the difficulties in managing the companies and their vessels.”