Kobe tuna meeting

I am following the news from the tuna meeting in Kobe. Kyodo reports that they will agree to evaluate the world's five tuna conservation bodies.

Five different systems? No wonder tuna stocks are diminishing:

As the meeting ran into a second day, the five bodies, gathering together for the first time, studied the differences in their historical backgrounds and past achievements in ensuring the sustainable use of the world's tuna stocks, which have increasingly fallen prey to overfishing.

Reuters has better reporting, quoting WWF officials who called the gathering an important first step but said regulators needed to set quotas based on scientific data and combat illegal fishing:

"For the first time, there's a general agreement by the governments that something significant has to be done," said Alistair Graham, High Seas Advisor for WWF International.

"One of the key decisions they have to make is to stop ignoring scientific data and to put in place catch limits."

With fishing a touchy political topic in many nations, governments have tended to shy away from imposing restrictions on the industry.

The Kobe meeting is not expected to set catch limits, since those are decided at regional gatherings, but Graham said one outcome could be a decision by governments to use data on stocks and depletion for their fisheries policy.

Pacific Magazine has the local perspective from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga - islands that are increasingly worried about the Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese, markets. Bribes are a part of the game, and in Fiji, the Tuna Boat Association has publicly alleged that Permanent Secretary for Fisheries, his director, and the deputy fisheries director have all been taking bribes from Chinese agents in exchange for longline tuna licenses. Similar questions about compromised local fisheries bureaucracies have been raised in several countries, including the Solomons, the Marshall Islands and Papua New Guinea, according to the article.