Eight Pacific countries created a revolutionary system that brings in $500m a year and prevents the overfishing that blights other regions.
It has been described as “the most remarkable achievement of the Pacific island countries in the last 50 years”.
In 1982, eight, mostly minuscule Pacific island countries in whose waters much of the world’s skipjack tuna was caught got together and decided to do something to get a share of the profits, of which they received precisely nothing.
In a shining example of regional cooperation, the group, known as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), successively outmanoeuvred the United States, Japan and Taiwan, and later mainland China and the European Union.
“It was a David versus Goliath situation from the start,” said Jonathan Pryke, director of the Pacific Islands Program of the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
Over four decades of trial and error, they created a system that Pryke calls “revolutionary” that today not only yields them half a billion dollars a year but also prevents the overfishing that international fishing fleets have carried out to deplete the waters off most poor countries.
They were, from east to west, six micro-states made up mostly of tiny islands (Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau) and two midsized countries, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.
The key to success, said Ludwig Kumoru, the outgoing chief executive of the PNA, was to jettison a system in which the PNA nations undercut each other in trying to sell fishing rights in their waters to foreign fleets – and replace it with another, called the Vessel-Day Scheme. That scheme sees them calculate how much tuna fishing is sustainable and then divides that amount up into fishing days for which fishing companies bid.
“We set the minimum price of a day at US$8,000 a day, up from $2,500 at the beginning, but demand was so high that we’ve been getting $12,000 to $14,000 a day,” Kumoru said.
“All our fish stocks are healthy,” said Transform Aqorau, a Solomon Islands lawyer who became the first chief executive of the PNA in 2010, and was largely responsible for introducing the scheme.
“And they are likely are likely to remain healthy if recent levels of exploitation continue,” confirmed John Hampton, chief scientist as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the region’s top fisheries scientist.
The PNA took years to refine into a system that generated significant profit for the Pacific nations. Fees grew slowly in the decade after signing the PNA.
By the mid-1990s, the massive expansion of the international tuna fleets was beginning to peak, but the eight countries were receiving a tiny fraction of the profits realised by the fleets when the fish were landed. “So there was no real cap, no competition and no scarcity, and the fees they collected were still way below 5% of the landed value of the fish,” said Michael Lodge, a young British lawyer, who joined the Forum Fisheries Agency, the regional agency that supervised Pacific fishing, as its legal adviser in 1989.
In Papua New Guinea, the largest country and economy in the Pacific Islands, the increase in fees income from $20m to $80m a year has been mostly earmarked to develop sustainable coastal fisheries and cooperative fish farming.
“It’s made a big difference in coastal communities,” added Kumoru, the PNA’s acting chief executive, who is from PNG.
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