Progress and setbacks with tuna and coastal fishing and aquaculture are being discussed at a Heads of Fisheries meeting at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea.
The management of fisheries, including deep sea snapper will also be discussed.
This year, special focus will be placed on sea cucumber fisheries and increasing the return from beche-de-mere exports.
Dr Mike Batty, the director of the fisheries division at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community says progress has been steady but funding could become an issue.
Presenter: Richard Ewart
Speaker: Dr Mike Batty, director, fisheries division, Secretariat of the Pacific Community, SPC
BATTY: We’re reasonably happy with the way the program is going. We’ve managed to maintain funding and keep our activities on the road, but we do face a bit of an uncertain future with regards to some projects over the next year or two.
EWART: Now, I mentioned in the introduction that Deep Sea Snapper. My understanding is these are slow growing fish, so potentially more vulnerable to overfishing. So what needs to be done to manage that particular species and how much potential is there if that management is successful?
BATTY: Yeah, this is an important fishery in a number of our member countries, particularly Tonga, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Samoa and we’ve been focusing our efforts on those countries. It’s the fishery that was developed quite a few years ago, mainly with assistance and support from SPC, it was sort of pioneered by SPC and it’s continued as quite a sustainable fishery. But a number of countries are under pressure now to expand the fishing effort. They’re being asked by owners of larger vessels if they can join the fishery, where the more sophisticated techniques can be used and I think it’s really to answer that question that they’ve asked us to help, to help them come up with better stock assessments.
EWART: And if, if you can come up with those answers, this is a potential growth market, yes?
BATTY: I think there are opportunities for the fishery to expand in some countries, but one has to be cautious, remembering that this very often when you discover a new stock as happened with deep water snapper in the late 70s and early 80s, you get very high catch rates and then, of course, catch rates tail off because the sustainable yield is, is made at about half the standing stock typically. So you don’t get the boom that you got in the early years and people have to be aware that even, although the fisheries sustainable, they may not get the same sort of catches and returns that they got in the, when the fishery first started.
EWART: What about other species that may have potential for the future, the Blue Nose is one that’s been mentioned and also perhaps a bit out of the left field I gather the deep water squid?
BATTY: Yes. Blue Nose is a resource that also occurs in Tonga as it happens and there’s been some initial commercial fishing of that species.
I think the main problem they’re looking at there is the market. They’ve been selling on the local market, which is quite small and it doesn’t seem that there’s enough money in the fishery to look really at exporting to markets such as Australia and New Zealand.
The deep sea squid was another one. There was a trial done last year between SPC and the New Caledonia Fisheries and they came up with good results there, some huge squid to about 18, 20 kilos each squid being caught in deep water, about 500 metres down and that fishery is something. We expect that resource will occur across other countries at a similar latitude and it is an export fishery in a number of countries. There’s strong demand in Japan. So that may well be something coming up in the future.
EWART: Now, the European Fisheries Program, which you’ve been overseeing, 11 million Australian dollars pumped into the region, that wraps up this year. So what impact will that have once that program comes to an end?
BATTY: Yes, that’s one of the areas I mentioned as a potential problem, when you asked me where we faced some setbacks. Certainly, we’ve had very strong support from the European Union over a number of years and I’d like to acknowledge that. It’s been very important in building up our programs. But it has been through these relatively short term projects and we get a problem of sort of stop and start. We get good activities up and running and then the funding runs out and we have to develop a new project proposal. And we’re hopeful, at least in the medium term, that we maybe able to come to a different arrangement with the European Union, where they provide more sustained support to fisheries programs in the region.
In terms of the immediate effects, some, while the first staff member has already finished and left from the project and we’re hoping that we maybe able to secure additional funds to keep things running until around the middle of next year, but after that, the future is not very certain.
2011 ABC