Back to FAO Rome, with a different hat

From the 7 to the 11 September, I'm going to be Rome for the 37th session of the Committee on Fisheries, working as technical support to the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority. 

Seventeen years ago I worked in that building as a fisheries officer. I left in 2009 and wrote a blog about why (one of my first ones on another platform). So walking back into the COFI plenary room as a delegate of a member state instead of an officer or a consultant will be interesting and some way of closing the circle.

Fisheries fun

So let me use this post to explain what COFI actually is, what the paperwork looks like, and what it feels like to come back from the other side.

What COFI is

The Committee on Fisheries is a subsidiary body of the FAO Council. The FAO Conference set it up in 1965, and it meets every two years. It is the only global intergovernmental forum where countries sit down together to deal with fisheries and aquaculture. That sentence gets repeated a lot in FAO material, and it is easy to skim past, but it is true, and it matters. There is no other room like it.

COFI does two things. It leads negotiations on international agreements on fisheries and aquaculture and issues global recommendations and policy advice to governments, regional fishery bodies, civil society, the private sector, and the wider international community. Over the years, it has produced binding agreements and non-binding instruments that changed how the sector works, mostly in the direction of resource sustainability and biodiversity conservation.

If you work in fisheries, you already live inside things that came out of that room. The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. The Port State Measures Agreement. The Voluntary Guidelines for Catch Documentation Schemes. The Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment. The Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, and so on…  Every one of them started as a draft, that then got discussed by FAO officers, then go trough a expert cosnsultation, then a technical consultation and along the proces a poing in the  COFI agenda, where it gets argued over line by line, and finally may end up as something a port inspector in Majuro or a fisheries officer in Honiara now has to apply on a Tuesday morning.

That is the thing about COFI. It looks like a conference. It is actually the upstream end of the work most of us do downstream.

The paperwork, and why it matters

COFI runs on documents, and there are three kinds. 

Working Documents are the core official papers, prepared by the Secretariat to guide the Committee's deliberations. Each one is tied to an agenda item. They provide context, an overview of FAO's work in that space, and a summary of the key issues, options, and recommendations for Members to consider. These are the ones intended to support negotiation and formal action. If you only have time to read one category, read these, because these are the ones that turn into decisions.

Information Documents are supplementary. They sit behind the Working Documents and go deeper on a specific topic. They are not up for negotiation, and nobody is going to endorse them. Their job is to inform. Very often they hold the detail that the Working Document had to compress into a paragraph, so if a Working Document says something that will land on your country, the Information Document is where you go to find out how hard.

Session Background Documents are broader context and reference material for the session as a whole. Useful, occasionally very useful, but not the thing you build a position on.

For a small delegation, this hierarchy is a matter of survival. A big delegation reads everything, with a person per agenda item and a capital behind them sending instructions. A Pacific island delegation may be two or three people covering an agenda that runs from aquaculture to fisheries subsidies to climate adaptation. You cannot have the capacity to deal with all of them with the same attention. You triage, identify which lines actually touch your country, and focus your preparation there.

That triage is a lot of what I'm there for. Read the papers, find the parts that land on RMI, work out what they mean in practice for a country with the world's busiest tuna transhipment port and an administration of a dozen people, and turn that into something the delegate can say in two minutes with the microphone on.

Coming back

I first walked into FAO because of FAO. I was trained by a Fisheries Department programme as an 18-year-old fisherman in Argentina. That training gave me knowledge, but more than that, it gave me a start. Years later, I got a job there, replacing one of the people who had trained me, which felt like closing another circle. I still think FAO changes people's lives more reliably than it changes the world, and I have no standing to complain, because it changed mine twice.

Then I quit, after a bit over a year, having been picked from more than 100 candidates for the post. People found that hard to understand at the time (and so did I). It was a well-paid job with diplomatic status, real research freedom, and Rome outside the window. Rome is one of the most beautiful cities in history, and I loved it. But she asks a price, and I was not willing to keep paying it.

The reasons I wrote down in 2009 have not changed much on rereading. Some of it was family. I'm a village boy, and I wanted my kids to grow up somewhere small, walking home along the beach, in a place where, if they got into trouble, almost anyone they ran into would try to help. Some of it was me. I grew up in a society where personal effort alone did not cut the cake, where who you knew mattered more than what you did, and I had spent years in rebellion against exactly that. I did not want to hand it to my children as normal. New Zealand let a 29-year-old with 300 dollars in savings start again without anyone asking which party he belonged to or which school he went to. Those are the values I wanted them to know still exist somewhere, and those values are not the ones that guide Italy… as much as I love the country.

I also wrote at the time that FAO Fisheries was a good old solid boat, the only one of her kind, but one that burns a lot of fuel just to stay afloat, and that the responsibility for that lies with the skipper. Seventeen years later, I would not change the metaphor much. She is still the only boat of her kind, which is precisely why the state of her engines is everyone's problem and not just FAO's.

What I took away was better than what I gave up. I worked alongside some genuine popes of very specific corners of fisheries. I found my tribe: transient, borderless, mixed origins, doing for a living things most people do not know anyone does. And I proved to myself that you can get somewhere on your own terms, without a tie, without diplomatic language, without powerful recommenders, as long as you are consistent and you treat people with respect. That is not a small thing to learn.

Twenty years of paperwork coming back around

The odd part of reading the COFI 37 papers has been how much of the agenda I have already met somewhere, at an earlier stage of its life.

My relationship with the institution is now about twenty years old (2208), and at that time I i evaluated the operational impact on the initial text of what became the Port State Measures Agreement. Then, as a consultant, I drafted the initial text of the Catch Documentation Scheme guidelines and then sat in on the expert consultations that turned it into something Members could adopt. I was in the expert and then technical consultations for the Transhipment guidelines. I drafted the initial text of the guidance on social responsibility in fisheries and aquaculture value chains, which the Sub-Committee on Fish Trade has now consolidated into a single document and is moving towards finalisation. I led the writing of the end-to-end traceability guidelines. And right now I'm working on the draft of the voluntary guidelines for fisheries access agreements, which appears in the COFI 37 papers as work FAO has started and will bring back to a future session. And i wrote a couple of books for them that condiment al lot of the issues being discussed.

So several items on this agenda are, in a very direct sense, drafts I once had in front of me on a screen, now grown up and being discussed by 190-odd countries. Nobody's name is on any of it, which is exactly how it should be. Text that survives that process no longer belongs to whoever typed the first version, and that is the point.

Still. As someone who sees themself as an ex-fisherman who got carried away by education and works independently as a 1-man band…. I’m quite proud of my relationship with FAO

The other side of the table

So the interesting part of September, for me, is the change of seat.

When you sit on the Secretariat side, you write the papers. You choose the framing, decide what goes in the Working Document and what gets pushed to an Information Document, and draft the suggested action the Committee is invited to take. You are trying to be even-handed across 190-odd Members, which in practice means the text ends up general enough that nobody objects.

When you sit behind a country's nameplate, you have to live with the result. General text is not neutral. A recommendation written to suit everyone tends to suit the countries with the administrative capacity to implement it, and quietly burden those without. 

A capacity development programme designed in Rome is delivered in Busan, Malta and Vigo, and the numbers show how much of it has ever reached the Pacific. None of that is malice. It is just what happens when nobody in the room says the specific thing out loud.

Which is the job. Not to make noise, but to put the specific thing on the record, in two minutes, with the facts straight. Majuro handles more tuna transhipment than any port on earth. RMI ratified the Port State Measures Agreement in 2024. Tuna biomass is projected to move east out of Pacific island zones as the ocean warms, taking access revenue with it. Those are facts, and facts said plainly into a microphone in that room have a way of turning up in text two years later.

I got a good reference and an open door when I left in 2009. I never went back through it as a staff member. Going back through it as technical support for a Pacific island member country is, I suspect, closing another circle in my sunset years that allows me to see issues from many sides, something I consider a blessing life gives me.

Tagging on a borrowed boat

In my last post on the SC22 outcomes, I wrote about tagging and about SC asking SPC to convene a technical workshop in 2027 on the use of tagging data in regional assessments. Tagging is a vital tool in the stock assessment toolbox. The results always matter, even when they do not go the way scientists would like. Continuity is fundamental.

Yet every few years, the same conversation comes back around, dressed up in the language of efficiency, with the Scientific Services Provider asked to explore options to improve cost efficiency in the tagging programme. The answer tabled at SC22 (WCPFC-SC22-2026-SA-WP04) is polite, thorough, and, if you read it properly, quite blunt. There is nothing left to trim. The only cost that scales is charter days, and cutting charter days is cutting the science.

source: https://www.spc.int/spc-tuna-tagging

I want to talk about why that matters, because tagging is one of those things everyone agrees is important, though few can say exactly why. And then about the part everyone silently agrees we need, but nobody wants to pay for: a dedicated research vessel.

What tagging actually is

A tag is a small piece of numbered plastic pushed into the back of a skipjack that has been caught, brought aboard, measured, marked and returned to the water in a matter of seconds.

On its own, it is worth nothing. What makes it worth something is that months or years later that fish turns up in a purse seine set, goes into a well, gets landed, goes through a cannery, and somebody on the line notices the tag, reports it and gets a reward. That is the whole trick. A release event, a recapture event, and the distance and time between them.

From that pair of dots you get things you cannot get any other way. How fast fish move between areas. How many die of natural causes rather than fishing. How quickly they grow. How big the population is. Catch data cannot tell you any of that; it only tells you what was caught. Tagging is the one method that measures these things directly instead of inferring them.

It also gives you an estimate of fishing pressure that does not depend on the catch-and-effort data the industry reports about itself, and an estimate of abundance from sources other than CPUE. That matters enormously in a fishery where FAD use has quietly rewritten what a unit of effort even means.

Since 2006, the Pacific Tuna Tagging Project has been the primary source of data on skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye in the WCPO. It feeds MULTIFAN-CL. It feeds SEAPODYM, which is how the region generates its climate projections of where the tuna will be in 2050. It underpins the skipjack management procedure, the harvest strategy that took the Commission the better part of a decade to agree.

Take the tagging away and, as Table 3 of the paper spells out, the skipjack management procedure needs redeveloping, the monitoring strategies for all three species need redeveloping, and the skipjack assessment starts to lean on historical tagging data from a climate regime that no longer exists.

That last point is the one that should worry people. Old tagging data does not just get less precise. Under a shifting ocean, it gets wrong, and it gets wrong in a direction we cannot see.

The numbers, since we are talking about efficiency

WCPFC puts in roughly USD 790,000 a year. That is not what the programme costs. Between 2022 and 2025, non-WCPFC sources covered about 63% of core activity, so every Commission dollar pulled in another USD 1.70 of work aimed at Commission priorities. Over the life of the project, WCPFC has contributed just under USD 6 million since 2006. SPC's own non-WCPFC projects total USD 16.8 million, Korea USD 2.7 million, and PNG USD 1 million. Seventy-seven per cent of the lifetime cash has come from someone other than the Commission.

And that co-finance is not free-floating. It is attached to WCPFC being in the room. Donors and cooperating members fund this because it is the regional tagging programme bearing the Commission's name. Reduce the Commission's share, and you do not save your share. You lose a multiple of it.

The activities are interlocking:

• You need the cruises to plant the tags and release the tagged fish.

• You need the recovery network, rewards, and training for observers and port staff to get tags back.

• You need tag-seeding experiments, in which known tags are introduced into the system without the finders knowing, to determine what proportion of recaptures are actually reported. Without a reporting rate, the recapture numbers mean nothing.

• You need the data curation and analysis to turn any of it into something an assessment can use.

Drop one and the others stop producing useful information.

Then there is what it would cost not to have it:

• USD 1.3 million a year to replace the tagging data with alternative sources for harvest strategies, assessments and climate projections

• USD 100,000 a year for the specimen bank samples

• USD 250,000 to redevelop the skipjack management procedure

• Roughly USD 1.6 million a year of knock-on cost to at least nine other WCPFC projects

The only genuinely scalable cost is charter days, currently around 60 a year. Fewer days mean fewer tags, which lead to noisier estimates of movement, mortality, and abundance, feeding into weaker assessments and less reliable climate projections. How much weaker it would be would require a large simulation exercise to quantify, which would itself be costly.

And those cruises are not just tagging cruises any more. They are the only regular at-sea sampling platform in the region. Otoliths for ageing, growth and microchemistry. DNA biopsies for close-kin mark-recapture and epigenetic ageing clocks. Blood for reproductive biology and heavy metals. Stomach contents for the microbiome work. Fat content for condition time series. All of it rides on a platform already paid for, at marginal cost. Kill the charter, and every one of those projects has to go and find its own boat.

So the efficiency question has already been answered, several times over, by the accounts. This is one of the cheapest things the Commission does, and one of the few where the money visibly multiplies.

A fisherman always talks about boats

The proposed terms of reference state that tagging cruises are anticipated on either the NFD pole-and-line vessel Solomon Searcher or the multipurpose vessel Gutsy Lady 4, with alternates as availability allows. That sentence is doing an enormous amount of load-bearing work.

There is a reason it has to be pole-and-line. You cannot tag out of a purse seine brail. You need fish coming aboard one at a time, hooked, barbless, landed on a mat, handled for seconds and put back over the side alive and in good condition. Pole and line is the only commercial method that delivers that at scale, along with the live-bait operation that brings the school up and holds it there. The entire mark-recapture dataset that the WCPO assessments rest on exists because a couple of pole-and-line boats in the Solomons and elsewhere are still fishing.

And that fleet is not in good health. Pole-and-line has been shrinking across the Pacific for forty years, squeezed out by purse-seine economics, bait supply problems, crew costs, and the simple fact that it is labour-intensive in a world that keeps trying to be less so. What is left is a small number of ageing hulls kept going by operators whose business case has nothing to do with science. Nobody is building new pole-and-line vessels for the WCPO. Nobody is maintaining them to a research standard, because why would they? They are maintained to keep fishing, for as long as fishing pays, and no longer.

So the regional tagging programme, and through it the skipjack management procedure, and through that a fishery worth billions a year and a large share of government revenue in several PNA members, is underwritten by charter availability on a dwindling fleet of old commercial boats in a fishery that is on its way out. When a charter falls over, the science schedule bends around it. And the paper is clear that sporadic field operations make the whole supporting apparatus, the technicians, the recovery officers, the seeding programme, harder and more expensive to keep alive.

We have built a lifeline out of someone else's spare capacity.

Which brings me to “the boat”

SPC has a proposal on the table for a purpose-built Pacific fisheries science vessel. It is 48.6 metres long, has more than 6,000 nautical miles of range, and draws under 3.5 metres, so it can actually work in the region's shallow ports. It is diesel-electric, with room for whatever comes next: laboratories, acoustics, a hydraulic crane, mid-water trawl capacity, small boats for coastal work, and 26 people on board. The rationale is stark. The vessels previously used for this work are being decommissioned due to their age; here is a solution.

source and details: https://fame.spc.int/ecosystems-and-marine-biology/pacificsciencevessel

I should declare an interest. I began as a fisherman, and when I went to university to study fisheries, I paid for it by spending years crewing on research vessels. I collected data for my thesis and for other scientists while standing watch. I was a scientist and a deck officer at the same time, so I know what a research vessel is worth from both ends.

Which means I also know the arguments against capital investment. A vessel is a capital item, and capital items are politically harder than recurrent line items. Somebody has to crew it, dry-dock it, insure it and fill it with fuel. Regional bodies have owned ships before, and it has not always ended well.

But investment in science is long-term, and you do not see gains in the short term. Look at what countries in the region actually spend. New Zealand, a small agricultural country currently run by a government that invests minimally in science, still puts NZ$250-300 million of public money a year into agri-food science. Australia, a much bigger economy, invests around A$1.2 billion.

On fisheries specifically:

• New Zealand: NZ$22.3 million a year on fisheries science, roughly half Crown-funded and half recovered from industry, with two offshore research vessels and small inshore craft

• Australia: A$33 million a year through FRDC, plus A$49 million a year to run the Marine National Facility, with 15 to 20 vessels across the Commonwealth and the states

• Japan: 7 fisheries research vessels plus 2 training vessels, the largest being Koyo-maru at 2,352 tonnes, run by an agency with 10 institutes and 968 staff, including 541 researchers

• Korea: 13 research vessels operated by NIFS alone

These are only the countries I could find figures for. The point is that every serious fishing nation in this region owns fisheries research vessels and has the institutional experience to run them. The Pacific does not.

Furthermore, I would argue that a research vessel for SPC is a better investment than the Guardian-class patrol boats that Australia has already deployed in the region. Those cost around A$16 million per hull, with 22 delivered to 13 recipients, 30-year sustainment behind them, and they appear to go to sea for about 40 to 60 days a year. Over a 30-year life, that is roughly 1,200 to 1,800 sea days per vessel. For comparison, Australia's own RV Investigator costs about A$163,000 a sea day and is considered underused at 200 days a year.

A research vessel that actually goes to sea 200 days or more a year delivers more time on the water per dollar than a patrol boat managing 40 to 60. And it produces the stock assessment data that the enforcement effort is supposed to be protecting. The patrol boat programme bought the platform that ensures presence. Nobody wants to buy the platform that ensures the science.

The options are simple. Either we keep renting time on boats we do not control, from a sector we know is contracting, at a price that only goes one way as the fleet thins, with no ability to schedule the science around what the science needs. Or we build a dedicated vessel that does more than tag: acoustic biomass work, coastal surveys, seafloor mapping, ecosystem sampling, and the training of Pacific Island scientists at sea, which is the part nobody costs and everybody needs. It shows up after a cyclone. It carries the flag of a region that owns two-thirds of the world's tuna and currently cannot independently go and look at it.

Tagging continuity is not a nice-to-have in the science budget. It is the sensor on the most valuable renewable resource in the Pacific, and the entire signal chain currently depends on whether an old pole-and-line boat is free next April.

Fixing the charter line item was never the real question. The real question is whether the region's fishing powers and donors are willing to pay for and own the platform on which their own future depends, or whether we keep renting it from a fishery that is quietly closing down around us.

SC22 in Apia: what the Scientific Committee actually decided

The Scientific Committee of the WCPFC met in Apia from 11 to 19 August, and the outcomes document is out. It runs to a few hundred paragraphs across almost 100 pages, so full respect to the group that made it! Not sure if anyone one ever reads it completely! It is very dry reading; most paragraphs begin with the institutional language of "SC22 noted" or "SC22 recommended", and, like all such documents, it buries the interesting parts in careful language.

Conceptual model of north Pacific albacore biology and population dynamics.

I did not read it all, partly because much of it went over my current level of scientific knowledge, yet I have areas of interest, and this document will be the basis for the advances that can be made… so here is what I take from it.

The bigeye assessment was the best one ever produced, and the meeting could not agree on it

SPC presented a new bigeye tuna assessment. SC22 called it the most scientifically advanced assessment of the stock developed to date, and commended the openness and reproducibility of the process, which let member scientists engage with the model as it was being built rather than argue with it afterwards. That is real praise, and not the sort you usually see in these documents.

Then it could not agree on the answer.

The disagreement concerns which set of model runs best describes stock status. When you build an assessment, you do not produce one model; you produce a grid of them, each with different assumptions about the things you cannot measure. Some members preferred a grid of 80 models that keeps both options on one uncertainty axis: the treatment of tag reporting rates during the mixing period. Others preferred a grid of 34 models that keeps only one of those options, and thought it more defensible.

Both grids give the same qualitative answer. The stock is not overfished and is not subject to overfishing, and recent biomass is slightly below the 2012 to 2015 average the tropical tuna measure uses as its objective. What differs is the risk. Grid 1 puts the chance of being below the limit reference point at 18.6 per cent and the chance of fishing mortality above FMSY at 24.1 per cent.

Grid 2 puts them at 23.6 and 29.2 per cent. Five percentage points on the risk of breaching a limit reference point is the kind of number that decides an allocation argument, which is why nobody was in a hurry to concede. There was even a proposal to weight the two grids 60/40 rather than treat them equally.

Underneath it sits tagging. SC22 identified tag mixing and the possible overdispersion of tag recaptures as the outstanding uncertainties that must be resolved before consensus can be reached. So the Committee asked SPC to convene a technical workshop in 2027 on how tagging data are used in regional assessments, with the results feeding into the next bigeye assessment in 2029 and an independent peer review of that in 2030. Meanwhile, the formal advice reverts to SC19, and SC22 had to note that the SC19 assessment contained an error in model specification and should be read with caution. That is an uncomfortable place to be, and everyone in the room knew it.

The yellowfin assessment did not fare better, for a duller reason. It arrived too late for members to review properly, so adoption was deferred to SC23, with a list of items to address, including whether the model's spatial structure is distorting the growth estimates.

The tagging programme produced mixed results. SC22 endorsed its workplan and indicative budget to 2029, noted the revised terms of reference, and stressed the importance of tag seeding. It also told SPC to strengthen the paper before FAC20 and the Commission by linking each activity to a management issue and making the value-for-money case explicit. Given that the bigeye stalemate turns on how tagging data are handled, asking for a better argument is fair enough. It does leave SPC defending a programme whose data the meeting could not agree on how to use.

The important line is buried in the BigEye section

Two sentences deserve more attention than they will get. SC22 agreed that the lack of consensus should not delay the bigeye management procedure, because the Commission's consideration of the procedure depends on the estimation method rather than on acceptance of the latest assessment. And it noted that, within the harvest strategy framework, management advice should come from adopted procedures, while assessments primarily serve to monitor and review those procedures.

That is a restatement of what the Commission is becoming. For twenty years, the annual argument was about the assessment because it produced the advice. Under harvest strategies the advice comes from a rule agreed in advance, and the assessment becomes a diagnostic tool. Whether members behave that way is another question, but the principle is now on paper.

You can see it working already. The South Pacific albacore management procedure ran for the first time and produced an actual number: 56,096 tonnes, applying to longline and troll fisheries south of 10 degrees south, excluding the EEZs of Tokelau and Tuvalu. No debate about the assessment, just the output of an agreed rule. The skipjack monitoring strategy also found nothing preventing the skipjack procedure from operating.

Bigeye is not there yet. The operating models were revised, the estimation method was accepted in principle, and the candidate procedures now sit on something called a nuclear grid, which sounds alarming but is a table of combinations of longline catch and FAD closure periods that reach a given target. Some members think the candidates do not reflect what was agreed at the first bigeye management workshop, particularly on how catch limits and FAD closures sit alongside the exemptions in CMM 2025-02. SC22 has requested a two-day special session alongside the Commission meeting in Port Vila to sign off on the operating model grid.

Yellowfin gets no procedure of its own and will be managed implicitly through the skipjack, bigeye and albacore rules, which is a bet worth watching, especially since none of the current bigeye candidates reaches the interim yellowfin target.

The northern stocks are in good shape

North Pacific albacore is virtually certain, above 99 percent, to be neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, with spawning biomass around 60 percent of the unfished level and fishing intensity below target for six years running. Pacific blue marlin sits at the same place relative to MSY-based reference points, and the ISC noted that the stock might support somewhat higher removals.

SC22 did not simply pass that on. It pointed out that terminal-year status is less certain than the headline probabilities suggest, that the assessment relies on biological parameters sampled almost entirely in the North Pacific for a fish assessed as a single Pacific-wide stock, and that southwest Pacific sample holdings are close to zero.

Given how much blue marlin matters to coastal longline and sport fisheries in the islands, it recommended caution about any catch increase. The Committee read the number, then the fishery, which is what you want it to do.

The unpretentious decisions that will matter

Data work moved forward in ways nobody will notice for years. Cannery receipt data, Project 114, gets a workshop later this year and an extension to 2027, aimed at using cannery weights to correct logbook data (this, for me, is a key issue that, if we could get right, plus the transhipment scales, could give us the real numbers in under- or misreporting). Size data submission gets a formal proforma and a traffic light system for spotting sampling gaps, with an explicit instruction that the thresholds are not to be used for compliance.

On monitoring, SC22 told the Commission plainly that coverage of at least 10 per cent of longline effort is needed for reasonably good bycatch estimates of common species, and more than that for turtles and cetaceans. It also linked electronic monitoring to the increased longline bigeye limit under CMM 2025-02, noting that some members may use EM to meet the coverage requirement.

On FADs, the Committee agreed a stepwise introduction of biodegradable drifting FADs is technically feasible, while recognising that material supply chains make this disproportionately costly for atoll states and SIDS. On loss and abandonment, it prioritised prevention and shore-based recovery, noted that many strandings originate outside the region, and recorded that several members believe the cost of recovery should fall on those who benefit from the fishery (which has been my posture for years)

Climate ran through the meeting. SC22 noted with concern the record global ocean heat content in 2025 and the eleven warmest years on record, and asked that ecosystem indicators be reported in a way that separates short-term variability from long-term trends from plain changes in fishing behaviour.

SC22 also noted the growing use of AI tools to access WCPFC scientific information, and the risk that, without a well-curated source, these tools may return material that is simply wrong. It recommended the Commission discuss whether it needs a policy on AI access to its information. That is the first time I have seen an RFMO put that on the record.

Marine pollution, and the limits of what the SC could say

The gear that fisheries lost got a proper airing, and most of what the Committee said concerned what it does not know.

On abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear, SC22 recommended that the Commission strengthen observer monitoring across longline observer programmes, including through electronic reporting and observer training, and encourage more members to participate. Only 13 members monitor it at present. Some members want the data recorded in standardised fields rather than free-text comments: whether gear was abandoned, lost or discarded, why, and how much, down to mainline and branchline length and the number of floats and beacons.

Then the honest part. SC22 advised that the scientific value of extra reporting stays limited while longline observer coverage remains as low as it is, and it recorded that it did not have the information to advise on which lost gear poses a significant risk of ghost fishing or to navigation. That is precisely the judgement the draft measure wants from it. Underwater noise and greenhouse gas emissions were parked as needing more science and as having management implications that are better handled at TCC, and the Committee suggested a three-year review period once the new measure is adopted.

Doing less, on purpose

The most consequential decision may be procedural. SC22 agreed a three-year process to prioritise its own work: the assessment schedule this year, the harvest strategy work plan next year, and conservation measure reviews in 2028. Assessments for stocks that have passed peer review may now alternate between full benchmarks and lighter updates. The shark measure review is proposed for deferral to 2028. The long-running effectiveness analysis of the tropical tuna measure is recommended for discontinuation, since monitoring strategies will do that job once the procedures are running.

There was even a suggestion to swap the timing of the Commission and Scientific Committee meetings so assessments arrive with time to be reviewed. Given that yellowfin was deferred this year for exactly that reason, it is not a silly idea.

SC23 is in Pohnpei, 10 to 18 August 2027. Solomon Islands have offered to host in 2028.

What it adds up to

The science is in better shape than the consensus process around it. An assessment can be the best ever produced and still fail to be adopted, because adoption is a political act and the numbers in dispute are the ones that translate into catch. The harvest strategy framework is meant to take that pressure off the assessment, and this year gave the first real sight of it working for albacore and skipjack while bigeye stayed stuck in the old pattern.

The other thing I notice is a committee that has started saying no to itself. Deferring items, dropping an analysis, spacing out assessments, asking for a prioritisation process. Some of that is good discipline. Some of it is a body admitting it has more work than it can do, which is worth saying out loud rather than discovering later through another late assessment.

The due diligence that should happen before a transhipment at sea, and doesn't

FAO has recently published Implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment: 1. A guide for fisheries managers (Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries No. 15, Suppl. 1, Rome 2026). It is the operational companion to the Voluntary Guidelines for Transhipment (VGTS) that COFI endorsed back in 2022, and it was written by Shelley Clarke and Esther Boy Carmona, with contributions from Giuliano Carrara and Glenn Quelch, and technical backstopping from Matthew Camilleri and Alicia Mosteiro.

I have to declare my bias upfront. I have known Shelley for a long time, and I admire her work more than that of almost anyone else operating in this space. She is one of the very few people who move comfortably between science, policy, and compliance reality, and who does not let any of the three off the hook. When she puts her name to something, I read it properly rather than skimming the executive summary, and this one repaid that.

And it repaid it for a very specific reason. This is the first document I have read that explicitly places the required due diligence on the flag States of both the fishing vessel and the carrier before the transhipment takes place on the high seas. Not after. Not at the port of landing, when the fish is already mixed in a hold with the catch of eleven other vessels. Before.

What the guide actually says

The architecture is built around what FAO calls critical tracking events and functional requirements, borrowed from the catch documentation scheme guidelines of 2022. Fish get an identity (V1, V2 for the vessel and its authorisations, C1, C2 for the catch and the legality of its capture), and those assurances then have to survive the transhipment event (T1, T2, T3) and the landing (L1, L2, L3).

The point the guide hammers home, and that I think is the real contribution, is that these things are linked. If the species verified at landing is not the species declared at catch, then C1 fails, and if C1 fails then C2 or V2 may fail too, because the gear may not be capable of catching that species, or the vessel was never authorised for it. And if C1 and C2 fail, then T2 and T3 fail with them. One broken link and the chain is not a chain.

So who is supposed to hold that together at sea? The guide is unambiguous. Before acknowledging and confirming that a transhipment event can proceed, the flag State of the donor vessel must verify, for the current fishing trip, compliance with the applicable CMMs, compliance with MCS measures, VMS reporting, and regular reporting of catch and effort. And it says this in a sentence that should be printed on the wall of every fisheries administration:

It is important that this confirmation be based on sources of information that are independent of the operator's own declarations.

The listed sources are VMS, observer reports, inspection reports from port and coastal States, and surveillance reports from sea or air patrols. Then there is a checklist (Table 3) that is genuinely usable. Is the vessel identity aligned with your own register? Is the fishing authorisation in force during this trip. Which species are authorised, is there a quantity limit, is there a prohibited species in the fishery, what area, what gear. Are the reported quantities coherent with the timing and the authorised gear? Is the VMS track coherent with the gear, judging by speed and pattern? Is there any unjustified zero-speed gap near a receiving vessel that is not authorised? Is there satellite imagery to cross-check?

The carrier side is not left out either. In the authorisation stage, before any specific event, both flag States are expected to do their own due diligence on their vessels: IMO number where eligible, a functioning approved VMS, inclusion in the flag State's observer programme for transhipments with 100 per cent coverage for receiving vessels, entry in the FAO Global Record and in the relevant RFMO authorised vessel lists. And there is a step in the flow, step D, that I had not seen articulated anywhere before: a pre-arrangement between the flag State of the donor vessel and the flag State of the receiving vessel, to confirm that both are actually operating in conformance with the VGTS and that information exchange protocols exist between them before their vessels ever meet.

The guide is honest about the one gap it cannot close on its own. The VGTS requires confirmation of each event from the donor vessel's flag State, but not from the receiving vessel's flag State. The authors work around it as far as guidance allows: nothing precludes the receiving vessel's flag State from withdrawing the transhipment authorisation after a pre-notification if risk assessment and due diligence reveal evidence of IUU fishing or breaches of the conditions.

Now the reality

None of this is happening at the moment, and I say that as someone whose job for the last twenty-odd years has been to look at the logistics and paperwork these operations generate.

What happens in practice on the high seas is a notification, generally 24 or 36 hours in advance depending on the RFMO, that is treated as an administrative formality rather than as a trigger for verification. The guide notes politely that several RFMOs require 24-hour advance notification and that this "may not support effective MCS". I would put it less politely. Twenty-four hours is not a verification window; it is a courtesy.

And in the vast majority of cases nobody at the donor vessel's flag State opens the VMS track and asks whether it is coherent with the gear and the catch, because either the capacity to do that does not exist, or the vessel is flagged somewhere that has no interest in asking.

The carrier side is worse, because the flag States of the reefer fleet are, with few exceptions, not fisheries administrations in any meaningful sense. They are registries. Asking a registry to perform pre-arrangement with another flag State, to run an observer programme with 100 per cent coverage on its carriers, and to cross-check pre-notification positions against VMS and surveillance data is asking for a function that, in many cases, has never existed.

Where 100 per cent carrier observer coverage exists, it exists because an RFMO imposed it through a regional observer programme, not because a flag State decided to exercise due diligence.

So the honest reading of this guide is that it describes a system that almost no one is running, and that is exactly why it is useful. Until now, when I asked who is responsible for confirming that the fish going over the rail has legal provenance, the answer was a shrug and a gesture toward the port State, three weeks and 4,000 miles later. This document says: it is the flag State of the donor vessel, before the event, on independent evidence, and here is the checklist. That is a benchmark. Appendix 1 is literally set up as a benchmarking table so you can compare your national procedures against it.

A few other things worth your time

The container work in section 4.1.3.3 quietly closes a hole I have been complaining about for years. Because the VGTS finally defines a landing, moving unlanded fish from a vessel into a container is a landing, so it needs a landing declaration meeting VGTS Annex II, and the PSMA Article 3(1)(b) container exemption only applies if that declaration exists and shows port State measures were applied. The old trick of calling it a "transit activity" and letting the receiving port assume that fish in a box must already have been landed no longer has cover.

The weight chapter is unglamorous and important. Estimates at sea against verified weights at landing, processed weight rather than live weight in the declarations, conversion factors that need official definition, ice percentages, and a margin of tolerance typically around 10 per cent. The mass balance logic in Figure 18, where a donor vessel's reported catch has to reconcile with the sum of what each receiving vessel actually landed across different ports, is the check that would catch most laundering. It only works if everyone weighs and classifies the same way, which is the guide's real ask.

And the force majeure section deserves a read, because falsely claiming distress is the obvious route to transhipping into a carrier that would never have been authorised.

None of this is binding. It is guidance on voluntary guidelines. But it names the responsibility precisely, and gives the people who want to do the job a defensible set of steps. That is more than we ever had

FAO. 2026. Implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Transshipment. 1. A guide for fisheries managers. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries, No. 15, Suppl. 1. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ce0610en

The next generation reads the SW Atlantic fishing paralysis better than the present one

In April 2021, I wrote a blog called "The paralysis of any fisheries management initiative in the South-Western Atlantic". I started it by admitting that I'm not always keen to talk much about the situation down there. Being Argentinian by birth, a navy search-and-rescue swimmer cadet during the war, and a fisherman and fisheries scientist after that, I find that particular corner of the ocean is where my history and my profession pull in opposite directions, and where any attempt at nuance gets flattened by colonialism and geopolitics. 

fishing activity if the Argentinean EEZ and the mile 201from the 19 to the 21 August 2026 by starboard.nz

My argument is simple: that area is perhaps the last purely unregulated fishery in the world; an RFMO would fix a good chunk of that, and Argentina's refusal to be part of one, on the grounds that it would imply tacit recognition of Falklands coastal rights, is basically self-inflicted fisheries mismanagement with no real impact on sovereignty claims. Other authors have studied the issue and reached the same conclusion.

I got the expected mix of responses. Some quiet agreement from people in the industry, some very loud disagreement from people who read "RFMO" as "surrender". 

So I was not expecting much when five master's students from the Universidad de San Andrés got in touch a few weeks ago. They were working on a paper for their Elements of Public International Law course in the Master's in International Politics and Economics at San Andrés University and wanted to interview me about the blog entry and fisheries situation in the South-West Atlantic. 

I say yes to most of these requests because whatever I've achieved in life is thanks to many people who took the time to answer my questions… So I always pay it forward. 

After a really nice online talk with them, I was really happy they sent me the finished paper: five thousand words comparing the British licensing regime in the islands with the fishing at mile 201, and asking what each one actually does to Argentina's rights and obligations under international law.

I read it in one sitting... It is a serious piece of work, and more importantly, it is honest in three ways that the public conversation in Argentina almost never is.

They looked back at the 90s, when it worked

The first thing they do, and this is the part that impressed me most, is go back to what happened between 1989 and 2005 instead of starting the story at whatever outrage is currently on the news. 

The Madrid Joint Declarations of 1989 and 1990 created something genuinely clever: the "sovereignty umbrella" formula, under which both countries agreed that nothing done under the arrangements would be taken to affirm, support or deny either side's position on sovereignty or maritime jurisdiction. 

Under that umbrella, they set up the South Atlantic Fisheries Commission (SAFC)  in 1990; they exchanged scientific data; they ran joint research cruises (which I was part of in 1990 and 1991, working with scientists who then, years later, I worked with in New Zealand and the WCPFC); we talked then about Illex argentinus as a biological population rather than as a flag. 

Then it fell apart. The paper traces it carefully: the 1986 interim conservation zone, the 1990 outer zone, the 2005 shift from annual licences to 25-year individual transferable quota concessions available only to companies registered in the islands, the Argentine protest invoking Resolution 31/49 against unilateral modifications, and the fact that the Commission has not met since. 

In 2021, the islands offered holders another optional 25 years on top of licences expiring in 2031. So the horizon is now 2056, and there is no forum.

What the students understood, and what many much older people refuse to understand, is that the 90s prove that what everyone claims today is impossible is not impossible. It already happened. Argentina cooperated technically with the United Kingdom on fisheries for fifteen years without conceding one millimetre of its sovereignty claim, because the umbrella formula was designed precisely to make that possible. 

Their conclusion says it plainly: Argentina's own experience of cooperation in the 1990s shows it can be done without legal effect on the claim. That is not a young person being naive about diplomacy. That is a young person reading the record.

They refused the easy cliche

The second thing they got right is the one I care most about professionally, because it is the one that does the most damage.

Almost everything written in Argentina about mile 201 refers to it as illegal fishing. It is not. Beyond 200 nautical miles lie the high seas, and articles 116 to 119 of UNCLOS grant states the right to allow their nationals to fish there. A Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese squid jigger, sitting at 201 with a valid flag-state authorisation and reporting its catch to its flag state, is doing something legal. Perhaps uncomfortable, ecologically disastrous, economically infuriating, but legal.

The students consulted the FAO's 2001 IUU International Plan of Action definitions and rightly concluded that the one that fits is unregulated fishing: activity in areas or on stocks for which no applicable conservation measure exists. 

And then they say the quiet part out loud. The obstacle to regulating fishing at mile 201 is the absence of an RFMO. Not Chinese or Korean wickedness, not flag-of-convenience trickery, just the absence of an agreed set of rules.

This matters enormously and not just semantically. If you call it illegal, you have located the fault entirely outside yourself, and your policy options are patrol boats, outrage and victimhood. If you call it unregulated, the finger points at the empty chair, and the empty chair is one that Argentina has chosen not to fill. 

Precision here is the difference between a strategy and a grievance. There is plenty of genuinely illegal behaviour in that fleet when they conduct incursions into the EEZ (or in the alleged crewing situation on board). But the act of fishing at 201 is not one of them, and pretending otherwise has cost Argentina credibility in every multilateral room I have sat in.  

I also noticed something else. They cite the ITLOS Advisory Opinion 21 of 2015 on flag state due diligence, which is the obvious card to play, and then immediately tell you it does not quite fit, because that opinion concerned vessels inside the EEZs of the SRFC member states and not high seas fishing, so it works as a general standard by analogy and not as direct precedent. Politicians overclaim, and these students underclaim deliberately, and their argument is stronger for it.

They separated the two problems

The third thing is the paper's overall framing. The two cases look similar from a distance and are legally nothing alike. Licensing in the islands is a sovereignty dispute expressed through fish. Mile 201 is a high seas governance failure expressed through fish. 

Argentina has been treating them as one problem for two decades, and the result, as the students conclude, is that the protests have not changed the de facto situation on the islands by one inch, while the refusal to countenance an RFMO has left the highest concentration of distant water fishing vessels on the planet without any regional instrument at all.

They also do the homework on what exists elsewhere, based on my advice… Taiwan is participating in the WCPFC as a “fishing entity” under Article 1.3 of the 1995 Agreement, with full decision-making rights and no implications for statehood (I’m sure such a status could be of interest to the FIG; otherwise, their interest would be represented from London); furthermore, here in the WCPFC we have the Matthew and Hunter Islands, claimed by both France and Vanuatu… both parties work inside the WCPFC and the dispute stays untouched

Articles 74.3 and 83.3 of UNCLOS, which actively require states with overlapping claims to seek provisional arrangements and to avoid jeopardising a final settlement. All of it points the same way: international law has spent fifty years building tools for exactly this situation, and Argentina is choosing not to pick any of them up.

They are honest about the gaps on the Argentine side, too, which cannot have been comfortable to write about. As of August 2026, Argentina is still not a party to the Port State Measures Agreement, yet has passed Ley 27.815, approving accession to the PSMA (AMERP in Spanish). While it has signed, it has not ratified either the 1995 Fish Stocks Agreement or the BBNJ Agreement.

None of this weakens the sovereignty claim. That is the whole point, and it is the point I tried to get across in 2021. Fisheries management and sovereignty are separable; the work we did in the 90s proved they are separable, and every year they are kept fused, the squid gets scarcer, and everybody loses.

These five students worked that out on their own and wrote it down with their names on it. I'm cynical by default about this stuff, but that gave me more hope than anything I have read on the topic in years.

Personally, I'm painfully aware of the honest grievances behind the case made for the 649 who did not survive the 1982 war, and for the families of the estimated 500 who did not survive coming home and took their own lives since then. I served with three of them, and none of this is any consolation to those left behind. Nor is the bigger picture of the many thousands that died during the military dictatorship that led Argentina into that war…  Still, I keep coming back to the same position: fisheries management and sovereignty are separate issues, and I say that because I worked in the years when they were kept separate.

Source: Álvarez Peón, E., Lestani, N., Nizzo, C., Patane, B., & Zaffaroni Safar, M. (2026). Análisis comparativo del otorgamiento de licencias pesqueras en las Islas Malvinas y la pesca INDNR en la milla 201. Universidad de San Andrés, Maestría en Política y Economía Internacionales, Elementos del Derecho Internacional Público (Dr. Facundo Pérez Aznar).

What Ai.Fish has built, and why it matters for fishers

On my way back from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, I always have a overnight stopover in Honolulu, so I took up on an invite from Jimmy Freese from Ai.Fish, and we caught up for lunch and a few beers

Jimmy is an interesting character who sees fisheries from a different angle, and I always learn from people like him.

We had crossed paths at a few conferences, so it was good to see him at home. He was born and raised on Oahu, grew up surfing, and still surfs, so we have that in common, except he is about 10000 times better than me. But that is not really the point of mentioning it.

As a surfer myself, I get why he says the ocean is not background for him; it is context. When you spend that much time in and around the water, you start noticing what is in it. You pick up the small details that make big differences; you read the swell, the wind and the currents for what is coming, where to be and when, and which board to take.

So I really see his point when he says everyone looking at the same ocean is working from a different slice of it.

Fishermen talk about where the fish are and what the season looks like. Scientists talk about stock assessments and data gaps. Regulators talk about compliance. One activity, three groups, one ocean, three incomplete pictures.

That's the gap that Jimmy’s Ai.Fish, is built to close.

Let’s go back a bit… Ai.Fish is a Hawaii-based team Jimmy co-founded in 2019 with Justin Kay, whose background is in computer vision research, including automated salmon counting work at Caltech and ongoing AI-for-climate research at MIT. The wider team is small and distributed, spread across the US, Canada, Kenya, Spain, and Turkey. What they're applying that computer vision expertise to is electronic monitoring, or EM: cameras and sensors on commercial fishing vessels that record what happens on deck, so there's an independent record of catch and bycatch.

EM sounds simple in principle, and I have written a lot about it… But in practice, it has a bottleneck that anyone who has worked in fisheries management will recognise immediately. A single trip can generate hundreds of hours of footage, and while AI is helping, someone still has to watch it to confirm what the algorithm may pick up, frame by frame, to log species, count fish, and flag anything unusual.

That review bottleneck costs money and, in my view, more than anything else, is why EM adoption has lagged for years, despite pilot programs proving the underlying concept works.

But here's the part of the conversation with Jimmy that stuck with me most, because it's something I've argued for a long time from the policy side. Whenever you try to impose a monitoring system on fishermen, whether it's observers, logbooks, or EM, there is a “fisherman’s question” sitting in the back of their mind: “what's in it for me?”  You can explain compliance and sustainability all day, but if the system only extracts data from them and gives nothing back, it will always be resisted, or at best tolerated.

Ai.Fish's whole approach goes straight at that question.

If a vessel already has to run cameras and collect footage for regulatory purposes anyway, the marginal cost of also using that same footage to make the fishing itself better is close to zero. 

That's the insight. The same video that a reviewer uses to count and classify catch for a regulator can, in principle, answer the questions a fisherman actually cares about, in real time: where did I catch my biggest bigeye, at what depth/hook number, what was the water temperature, what phase was the moon in, what trolling speed was I running, what bait was on the hook, a picture of the fish (coloration),? None of that requires new hardware or a second monitoring burden. It's the same footage, mined for a second purpose.

Suddenly EM isn't just a science/compliance cost sitting on top of the trip; it's a source of operational intelligence the skipper can use to fish smarter next time out. Jimmy showed me their software called Tuna Insights, and you can see some of the screenshots below:

the info for the haul

the info for the basket

For companies that already have their own EM hardware or review software, Ai.Fish also offers an API, so the same computer vision models can be plugged in directly, without adopting the whole platform.

Another basket analysis

and the indiviusal fish at each hook with data on the position on the basket, the depth, the bait, etc that you used for example… for those most interested on the value chain than the fishing event… think the traceability value of this info.

As you see above, color matters as it's an indicator of how long that fish has been alive, etc. Any depredation, even one cookie cutter shark bite can bring down the prices and that's nice to know in real time when you're thinking about the economics of when one is thinking about their fleet and in 10 days you could have 100 or 200 sets depending on how many boats are monitored.

Beyond the software, they also run a services side: in-house video and image annotation (they say they've delivered millions of annotations), custom AI model development, AI strategy consulting, and cloud- and edge-based systems engineering for vessels that need onboard processing rather than a live connection back to shore.

Getting EM to a point where it's affordable and fast enough to deploy everywhere, not just in well-funded fisheries, is one of the clearest levers for making sustainable fishing verifiable at the scale at which the industry operates.

Jimmy frames the whole effort as building "the Fishery of the Future," which could sound like a slogan until you sit with him for an afternoon and hear how specific the thinking is: software built for the people who'll use it day to day rather than for engineers like him; EM review cheap enough to reach fisheries that could never afford a full observer programme; data that fishermen own and that still feeds securely into regional and international management; and real-time edge AI onboard that's reliable enough to trust without a shore connection.

What struck me most as I walked away from that conversation wasn't the technology stack. It was how clearly Jimmy has internalised the “fisherman's question” and built the answer into the product itself, rather than treating it as a communications problem to be solved after the fact. 

Seven years into this, he told me the work has only convinced him further that the ocean economy runs on better data than it currently has, and that the gap is closeable.

Having spent my career on the fisheries monitoring side of that same gap, I think he's right, and I think Ai.Fish is one of the more sensible attempts I've seen to actually close it rather than just talk about it, while helping fishermen fish better with a product generated and tailored to their own vessels.

On top of that is a really smart guy who is fun to talk to.

Just for the record, I have no commercial interest in Jimmy’s business… I just happen to believe that fisheries are made up of interesting people, and in the same way that I read a paper I find interesting and blog about it, here is a product I find interesting and blog about it!

What tuna tell us about the world's mercury levels

By far the most-read posts I have ever written are not about IUU fishing, licensing, transhipment or any of the topics I actually work on. They are the ones about mercury in tuna and where the fish was caught, the model of mercury distribution across the WCPO, and where the methylmercury in the ocean comes from in the first place. Almost a decade later, people still land on those pages. It still says something that more people worry about what tuna might do to them than about the legality of the catch or the working conditions of the crew that got it on board.

So when a paper on exactly that topic turns up on the agenda of the WCPFC Scientific Committee, which is meeting in Apia as I write this, I read it with more than professional interest. WCPFC-SC22-2026-RP-P35b-03, "Methylmercury and other pollutants studies in tunas", is presented by Anaïs Médieu, Valérie Allain, David Point, Anne Lorrain and colleagues from IRD, SPC, Toulouse, Université Laval and IFREMER. It is essentially a stocktake of eleven years of work, and it closes several of the loops I left open in those earlier posts.

A) Spatial distribution of tropical tunas analysed for mercury (coloured circles) and atmospheric mercury level observation sites (blue triangles). B) Temporal anthropogenic mercury releases from 1950 to 2010 by world region, from Streets et al. (2019a, 2019b). C) Temporal variability of mercury concentrations (Hg, mg/g) in tropical tunas: yellowfin (orange), bigeye (red), and skipjack (blue), from Médieu et al. (2024).

The database our observers built

For me, the 1st substantial fact to highlight is not the numbers about mercury. It is where the numbers came from.

The team assembled over 5,700 total mercury measurements in muscle tissue: 1,422 bigeye, 2,467 yellowfin, 1,003 skipjack and 900 albacore, from the Pacific (3,551), Indian (1,218) and Atlantic (1,023) oceans. That is the largest global dataset of mercury ever compiled for tropical tunas and albacore. A large share of it is due to the WCPFC Pacific Marine Specimen Bank, which has quietly been accumulating tissue samples collected by onboard observers and port samplers across the region since 2001.

Think about what that means. An observer trip out of Majuro or Funafuti, taking a muscle plug, conserving it, and filling in a label, is a node in a global mercury monitoring network. Their work is now being used in the first evaluation of the effectiveness of the UNEP Minamata Convention. Pacific tuna, and the people who sample them, are measuring the performance of coal plants and gold mining operations on the other side of the planet. I do not think we say that often enough when we talk about the value of observer programmes, and we should, because it is one of the few arguments for observer coverage that has nothing to do with compliance.

Where the mercury is, and why

The spatial picture confirms and sharpens what I wrote about in 2019. Standardised mercury concentrations in yellowfin, bigeye and albacore are higher around New Caledonia and Fiji than near the equator. Skipjack levels are 1.5 to 2 times higher in the northwestern Pacific than in the east, and 4 to 5 times higher than in the western central Pacific.

The driver is the combination of two things: how deep the species forages, and the biogeochemistry of the particular bit of ocean it forages in. Methylmercury is not evenly spread through the water column. It is produced by microbes down where oxygen is low and organic matter is raining down, so its concentration climbs with depth. The team compared measured seawater methylmercury profiles from the surface to 600 m against mercury in the blood and muscle of four tuna species with known, contrasting foraging depths. The relationship is clean and positive. Skipjack stay shallow and stay low. Bigeye work the deep scattering layer and pick up the load that lives there.

That is the mechanism behind the pattern, and it is why "big fish = mercury" is only half the story. Size matters, because bioaccumulation is the key mechanism, but a bigeye and a skipjack of the same weight are not eating out of the same place.

The northwestern Pacific skipjack signal is different again, and worth flagging. There, the elevated levels are attributed to proximity to anthropogenic sources, primarily fossil fuel use in Asia, superimposed on natural biogeochemistry. So we are seeing both the ocean's own plumbing and the smokestacks in the same dataset.

Fifty years of stubborn numbers

The temporal result is the one I would put in front of any policy person. The team compiled the longest time series of tuna mercury ever assembled, 1971 to 2022, and compared it to estimated regional atmospheric mercury emissions.

Outside the northwestern Pacific, tuna mercury concentrations have been essentially stable for fifty years, even though anthropogenic emissions have been falling in several regions. In the northwest they rose about fourfold in the late 1990s, tracking the rise in Asian emissions.

Stability sounds like good news until you understand why it happens. It is ocean inertia. Mercury emitted decades and centuries ago is still working its way through the water, and the fish are integrating that legacy, not this year's flue gas. Using a mercury circulation model, the authors show that even if emissions were cut drastically tomorrow, it would take between 10 and 25 years before we could detect a decline in tuna populations.

That is a hard message for a treaty that has to demonstrate results. It is also the strongest possible argument for both aggressive emission cuts now and continuous long-term monitoring, because the only way to see the payoff is to keep measuring for a very long time. Which brings us back to the specimen bank.

Not all mercury is the same, and not all billfish are the same

Here is the finding that genuinely surprised me, and that has direct consequences for food safety advice in our region.

Consumption guidelines are written for methylmercury, the toxic organic form. But in practice, risk assessments are almost always based on total mercury, assuming that most of it is methylmercury anyway. For tunas, that assumption holds: methylmercury is 70 to 100 per cent of total mercury in tropical tunas and albacore.

The team then measured four billfish species from New Caledonia and the Indian Ocean. In swordfish and striped marlin, methylmercury is around 90 percent of the total, as expected. In blue marlin and black marlin, it is less than 15 per cent.

These fish have high total mercury levels, but most of it has been converted into something else. The evidence points to selenium-dependent detoxification in vivo, with inert mercury selenide nanoparticles as the end product, and selenoneine, a selenium compound abundant in the muscle of tunas and swordfish, as a likely precursor in that pathway.

The practical consequence is that lumping "billfish" into one dietary category, as health agencies routinely do, gets it wrong in both directions. On a methylmercury basis, adults and children can eat blue and black marlin more often than swordfish or striped marlin, which is the opposite of what a total mercury reading would suggest. If we are going to give advice to Pacific communities where these fish are food, not just an export product, we need to measure the right compound.

For the tunas caught off New Caledonia, the picture is reassuring and familiar: every skipjack sample was below 0.5 mg/kg, yellowfin was mostly low with a small tail above the stricter guidelines, and bigeye was the outlier, with most samples above 0.3 mg/kg and a third above the 1 mg/kg predatory fish guideline. Species and size, together, are what matter.

Plastics, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and the other stuff we have no rules for

The paper also reports a smaller exploratory study of around 100 samples from New Caledonia and PNG, covering persistent organic pollutants (PCBs, PBDEs, organochlorine pesticides, and PFAS) and plastics.

POPs are present, suggesting atmospheric and oceanic transport, given that the sources are overwhelmingly in the Northern Hemisphere, but the levels are low compared with those in other oceans and currently pose no known health risk.

Plastic fragments or fibres above 2 mm were found in the stomachs of 6 of the 20 fish examined, mostly polypropylene and polyester. Plastic additives were detected in muscle tissue at levels comparable to fish sampled in Spain.

And here is the gap: there are no health standards for those additives. We can now measure things in tuna flesh for which no regulator anywhere has set a limit. That is not a reason to panic; it is a reason to build the baseline now, while levels are low, so that in twenty years we can say whether something changed.

On the other side of the ledger, skipjack and yellowfin from both areas remain a solid source of fatty acids, including omega-3. The benefit side of the equation has not moved.

What SC is asked to do

The asks are modest: note the findings, note the uncertainties around detoxification and selenium, note that these fish are nutritionally valuable, and support the ongoing activities of the Pacific Marine Specimen Bank as an accessible long-term repository.

That last one is the only one with teeth, and the paper ends with a sentence that should worry us: funding is being sought to continue the work.

A 25-year archive of tuna tissue, collected by our observers, now underpinning a global treaty's effectiveness evaluation, and its continuation depends on the next grant cycle. We spend a great deal of money in this region for geopolitical purposes. A fraction of that keeps an asset like this alive.

For those of us working on the traceability side, there is a bonus I flagged back in 2017 and still believe in. If mercury varies by origin and by species, then knowing where a fish was caught is not just a compliance requirement; it is information about the product. Our region has low-mercury fish. Being able to prove its source turns a paperwork obligation into an argument.

As always, my summary is no substitute for the original. Read the paper; the figures do a lot of the work, and the science is theirs, not mine. I'm just pleased that the samples came from our part of the world.

How much longline gear are we actually leaving in the WCPO?

Continuing with my read on papers tabled at the 22nd Scientific Committee in Apia this August, here is another one I found interesting “An assessment of the quantity of ALDFG in the pelagic longline fishery in the WCPFC Area” WCPFC-SC22-2026-EB-WP11, by Keith Bigelow, Aurélien Panizza, Tiffany Vidal and Raymond Clarke,.

I have been circling the ALDFG topic (Abandoned, Lost or Discarded Fishing Gear) for a while now, mostly from the purse seine and FAD side, because that is where the attention has been. Drifting FADs are visible; they wash up on reefs; they have a constituency of angry people photographing them. Longline gear does not. It is monofilament; it sinks or drifts sub-surface; nobody films it; and, as a result, the assumption in the region has quietly been that longlining is not much of an ALDFG problem… and as someone who did longline for a living and thinks it is a very unique type of gear, I can confirm that it is.

This paper is the first serious attempt I have seen to test that assumption with actual observer data across multiple flags in the WCPFC Convention Area, and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

What they did

The authors pulled twenty years of observer records, 2005 to 2024, from two very different sources. The first is the SPC/FFA Regional Observer Pollution Report, the GEN-6 form, submitted by eleven CCMs (the FFA membership plus French Polynesia). The second is the Pacific Islands Region Observer Program, PIROP, covering the US longline fleets based in Hawaii and American Samoa. Thirteen CCMs in total had to individually authorise the release of their data, which is not a trivial bit of diplomacy and deserves acknowledgement, because both datasets are confidential.

That gave them 9,864 observed trips. To my knowledge, nobody has combined GEN-6 and PIROP at this scale before.

The headline: ALDFG was reported on 4.8% of trips, 477 of 9,864. But the split between the two data sources is where it gets useful. GEN-6 trips reported incidents at 8.7%, PIROP at 2.2%. That is a fourfold difference, and it is not because Pacific Island flagged vessels are dirtier. It is because PIROP observers do not record deliberate gear discard at all, only loss and abandonment. Take discards out of the GEN-6 numbers, and the two datasets converge. Of the 844 total incidents, 587 were discards, 189 were losses, and 68 were abandonments. In other words, the majority of what shows up in the regional data is gear being deliberately thrown over the side as a means of disposal.

That single fact reframes the whole issue for me. This is not primarily a story about the sea taking gear from fishers. It is a story about waste management.

Why gear is actually lost

The paper does something I appreciate: it categorises the drivers rather than just counting incidents. They could assign a possible driver to 257 incidents. Half of them, 49%, came back as unknown, which tells you plenty about the state of the forms. Of the rest, the dominant cause of loss is the mainline parting and the vessel then being unable to find and retrieve the gear, 23.3% of cases. The secondary cause is not being able to locate the terminal radio buoy to haul back in reverse, 4.6%.

Here is the number that stopped me. In the Hawaii and American Samoa fleets, the mainline parts on 44.5% of all sets. Nearly half. That is routine, not exceptional. The standard response is to locate the next segment, tie the mainline back together and carry on hauling, and most of the time that works. Loss only occurs when it does not. So the frequency of parting is very high, and the conversion rate into actual gear loss is comparatively low, which is a useful thing to understand if you want to intervene.

For abandonment, the leading driver is a large gear tangle that makes recovery impractical, 14.7%, followed by interaction with a drifting object, 13.2%, which observers almost always recorded as a dFAD… so the two problems are not separate.

The paper also notes that modern GPS/AIS longline buoys are far better than radio beacons for finding gear, that the Hawaii fleet typically runs five or six of them per set, and that radio beacons are now hard to source anyway because direction finders are difficult to procure. That is an obvious mitigation lever sitting right there.

The estimation, and its honesty

To get from observed incidents to a regional number, the authors worked at the set level rather than the trip level, which makes sense. A set is a fairly consistent unit of about 2,500 to 3,000 hooks, whereas observed trips in the dataset averaged 43,394 hooks and ranged from 20,036 to 206,642. Then they ran a Monte Carlo simulation, sampling each distribution 5,000 times, and scaled the result to the annual WCPFC-CA longline effort, which averaged 756 million hooks over the period and peaked in 2012.

The honest part is what they do about all the sets where the observer recorded nothing. Rather than pretend to know, they ran four scenarios. Scenario 1 assumes every set in a trip has ALDFG. Scenario 2 assumes only one set in fifteen does, and the rest have zero. Both are explicitly labelled implausible and are there to bracket the answer. Scenarios 3 and 4 sit in between and are the ones the authors consider realistic.

Under Scenario 4, which assumes one set in fifteen at full ALDFG and the other fourteen at 25%, the WCPFC-CA is losing roughly 135,355 km of mainline and branchline per year, weighing about 1,408 metric tonnes, along with 9,852 buoys and around 2.08 million hooks. Scenario 3 roughly doubles that.

I like that they published the bracket rather than a single confident number. The upper bound, Scenario 1, is over 6,000 tonnes. The lower bound is 404 tonnes. That spread is the honest measure of how little we know.

Ten times lower than the global estimate

The most consequential finding is the comparison with Richardson et al. (2022), the study that surveyed 451 fishers globally and is widely cited for gear loss rates. Richardson's longline numbers were 3.33% of mainline, 3.58% of branchlines and 2.86% of hooks lost annually. This study's Scenario 4 gives 0.30% of mainline, 0.39% of branchlines and 0.39% of hooks. Roughly ten times lower.

Two readings are possible, and the paper does not pretend to resolve them. Either interview-based global estimates are overstated, which Richardson's own 2021 paper on methodological challenges would allow for, or observer coverage in the WCPFC is so thin and so spatially unrepresentative that the real regional figure is much higher. The authors lean toward the second as a real risk.

Longline observer coverage under CMM 2018-05 is only required to be 5%, coverage was below that for years, COVID knocked it back further, and only in 2024 did all nine reporting CCMs hit the 5% mark. And observer monitoring specifically for ALDFG is lower still than headline coverage. Nobody should be quoting the Scenario 4 number as settled.

There are also gear assumptions doing quiet work here. Everything is calculated assuming 4.0 mm mainline and 2.1 mm branchline, based on the Hawaii fleet. Vessels using 3.5 mm mainline or 1.8 mm branchline would push the tonnage down. And for discard volumes reported by observers in buckets and partly filled 50 kg rice sacks, the team physically obtained end-of-life gear in Honolulu and weighed it to build the conversion. I find that detail quite cool, as I remember weighing individual bait plastic bags on a study on waste we did a few years ago, but also a fair indictment of the reporting forms.

Ports are not always the solution

The last section is the one I would push hardest at the Commission. Seven CCMs interviewed at the last annual session (American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, South Korea, Marshall Islands, Tonga, Solomon Islands) reported that unusable longline gear simply goes to land because there is no alternative.

Port surveys in Pohnpei and Majuro found something instructive. For purse seine gear, a functioning private sector system already exists. Local firms collect, consolidate, store and ship webbing and floats offshore for recycling; municipal dumping is prohibited, and some webbing gets reused locally for fencing and hammocks. For longline monofilament, nothing. No collection infrastructure, no recycling outlet, no agency with the mandate or budget.

That gap is the discard driver. If there is nowhere to put end-of-life monofilament in port, the incentive is to leave it at sea, and remember that discards were 587 of the 844 incidents in this study. Honolulu shows the alternative works: the Center for Marine Debris Research and the Hawaii Longline Association run a bin, CMDR sorts and de-metals the line, and some goes to H-Power for waste-to-energy at no cost to the fleet.

The eight recommendations

Raise longline observer coverage with a timeline toward 100%. Build ALDFG indicators into electronic monitoring, which is the only realistic path to representative data. Extend GEN-6 reporting into the full ROP and beyond the FFA, French Polynesia and US to the distant water fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, whose gear currently sits entirely outside this analysis. Update the GEN-6 form, unchanged since 2014, replacing the free text comment field with tick boxes for reason of loss. Train observers specifically on ALDFG. Look at FFA observer journals, which the team was not authorised to access. And work on port reception facilities.

My own reading is that recommendations to expand the ALDFG reporting to additional WCPFC fleets carry the most weight. Right now, the biggest longline fleets in the region are invisible in this dataset.

As for disposal onshore, I refer to the plastics study we did: why do Pacific Island ports have to deal with the externalities of the LL fishery? Particularly considering that the main culprits are the DWFN? We examined the potential to off-load waste at several Pacific Island ports, and I quote: “The picture is grim: of the five fishing ports in the region that were looked at, only one – Suva in Fiji – has access to a landfill facility that is in any way compliant with any desirable standards. The other four nations – the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands – struggle with their own local waste management to varying degrees, and their landfill facilities are mostly already overwhelmed. Adding foreign commercial waste to existing domestic waste is not a viable solution where that is avoidable. While some fishing vessels do operate out of Pacific Island ports as a home base (e.g. one company in the Marshall Islands and another in Noro, Solomon Islands) and have to dump their waste in local dumpsites, the majority of fishing vessels are actually foreign-based, and materials that are now waste were once provisioned onto those vessels either at overseas ports or from carrier vessels. 

Perhaps we should think along the lines of what I discussed on FADs. My personal view is that we are treating it as a “waste management” issue, centred on disposal and limited recycling, which happens at the end of the problem and shifts the burden onto those who did not cause it… and this is simply not right.

So we need to see it from the perspective of “reverse logistics” that differs from traditional waste management in that it adds a “value” to recovering and repurposing products and routes while respecting the internationally recognised UNCLOS principle that the country to which a fishing vessel belongs is responsible for all the actions of the vessel, including the waste produced by that vessel.

I think we should consider a targeted “waste-bond” system that combines a deposit on longline gear with a recoverable payment for verified retrievals, creating a market signal that turns abandoned gear into an asset rather than waste.

The gear loss question is genuinely hard. The gear disposal question is not.

Effort creep in the WCPO purse seine fishery: the 2026 update

Continuing with my interest in the papers going to the 22nd Scientific Committee of the WCPFC in Apia this August, I want to look at one that sits right at the intersection of science, management and money: the annual update on indicators of effort creep in the purse seine fishery. The paper is WCPFC-SC22-2026-MI-IP01, by Paul Hamer and Thom Teears of SPC's Oceanic Fisheries Programme together with the PNA Office.

I remember when having a chopper was a worry on creep… good old days

Why this paper?

The Vessel Day Scheme is an effort control. You do not limit the tonnage of skipjack a vessel takes; you limit the number of days it can spend fishing. That works beautifully as long as one fishing day keeps meaning roughly the same volumes of fish caught. The moment a day catch “drifts” towards catching more fish than it used to over time, that assumed limit quietly loosens without anyone changing a number in a management measure.

That drift is what fisheries people call ”effort creep”, which is an area I've been interested in for a while (particularly when it comes to dFADs but also on longline). Creep comes in two types: the direct kind is more sets inside the same day, more nominal effort squeezed into the unit you bought. The indirect kind is each set becoming better at catching fish, through gear, electronics, skipper skill, better information, better networking. The first is easy to count. The second is genuinely hard.

Paragraph 2.4(ii) of the VDS text obliges the Administrator to brief the Parties annually on catch, effort and any observed or potential increase in average effective fishing effort per day since the scheme started. SPC has been producing this analysis with the PNAO since 2016, when Pilling and colleagues first set out the candidate indicators. This year's version runs complete data from 2007 and 2008 through 2024, with some observer series into 2024, and the authors recommend it supersedes earlier versions because data inputs get refined over time.

The fishing day and the VMS

Before getting to the results, there is a data story here that deserves attention from anyone working in MCS, because it is a nice example of reported data going quietly wrong.

Since around 2010, the raised logbook estimates of fishing days have become increasingly biased low. The reason appears to be misreporting of vessel activity codes, specifically what would previously have been logged as searching now being logged as transit. Searching is fishing effort. Transit is not. Under the VDS, a day spent steaming from one FAD to another is a fishing day, and it gets charged as one. So a fleet that codes its searching as transit ends up looking, in the logbook data, like it is fishing far fewer days than it actually is. And if you divide sets by an artificially small number of days, you manufacture an apparent increase in sets per day. In other words, the bias runs in exactly the direction that would create a false effort creep signal.

Since 2022, SPC has instead derived fishing days from VMS, applying criteria based on position and vessel speed to identify searching and active fishing. Those VMS days line up much more closely with the days recorded under the VDS. They run higher than VDS days, which is not surprising given the VDS claims process for non-fishing days, but the trend and variation track well. 

The team recommends continuing with VMS days and refining the algorithms using observer data for ground truthing. Work to correct the historical logbook record is ongoing, though the paper is honest that progress in 2024 and 2025 has been limited by staff turnover in SPC's data management team and competing priorities.

For me, this is the quiet headline. A core management indicator was being distorted by reporting behaviour on the vessel, and it took an independent data stream to notice and correct it. That is a good argument for keeping multiple sources rather than trusting the logsheet alone.

What the indicators actually show

The analysis excludes archipelagic waters of PNG, Solomon Islands and Kiribati, since effort there is not under the VDS, and filters to 20N to 20S, dropping the smaller domestic fleets of Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Results are presented separately for PNA waters (PNA EEZs plus Tokelau) and everything else.

On nominal effort, sets per fishing day in PNA waters sit consistently just below 1.0, with a very slight declining trend since 2008. That is the opposite of what you would expect if vessels were cramming more sets into each purchased day. Outside PNA waters, the rate is lower and more variable, with a flat long-term trend. Observer data, which only counts days when sets were actually made and therefore gives higher values, tells the same story. Between roughly 15 and 30% of active fishing days in PNA waters involve more than one set, and 5 to 25% outside. There was an uptick in 2024, tied to a big jump in unassociated sets, and the authors note a slight increasing trend may be emerging, but nothing sustained.

On effectiveness, catch per set for total tuna shows no long-term trend since 2007 for either set type, in either area. Associated sets consistently produce about double the catch rate of unassociated sets, which is unsurprising given how many free school sets come up empty. Comparing 2023 and 2024 against 2021 and 2022, catch per set was down 1 to 2%, while catch per day was up 8% in PNA waters and 18% outside, all within the range of variation seen since 2008.

Vessel characteristics are similarly stable. Length, gross tonnage and horsepower have moved between zero and 1% a year since 2007. Well capacity is the outlier, up 16% between the two recent periods. The authors make the sharp point that VDS day charging by vessel size is itself a brake on hull growth, so the fleet has stopped getting bigger and started getting smarter instead.

The creep that already happened

Here is where the paper gets more interesting to me. When the authors extend the catch per set series back to 1990, a clear increasing trend appears for associated sets from 1990 to about 2007, and then it flattens. Unassociated (free school)  sets show no such trend in either period.

That rise maps onto the transition from drifting logs to human-made drifting FADs as the dominant associated set type, which was made possible by cheap satellite tracking buoys. Their conclusion is that the most important period of effort creep in the history of this fishery happened before the VDS came in. By the time the scheme was implemented, the big efficiency jump had already been banked into the baseline.

Which raises the obvious question: why did the acoustic FAD buoys that came later not produce another jump?

The authors offer two explanations. One is that the technology may be less useful than assumed, giving a coarse presence signal rather than a reliable biomass estimate, and that its real value may lie in cutting steaming time and fuel cost rather than lifting catch per set. Also, a vessel can only set on FADs it can actually reach, and it has no control over where its FADs drift, including into EEZs where it has no access or no days. You cannot cherry-pick the best buoy if you cannot get to it.

The second explanation is management. The package introduced from 2007 by PNA and WCPFC- the VDS limits and pricing, FAD closures, high seas effort limits, more restrictive access, and the shift from roaming distant water fleets to domestic fleets fishing mostly at home- brought a pace of change beyond anything seen in other tuna fisheries. 

The comparison is telling. In the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the FAD share of catch has climbed to around 80%. In the WCPO, it has sat at around 50%, with roughly 70% of sets still made on free schools. Something is discouraging the switch that happened everywhere else.

The caveats worth keeping

The authors are careful not to oversell a null result, and neither should we.

Stable catch rates are not proof that nothing is happening. If efficiency gains are running against declining stock, the two can cancel out and leave a flat line. Purse seining is also highly selective, which makes catch per set prone to hyperstability, holding up even while a stock moves. That is why the catchability proxy matters: skipjack catch per day divided by assessed biomass. Against the 2025 assessment, which shows relatively stable spawning biomass since around 2010, that proxy is flat for PNA waters and very slightly increasing outside. Notably, this is weaker evidence of creep than the 2022 assessment gave, which showed around 2 % per year.

Aggregation also hides things. These are regional numbers, and the paper is explicit that individual flags or EEZs could show patterns the aggregate does not, which is precisely the sort of analysis a PNA member might want for optimising returns on its own day allocation.

And FADs remain the big data gap. Escalle and colleagues estimated 31,000 to 39,500 buoy deployments a year in the WCPO between 2016 and 2019, against roughly 11,000 associated sets in 2024. Most deployed buoys are never set on. The number of FADs a vessel is actively monitoring on any given day is plausibly a real component of fishing effort, and it is not captured anywhere in this analysis. SPC is building a FAD database off the back of PNA logbook reporting, and the authors recommend adding deployment and monitoring indicators in future updates.

What SC22 is being asked to note

The invitations to the Committee are modest but pointed. No clear evidence of effort creep since VDS implementation. Clear evidence it occurred before, during the drifting FAD transition. Recognition that the policy package may itself be constraining creep. Continued VMS work, continued logbook correction, and a suggestion I think deserves attention: review the role of this paper in relation to the WCPFC skipjack management procedure, since the MP now changes how VDS limits get adjusted rather than leaving them to periodic renegotiation of the Tropical Tuna Measure.

The finding that effort creep is not undermining the VDS is, as the authors themselves say, contrary to what might have been predicted. That is worth a lot of thinking about.  It suggests the scheme, along with the FAD closures and access controls around it, has done something that effort-based management is generally assumed to fail at. But it is a finding held up by indicators the paper openly describes as imperfect, resting on data streams that have already been shown to drift. 

Keeping it honest depends on better FAD data, better activity reporting, and continued willingness to check the logsheet against the VMS.

The Western and Central Pacific tuna fishery in 2025

Every August, the Scientific Committee of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission sits down to work out many of the science challenges for the year ahead, (at least partly) the numbers from the year before, and this year's overview paper, put together by Tiffany Vidal, Thomas Ruaia and Freddie Heather, tells a fairly clear story about 2025. After a record-breaking 2024, the fishery pulled back across almost every measure: catch, value, and the economic conditions underpinning the main fleets.

The headline number is the total tuna catch from the WCPFC Statistical Area, which came in at a provisional 2,588,945 mt for 2025. That is about 472,000 mt below the 2024 record of just over 3 million tonnes, though it sits close to the 2023 level of 2,685,724 mt. So rather than reading 2025 as some new low point, it looks more like the fishery reverting to its recent normal after an unusually good year.

We still dominate the global tuna supply. The WCPO catch represented 72% of the total Pacific tuna catch and 49% of the global tuna catch for the year, and unlike other oceans, the overwhelming majority of that catch, 86% in 2025, is taken inside the waters of Pacific Island coastal states rather than on the high seas.

Catch (mt) of albacore, bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin tuna in the WCPFC-CA, by longline, pole-and-line, purse seine, troll, and other small-scale gear types

Skipjack remains the backbone of the fishery. The 2025 catch of 1,668,409 mt made up 64% of the total, but that was about 393,000 mt down on the 2024 record. Yellowfin came in at 677,123 mt (26%), continuing a gentle decline from the 2021 record. Bigeye actually went the other way, up 9,146 mt to 155,864 mt (6%), and albacore fell to its lowest level since 1993 at 87,549 mt (3%).

The purse seine fishery is still the biggest part, taking 69% of the total catch by volume in 2025 at 1,787,386 mt, a drop of around 359,000 mt from 2024's record. Skipjack made up 76% of that purse seine catch, yellowfin 20%, and bigeye 4%.

What stands out in the detail is how much of the story is about where the fish were, not just how many there were. The fishery has been shaped for the past five years by persistent La Niña conditions, with a brief wobble toward El Niño in early 2025 before La Niña reasserted itself for the rest of the year. That kept effort concentrated in the western side of the WCPO, particularly around PNG, FSM and the Solomon Islands, a pattern reinforced in 2024 when PNG cut licensing fees to draw fleets into its waters.

The Pacific Islands flagged fleet, now 167 vessels and the largest it has ever been, continues to be the dominant force in the fishery, taking well over half the region's purse seine catch on its own, though even this fleet saw a slight downturn in 2025 after its record 2024.

One technical detail worth flagging for anyone who watches catch rates: there has been a documented shift in how vessels report transit days versus searching days on their logsheets, which is quietly inflating the nominal CPUE figures reported in this and other papers. The authors flag this explicitly, so any casual reading of "catch rates are up" needs that caveat attached.

Bigeye catches in the purse seine fishery jumped 42% in 2025 to 63,579 mt, the highest since 2018, driven by a heavier reliance on drifting FAD sets, which rose from 17% of all sets in 2024 to 32% in 2025. That is a meaningful swing in fishing strategy within a single year, and it shows up clearly in the size composition data too, with FAD-associated catches skewing smaller and more mixed-species than the free school sets.

Pole-and-line had a rough year, with the 2025 catch of 103,588 mt the lowest since the early 1960s. Japan's distant water and offshore fleets, still the mainstay of this gear type alongside Indonesia, saw catches drop 5% as the fleet itself shrank from 61 to 57 vessels. This is a slow, structural decline that has been running for decades now, driven by the economics of pole-and-line relative to purse seine rather than any one bad season.

Longline told a similarly downbeat story. The 2025 catch of 218,014 mt was below the ten-year average, with bigeye at its lowest since 1983 and albacore down sharply too. The Japanese and Korean distant water fleets continue to shrink (Japan's bigeye catch has fallen from 20,725 mt in 2004 to just 2,702 mt in 2025, alongside a vessel count that's dropped from 366 to 62 over the same period), while the Pacific Islands domestic albacore fleet keeps growing its share of the South Pacific albacore catch, now taking 57% of it compared to a third back in 1998.

Prices were a mixed bag through the year. Skipjack recovered somewhat after a rough 2024, with Thai import prices up 8% to $1,641/mt and Yaizu prices edging up 2%. Yellowfin and bigeye prices moved in different directions depending on the market and product form, fresh versus frozen, Japan versus the US, with US fresh yellowfin import prices actually falling 18% even as frozen product from Japan rose 16%. Albacore had a rough year in the US market, down 23% after a record high in 2024.

Put all the catch and price movements together, and the total delivered value of the WCPO tuna catch fell 5% to $5.4 billion in 2025. Purse seine still accounts for 57% of that value despite an 11% drop, while longline actually grew 9% to $1.18 billion and pole-and-line grew 13% to $230 million on the back of a big jump in albacore volumes. Skipjack value fell 15% to $2.7 billion even as the other three species all grew in value, a reminder that skipjack's sheer volume means its price and catch swings dominate the headline economics of the whole fishery.

The part of this paper that will matter most to anyone thinking about the industry's near-term prospects is the economic conditions indexes, which track fish prices, fishing costs and catch rates against a 20-year baseline. All three of the major fisheries went backwards in 2025. The tropical purse seine index fell to 80, well below its long-run average, driven mainly by a real decline in catch rates that outweighed cheaper fuel and slightly higher fish prices.

That is a sharp reversal from 2024, when the index sat at 109 on the back of strong catches. The southern longline fishery fell to 79, and the tropical longline fishery to 74, both weighed down by falling catch rates and, in the tropical fishery's case, persistently low fish prices as well.

None of these numbers is catastrophic in isolation, but the direction across all three fisheries in the same year, after several years of relatively favourable conditions, is the kind of signal that tends to get noticed at the coastal state level given how much of the region's fisheries revenue flows from access arrangements tied to these fleets. And i’m sure the fuel costs have had their share of influence on this slowdown.

Away from the big three gear types, the paper also captures a genuinely large shift in how Indonesia's handline fishery is being reported. After a 2024 handline workshop, Indonesia was able to properly split its large-fish handline catches from its small-fish hook-and-line catches for the first time, and the result was a big jump in the reported large-fish handline catch, to 176,314 mt in 2025, about 62% of it yellowfin. The authors are careful to note this looks like a reporting artefact rather than a real change in the fishery, but it is a good example of how much of what looks like a trend in these annual reports is actually a data collection story.

On the billfish side, most species tracked lower in 2025 than 2024: blue marlin down to 9,257 mt, black marlin down 44% after a record 2024, striped marlin down slightly. Swordfish in the South Pacific held roughly steady at 18,501 mt, still dominated by the EU-Spanish fleet.

Taken as a whole, 2025 reads as a fishery cooling off from an exceptional 2024 rather than one in trouble, but the simultaneous decline across catch rates, prices in several key markets, and the economic indexes for all three major gear types is worth watching into 2026, especially with forecasters now flagging a potential swing toward a strong El Niño later in the year, which would reshape where the fish, and the fleets chasing them, end up.

Joseph Conrad on the minds of the men I fished with

I was sent a picture from my fishing days in the late 80s… surely not one I should be proud off… but I’ll never deny who I was, and the things I did… it would be silly at any stage. The friend that took it is now retired, and he rejoiced in the life I lived and where I am now, while he stayed in Mar Del Plata fishing all the way to retirement.

Made me think about the perception of many fishermen being like pirates, people that rejoice in pillaging the seas, without any alliances to any place or anyone… I think it is far from that.

It made me go back to the opening pages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Marlow (the protagonist) is introduced by an unnamed shipmate:

He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them, the ship; and so is their country, the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings, the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself.

Conrad was a seaman before he was a writer, and it shows.

That “stay-at-home order” of mind is exactly what I found on board. The boat is the home and the sea is the country, and everything else glides past.

It is not stupidity; it is a survival setting. You cannot carry the whole world into a cabin you share with four men whose every body noise you hear from less than a metre away.

Sharing one after a good trip…. 1988

I have written before that I got into fishing partly because I did not fit anywhere else, and that life at sea sorts people out fast.

Either you deal with it, or you never come back, and that is fine; we respect that.

What holds it together is not affection. I fished with people that had views I despised, yet I would still take them as crew tomorrow, because trust and liking are different things, and only one of them keeps you alive.

Conrad’s disdainful ignorance is, I think, a way of managing what a paper on fishers’ mental health I read a while ago calls the traditional risks…. the weather, the hours, the danger, the missing family, the hope of coming back.

What Conrad’s seaman had no defence for is the modern uncertainty, the criminalisation and demonisation… my own daughter, as a child, telling a friend I was a fisherman… but a nice one.

That one still stings my soul.

The sea is always kind of the same. It is everything ashore that keeps changing.

7,288 longliners, and the ones we can't count

The good people at ISSF put out another excellent technical report this month that I've just had time to properly sit down and read. Josu Santiago pulled together the authorised longline vessel records from all five tuna RFMOs, ICCAT, IOTC, IATTC, WCPFC and CCSBT, as they stood in June 2026, and matched them against each other. That sounds like a hardcore data-cleaning exercise, so my respect for his work is very high!

We got two here!

Long-time readers will know I have a soft spot for longline. I fished it, I wrote my thesis on selective bait for the snapper longline fishery, and I still reckon it's the most physics- and chemistry-driven of all the gear (depth, thermocline, chemoreceptors, bait chemistry, branch line spacing, all of it).

So this is not me having a go at the gear. It's me having another go at how little we actually know about the fleet that uses it.

The reports find that across the five RFMO registries, there were 9,084 authorised longline vessels on paper. Once you strip out the duplicates (the same vessel sitting on more than one RFMO's list) that comes down to 7,288 unique boats. One in five records was a repeat, and unsurprisingly it's the bigger, more mobile vessels doing the repeating.

Here's the number that matters most to me. Vessels 24 m or longer are only 31% of that fleet by count, 2,283 boats, but they carry 86% of the estimated fishhold volume. So almost seven out of ten vessels on these registries are, in capacity terms, close to irrelevant, while a relatively small club of large-scale longliners is doing almost all the actual catching and carrying.

And that club is dominated by the usual DWFN, China, Chinese Taipei, Japan and Korea; between them, they own 59% of the large-scale fleet by numbers and 78% of it by fishhold volume. China alone has 601 vessels of that size, with roughly 229,000 m³ of hold capacity between them. That's more than any other flag by a wide margin.

What vessel counts tell us

Here's the part that will not surprise anyone who has worked in this region. Most RFMOs don't require small and medium vessels to register at all. IOTC and WCPFC use a 24 m cut-off. IATTC's large-scale longline rules also apply only above that length.

ICCAT is the one exception, as its Mediterranean requirements pull in a lot of smaller boats, which is why its registry looks so different from the other four.

This means Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, all strong small-scale longline nations, barely show up in this data because their small-scale fleets simply aren't on the books. Hence, fishhold volume should be more vital than vessel counts whenever this comes up.

It's not a nicer statistic to quote; it's the only one that gives you an honest read on what a fleet can actually land, given that the vessels missing from the registries are, almost by definition, the small ones.

The IMO number problem, again

40% of all registered longline vessels have no IMO number. That drops to under 4% once you look only at the large-scale fleet, which is something, but it still leaves a chunk of the fleet where you genuinely cannot tell if the boat on one RFMO's list is the same boat sitting on another under a different name or flag.

Santiago falls back on national registration codes to catch duplicates where the IMO is missing, which is a fair workaround, but it's not the same as a proper universal identifier, and we've known that for a long time now.

The report is also upfront about something I have noticed before: these registries record vessels authorised to fish, not vessels actually fishing. That distinction matters more than people give it credit for.

A vessel can be authorised across all five RFMOs and only ever operate in one of them or in none. The co-occurrence numbers here are a good illustration: 1,191 large vessels are registered in just one tRFMO, 861 in two, 137 in three, 72 in four, and 26 boats authorised in all five at once.

My take

I like to think that Santiago's ISSF report is the solid paperwork side of the complexity of MCS for the longline fleet… If most of the fleet never has to register, and 40% of what does register has no reliable identifier, then of course MCS can't keep up. The fleet is built, almost by accident, to be hard to see.

The 86% of capacity sitting in 31% of vessels is also worth sitting with for a moment. Every time an RFMO reports a fleet reduction in terms of vessel numbers, it can look like real progress while barely touching actual fishing capacity, because the boats that are easiest to drop off a registry are usually the small ones with next to no hold volume anyway. If we're serious about managing capacity, hold volume and gross tonnage need to be the numbers on the table, not just headcount.

None of this means longline is the villain. Done properly, it's still one of the more selective ways to catch a mature, high-value tuna or swordfish, and I'll defend that all day. But “done properly” depends entirely on being able to see the fleet, and this report is a useful, if slightly depressing, reminder of how much of it we still can't.

Santiago's excellent recommendations- mandatory registration for the smaller vessels, universal IMO numbers, and dynamic registries that track who's actually fishing rather than who's merely authorised- are not new, yet remain partially implemented.

What this report gives us is a clean, quantified baseline to hold the industry and RFMOs to next time they claim progress on capacity reduction based on fleet size by number of vessels

The Snapper That Never Makes to the stock assessment

A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens to the fish that swim away, the new study on post-release mortality in the SNA 1 snapper fishery. That piece looked at the fate of released fish, roughly a fifth of them dying anyway despite swimming off looking fine. I have since gone through the full Fisheries New Zealand assessment report behind that study, and there is a second story in it that deserves its own space: how much snapper actually gets caught in this fishery, as opposed to how much gets counted.

The short version is that the recreational snapper fishery across East Northland, the Hauraki Gulf (Auckland included) and the Bay of Plenty is enormous, and most of what gets hooked never gets weighed, logged, or reported anywhere. It just goes back over the side. The official harvest numbers that feed into stock assessments and catch allowances only see a fraction of what actually happens on the water.

Where the data came from

The study, led by Jade Maggs and colleagues from Earth Sciences New Zealand and Blue Water Marine Research, ran from January 2024 to January 2025. Interviewers worked at eleven boat ramps from Mangōnui in the north down to Whakatāne in the Bay of Plenty, catching private trailer boat fishers as they came off the water. Trained observers rode along on charter boats out of nine ports covering the same stretch of coast. Between the two sectors, they recorded 24,013 individual snapper: 16,921 from private boats across 1746 sampled outings, and 7092 from charter boats across 240 sampled trips. For each fish they logged length, capture depth, where it was hooked, and whether it was kept or released.

That is a serious amount of fieldwork, and it is worth saying so because the resulting numbers carry real weight.

More than 60% goes back

The headline figure is that 62% of snapper caught by private boat anglers were released, and 69% of snapper caught on charter boats were released. Most of what gets released is undersized: 84% of the private boat releases and presumably a similar pattern on charters, since 53% of all private boat catch and 60% of charter catch was below the 30 cm minimum legal size.

Put plainly, for every legal fish that ends up in a chilly bin, roughly one and a half to two more get caught, ideally measured against a ruler, and put back (or kept until a bigger one is caught)

That release rate held up fairly consistently across all three regions. It eased off a little in winter in the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty, when more of the fish around happened to be legal size, but the underlying pattern of high release rates was there everywhere the researchers looked, from the Mangōnui boat ramp in the far north to Whakatāne in the east.

Scaled up to the whole fishery, private boat anglers released an estimated 903 tonnes of snapper over the year, 2.1 million individual fish. The Hauraki Gulf, unsurprisingly given how much fishing pressure it carries around Auckland, accounted for the bulk of that at 551 tonnes, followed by the Bay of Plenty at 210 tonnes and East Northland at 142 tonnes. Charter boats released a further 207 tonnes, 462,000 fish, again concentrated in the Gulf. Add the two sectors together, and you get somewhere around 1110 tonnes of snapper, 2.6 million fish, handled and returned to the water across SNA 1 in a single year. 

That is close to three-quarters of the entire commercial Total Allowable Commercial Catch for the stock, caught and released by recreational fishers alone.

What the official numbers actually measure

Here is where the second, less discussed part of the story comes in. New Zealand's recreational catch statistics for SNA 1, the ones that feed into the Total Allowable Catch and the recreational allowance, come primarily from two sources: the National Panel Survey (NPS), a periodic survey of private fishers, and the Amateur Charter Vessel (ACV) database, which charter operators are required to fill in. Both of these systems are built to estimate landed harvest. What gets weighed at the ramp, what gets logged by the skipper. Neither was ever designed to capture the fish that get thrown back.

The 2022-23 NPS put the private boat snapper harvest at just over 1.3 million fish, 1514 tonnes. The ACV database recorded 237,141 snapper landed by charter boats that year. Add those together, and you get a landed harvest of roughly 1.54 million fish, a bit under 1800 tonnes. That is the number that shows up in the official accounts.

But when Maggs and colleagues combined their catch characterisation data with those harvest figures, to work out the actual total number of snapper being caught (kept plus released), the picture looked very different. 

Their model put total private boat catch at close to 3.44 million fish, about 2518 tonnes. Total charter boat catch came out around 699,000 fish, roughly 488 tonnes. Combined, that is somewhere in the order of 4.1 million snapper actually being caught across SNA 1 in a year, against an official landed harvest figure of 1.54 million.

In other words, the landed harvest numbers that management decisions are built on capture only around a third to two-fifths of what is genuinely being caught. The rest, well over half, exists only in this kind of dedicated at-sea survey, and even then only because someone thought to go and measure it.

I want to be careful here. This is not a story about unreported fishing or people hiding their catch. Nearly everything being released is being released because the law requires it: undersized fish, fish over the bag limit (yet you argue what you kept fishing, then). The system is doing roughly what it was designed to do. The point is narrower and, I think, more interesting: an enormous amount of fishing mortality and fishing pressure simply does not appear in the data that gets used to judge how healthy a fishery is or how much room there is to move on catch limits. If you only ever count what comes home in the bin, you are missing most of what the fishery is actually doing to the fish stock.

Why that gap matters

This is where the two threads from my earlier post and this one come together. SNA 1 carries a Total Allowable Catch of 8050 tonnes, split between a commercial allowance, a recreational allowance, a small customary allowance, and a 450 tonne allowance for everything else, illegal take, ghost fishing, and mortality among fish that are returned to the sea.

This study put annual release mortality, fish that swim away but die anyway from barotrauma or hook damage, at 200 tonnes for private boats and 48 tonnes for charter boats. Combined, that is 248 tonnes, on its own accounting for 55% of the entire 450 tonne allowance for other mortality, an allowance that is also meant to cover the much larger commercial fishery's own sources of unaccounted loss. The number of individual fish involved was around 582,000 snapper a year, dying after being carefully unhooked, measured, and returned to the water by anglers who almost certainly believed they were doing the right thing.

None of that 248 tonnes shows up as harvest anywhere. It is not landed and is not eaten. It simply disappears from the stock, invisibly, inside a number that until this study was, in the authors' own words, "somewhat arbitrary."

Most of that mortality risk traces back to two things: how deep the fish was hooked from, and where the hook ended up. Fish caught from medium and deep water die at much higher rates than fish caught in the shallows, and a fish that is gut-hooked or foul-hooked is far more likely to die than one hooked cleanly in the lip. 

The good news buried in the data is that the great majority of snapper across both sectors, 88% on private boats and 95% on charters, were lip hooked, which is the main reason the overall mortality rate is not far worse than it is.

The incentive gap again

I made the point in an earlier piece about the Fisheries Amendment Bill debate that incentives, not intentions, tend to drive outcomes in fisheries. That argument was mostly about commercial discarding, but it applies just as cleanly here. Under the current settings, there is no cost attached to catching a fish you are not allowed to keep, so there is no real incentive to avoid catching it in the first place. Fishers fish the same grounds, use the same rigs, and simply sort the legal from the sub-legal fish at the rail. The 4.1 million fish being caught each year is not a sign of fishers doing anything wrong. It is the predictable result of a management system built around size selectivity rather than encounter rates, applied to a stock that has recovered strongly enough that undersized fish are now everywhere on the upper east coast.

A fishery that is mostly invisible

What strikes me most reading through the full report is how much of this fishery's real footprint sits outside the numbers we normally use to talk about it. SNA 1 is often described, rightly, as the biggest recreational fishery in New Zealand, and the landed harvest figures are already substantial. But the total number of fish handled, measured, and returned to the water each year is more than double what gets landed. That is not a criticism of fishers, most of whom are simply following minimum size and bag limit rules that were designed decades ago around very different assumptions about what "release" costs the fish. Yet it is a criticism of their noisy opposition to any change.

It is a reminder that fisheries management built entirely around landed catch is, by construction, managing only part of the picture. The rest, the fish that get caught, judged too small, and sent back, has real biological consequences, and until surveys like this one go out and count it directly, it stays off the books. Good management needs to see the whole fishery, not just the part that ends up in the chilly bin.

Can EM Monitor labour rights on board?

This paper became the second half of the study I wrote about last week. The first part asked whether human fisheries observers could reasonably be expanded from data collectors into monitors of labour and human rights abuses at sea and concluded that the idea runs straight into the same power imbalance and safety risks that already make an observer's job dangerous. This second paper picks up where one first left off and asks a more technical but no less important question: if not observers, then what about cameras?

Electronic monitoring, or EM, isn't new to fisheries management; it's been quietly working its way into commercial fishing fleets for the better part of two decades. What began with Vessel Monitoring Systems tracking GPS position has evolved into full onboard camera rigs paired with gear sensors, winch and hydraulic pressure monitors, and increasingly capable machine learning that can help identify species and estimate catch size from footage. The paper draws a useful distinction that's easy to gloss over: E-Reporting (ER) is an "open" system that still relies on people typing into electronic log sheets and offloading records and observer reports submitted digitally. E-Monitoring (EM) is a "closed" system by design, with sealed, tamper-evident equipment that doesn't accept manual input and can't be talked out of what it recorded. That distinction turns out to matter a great deal once you start thinking about labour compliance, because a closed system is much harder to bribe, intimidate, or pressure into looking the other way than a person is.

That's the appeal in a nutshell. Human observers, however professional, get tired, need to sleep and eat, can only be in one place on the vessel at a time, and, as the first paper set out in some detail, can be subject to intimidation, corruption, or worse precisely because they're isolated on someone else's boat for weeks at a stretch. A camera doesn't get tired and can't be bought a drink. It also doesn't get to decide, on a bad night, whether reporting something is worth the risk.

But the paper is careful not to oversell EM as a silver bullet, and I think that caution is the most important part. Cameras have real limitations. Current technology still can't reliably determine the sex, age or species composition of a bulk catch sample the way a trained observer can. Blind spots are unavoidable on complex vessels unless the camera setup is extremely elaborate, and elaborate setups cost money. Crucially, none of the footage means anything without skilled analysts on land who understand the fishery, the vessel type and the processes on board well enough to interpret what they're looking at; the technology doesn't replace expertise; it relocates where that expertise is applied. For all these reasons, the paper's honest conclusion is that EM complements observers rather than replacing them outright, at least for the foreseeable future.

Where the paper does more original work is in mapping out what it would take to extend an EM system, built for fisheries science and compliance, to also cover labour standards. It's a genuinely practical roadmap: how to engage stakeholders who each see EM differently (a coastal state losing licence revenue if distant-water fleets flee to the high seas to dodge cameras is a very different worry from the ILO wanting a workable global standard); how to define minimum technical standards so systems from different vendors are comparable; how to structure a programme, whether through a single vendor or a certified-standards model; and how to grapple with cost, video review alone typically accounts for about half of an EM programme's budget, a sobering figure for anyone assuming cameras are the cheap option, albeit the raise of AI… yet the usefulness of AI on labour rights, is a whole paper in itself.

The paper also gets specific about which labour-focused capabilities could realistically be bolted onto an existing EM system. Crew identification via facial recognition at embarkation and disembarkation could help close a real regulatory blind spot: workers who join and leave vessels via at-sea transfers from carrier ships, far from any port authority's oversight. From there, calculating days at sea and actual working hours becomes a fairly straightforward extension, particularly on longliners, where most of the work happens on deck, where cameras already point. More ambitiously, the paper suggests EM-supported grievance mechanisms, with reported complaints logged alongside time and location data so they can't simply be dismissed as no proof, no problem.

None of this comes without real friction, and the paper doesn't pretend otherwise. Privacy is a genuine and legitimate concern; fishing vessels are cramped, crews already have almost no personal space, and being recorded around the clock is a real imposition that needs to be handled with actual limits on placement and use, not just reassurances.

Cost recovery is politically sensitive: someone has to pay for all this hardware and analysis, and industry pushback over who foots the bill is predictable. And there's a coordination problem baked into the whole exercise. Coastal states, flag states, RFMOs and vendors all need to move roughly in step, or fleets will simply drift towards whichever waters have the least monitoring.

What I find most useful about this paper, on a second reading, is that it doesn't ask EM to solve everything on its own. Its real argument is that EM already has a proven track record in fisheries data and compliance, so the technical and institutional case for expanding it into labour monitoring isn't a leap of faith; it's an extension of something already tested.

The genuinely honest caveat, though, is that nobody had actually piloted EM for labour purposes at the time we wrote this. The gap between "technically plausible" and "demonstrated to work" is exactly where the paper leaves things: recommending a proper pilot run in partnership with the ILO, flag and coastal states, and the fleets themselves before anyone claims cameras have solved a problem that people have struggled with for decades.

Should Fisheries Observers Ever Be Labour Rights Monitors Too?

After writing on the new FAO publication regarding labour, I was asked why we were not using fisheries observers for labour issues… this is not a new idea; in fact, a few years ago, together with my friend Osvaldo Urrutia, we wrote a study for a UN agency project that posed a question many keep returning to: could the fisheries observers already working on fishing vessels around the world be turned into monitors of labour and human rights abuses at sea?

It's a tempting idea. Working conditions on fishing vessels are notoriously hard to monitor, and observers are already out on the water. Why not ask them to watch for crew rights as well as their fisheries work?

Being Osvaldo a well-known fisheries jurist, the paper we did spends a lot of time on the legal plumbing before getting anywhere near an answer, and that plumbing matters. Under UNCLOS, the flag state, the country whose flag a vessel flies, bears legal responsibility for what happens on board, including labour conditions. The 2006 Maritime Labour Convention set global minimum standards for seafarers, but it left fishing vessels out entirely, which is why the ILO built a separate instrument, the Work in Fishing Convention (C188), to cover things like signed work agreements, rest hours, food, water, medical care and repatriation for fishing crews. On paper, the coverage is there. In practice, flag states are often unable or unwilling to enforce it, especially for distant-water fleets operating far from home and rarely inspected.

That enforcement gap is exactly why observers keep being proposed as a potential fix. UNCLOS itself only mentions them in passing; coastal states can require observers on foreign vessels fishing in their waters, but the convention says nothing about what those observers are for, or even about their legal status on board. That vagueness left it to individual countries and regional fisheries bodies to build their own observer programmes from scratch, and the paper walks through four of them to see how far the role has stretched in practice: New Zealand, Chile, the Philippines, and the WCPFC, which manages tuna fisheries across a vast stretch of the high seas.

The differences between them are revealing. Chile keeps its observers strictly to a scientific data-collection role; the law defines them explicitly as researchers gathering data for conservation and management purposes, full stop, with no compliance function at all. New Zealand goes further than any of the others, with observers who support fisheries compliance monitoring and, in some circumstances, even take on a labour-monitoring role, but only when specifically delegated by the labour inspectorate, not as a standing part of the job. The Philippines and the WCPFC's regional programme sit somewhere in between, with observers supporting fisheries compliance but nothing formally built in for labour or human rights monitoring. Across all four, the pattern is the same: observers were designed to gather biological data, compliance monitoring was added later as a practical necessity, and human rights monitoring has essentially never been formally attempted anywhere.

That gap isn't an oversight. It's the paper's central finding, and it stems from a hard, practical problem: the same isolation and power imbalance that make an observer useful also render them vulnerable. A 2020 Human Rights at Sea survey of observers working across the WCPO found that just over half had experienced harassment, abuse, violence or interference on at least half of their trips, and fewer than one in five said they'd never experienced it. Psychological and emotional abuse was the most common complaint. Roughly a third of respondents were dissatisfied with how their reports of these incidents were handled.

I wanted to shorten one section of the paper here because it captures the core dilemma better than anything I could write fresh:

Observers, like anyone, bring their own sense of ethics to the job, and their isolated position on board leaves them open to corruption; captains sometimes allege observers ask for bribes to look the other way, just as observers can be pressured or bought off. Crew may also not see an observer as independent enough to trust with reports of intimidation or abuse. These risks aren't hypothetical: conflict is common in a setting defined by a stark power imbalance, and there have been reports of observers dying in suspicious circumstances while doing their jobs. Some experts (and I) argue observers should be pulled back to a purely scientific role and relieved of compliance duties altogether, and I argue for splitting the functions entirely, leaving observers to the science and letting electronic monitoring (EM) handle compliance. Either way, any reform of observer programmes has to reckon with what it does to observer safety and whether the system still works, and it's genuinely unclear whether observers are even the most efficient use of scarce monitoring funding compared with the technology now available.

That's really the crux of the whole paper. There's no legal barrier stopping a state from expanding an observer's mandate to cover human rights monitoring; New Zealand already shows it's technically possible. But possible isn't the same as wise.

Every extra compliance power handed to an observer raises the stakes of the power imbalance they're already navigating alone, on someone else's boat, weeks from shore, with no colleagues, no easy exit, and often no reliable way to report if something goes wrong.

Layering a human rights watchdog role on top of that, without fixing the underlying vulnerability, risks making the job more dangerous without making the monitoring more reliable.

The paper doesn't conclude that observers are impractical for this role; it argues for caution and for treating electronic monitoring as a genuine complement rather than an afterthought, particularly for the kind of transhipment and long-haul longline operations where abuses are most often reported, and observer coverage is thinnest.

If we're serious about protecting the people working on fishing vessels (fishers and observers), the fix isn't just deciding who gets a new job description. It's building a system (cameras, reporting channels, jurisdictional cooperation between flag, port and coastal states, etc.) that doesn't quietly ask an isolated person on the wrong side of a power imbalance to carry the whole weight of it.

Progress in Advancing Decent Work in Marine Fisheries — Part 2: What's Actually Working

In Part 1, I introduced FAO's new Technical Paper No. 751 on decent work in marine fisheries, and mentioned that one of its authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is a friend I've known since 1998, a friendship built on more fisheries conversations than either of us probably wants to count.

Having covered the report's diagnosis of the problem, I want to use this second post to talk about the part I found most useful: what states and regional bodies are actually doing about it, and where I think the report's honesty about the limits of these efforts is its real strength.

Ratification Isn't the Only Path Forward

One of the more encouraging threads running through this report is its documentation of countries that haven't ratified ILO Convention No. 188 but have built equivalent, or in some cases stronger, protections into their own domestic law anyway. The Republic of Korea and Chinese Taipei are both discussed at length; Taiwan can't formally ratify ILO conventions given its political status, but it has built out a comprehensive legal framework covering foreign crew recruitment, labour standards, and social insurance that closely tracks the Convention's requirements. Indonesia is doing something similar, layering sector-specific regulation for fishing vessel crew on top of its general labour law, even while ratification and full implementation remain a work in progress.

I found this genuinely important, because it pushes back against the idea that a convention's ratification count is the only meaningful measure of progress. It isn't. What matters is whether the standards actually reach the fisher on deck; and the report does a good job showing that this can happen through several different legal doors, not just one.

The Coordination Problem — and Some Real Fixes

If there's a villain in this report, it's institutional fragmentation. Fisheries agencies, maritime authorities, and labour ministries in most countries operate in their own silos, with almost no routine data-sharing between them. A labour inspector might have no idea a vessel has a history of safety violations; a fisheries officer working on PSM might have no mandate, or training, to recognise the signs of forced labour even if they're staring right at them. (Albeit right now I’m working with the great crew of the iMCSn to change this last bit… more to come soon)

What I liked here is that the report doesn't just diagnose this; it names country-level fixes that are demonstrably working. Brazil's system of cross-checking crew rosters between its Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Defence during vessel inspections. Thailand's Port-In Port-Out control centres, which coordinate the navy, labour officials, and port authorities to catch trafficking and check crew documentation as vessels move through port. Indonesia's joint inspection protocols between its fisheries and manpower ministries. Namibia's newly launched National Coordination Mechanism, set up specifically to oversee ILO Convention No. 188 compliance across three different ministries at once. FFA’s HMTCs tie up licensing to minimum contract standards aligned with C188…

None of these is a perfect system, but they're proof that the coordination problem is solvable with the right institutional will, and that's a message national agencies genuinely need to hear.

The Regional Fisheries Bodies Are Starting to Move

The section of the report I found most consequential concerns Regional Fisheries Management Organisations; bodies like the WCPFC, ICCAT, and others that manage high seas fish stocks. These bodies have traditionally treated labour conditions as entirely outside their remit, focused purely on stock conservation. That's been changing, slowly and with real resistance from some member states.

The landmark moment the report documents is the WCPFC's adoption, in December 2024, of the first-ever binding conservation and management measure addressing crew labour standards, a measure that took roughly four years of negotiation to land, and won't take effect until 2028. (I wrote about my insider’s take on it here) It requires flag states to meet minimum labour conditions as a precondition for licensing, obliges port states to facilitate disembarkation of crew reporting abuse, and creates information-sharing requirements around crew recruitment providers. Other bodies — ICCAT, NAFO, the North Pacific Fisheries Commission, the South Pacific RFMO — have followed with their own non-binding resolutions built on similar principles.

This resonates strongly with something I've argued in the chapter I wrote for the Oxford University handbook of Human Rights at Sea: that no single instrument or institution is going to solve this problem on its own. What we actually need is a networked approach, international organisations, flag and port states, regional bodies, industry, and fishers themselves all pulling in the same direction, imperfectly but persistently.

The report's account of RFMOs edging into labour governance, often starting with something as narrow as observer safety before broadening into full crew standards, is a textbook example of that kind of incremental, networked progress.

Where This Leaves Us

The report closes without pretending there's a silver bullet. Its recommendations are the ones you'd expect from people who've actually worked this problem for years: ratify and implement Convention No. 188 more widely, strengthen interagency coordination at the national level, keep pushing regional fisheries bodies to treat labour as core business rather than an add-on, and use port state measures more deliberately as a lever for detecting and deterring abuse.

None of that is flashy. But having read Blaise and his co-authors' work here alongside my own thinking on this subject, what stands out to me is the shared conviction that decent work in fisheries isn't going to be delivered by one treaty, one agency, or one campaign. It's going to be built the way most durable maritime governance is built, slowly, through overlapping layers of law, regional cooperation, and enough political will at the national level to actually enforce what's already on the books.

For anyone working in fisheries management, labour inspection, or ocean governance more broadly, this report is worth the read … not because it has all the answers, but because it maps the terrain honestly, and points toward the places where real progress is genuinely being made.

Progress in Advancing Decent Work in Marine Fisheries — Part 1: Why This New FAO Report Matters

I've spent most of my working life around fishing vessels, ports, and the people who make the seafood industry run, and if there's one thing that has stuck with me through decades in this sector, working on aspects from the welfare of sharks and cetaceans to bycatch mitigation, compliance, data, and 1000 more issues, and it's how slowly the world has moved on protecting the fishers themselves.

So when FAO released its new Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper No. 751, Progress in advancing decent work in marine fisheries: challenges in the evolving legal and policy framework, I read it with more than professional interest.

Part of that interest is personal. One of the report's authors, Blaise Kuemlangan, is someone I've known since 1998. That's over a quarter of a century of crossing paths at FAO meetings, technical workshops, and the kind of late-night conversations about fisheries law that only two people who actually care about this stuff would have. Blaise has spent his career quietly building the legal architecture that underpins fisheries governance, and watching his name attached to this report, alongside Ke Song, Julia Nakamura and Daniela Kalikoski, felt like watching a thread I've followed for years finally being pulled together into something comprehensive.

I've written about the human dimension of offshore fishing myself, in a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Manual of Human Rights at Sea. So reading this FAO report felt less like discovering something new and more like seeing an institution catch up, properly and rigorously, with problems that those of us working at sea and in ports have been flagging for years.

Building on a Decade-Old Foundation

This report doesn't appear out of nowhere. It's explicitly a follow-up to FAO's 2016 scoping study on decent work in fisheries and aquaculture, and then the draft Guidance on Social Responsibility in Fisheries and Aquaculture Value Chains I co-wrote with Katrina Nakamura in 2019 and did no progress through the COFI process at the time becuase it was seen as too prescriptive in their language by the USA delegation.

But specifically, it responds to a specific recommendation from the fifth FAO-ILO-IMO Joint Working Group on Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, held in January 2024. That Working Group asked FAO to help develop guidance for national fisheries agencies on implementing ILO and IMO instruments governing fishers — and this report is part of the response.

 In any case, what struck me about this report is the argument: that decent work and the fight against IUU fishing are not the same… yet they can be deeply entangled. Vessels that cut corners on crew safety, wages, and living conditions are very often the same vessels cutting corners on catch reporting and licensing compliance. However, I would be the 1st to recognise that this is not a given in my own experience; I worked in Argentina under some of the best protections known to fishermen while doing very doggy stuff

 In any case, strengthening monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) systems and the tools we already use to fight illegal fishing can simultaneously protect the people on board. That's not a new idea to those of us who've done port inspections, but seeing it stated so clearly in an FAO technical paper matters, because it gives national fisheries agencies a legal and practical hook to act on.

Why Fishers Are Different

The report makes a serious effort to explain why marine fishers can't simply be treated as a subset of seafarers or lumped in with land-based agricultural workers. Anyone who has spent time fishing in the last couple of decades knows this instinctively, but it's worth spelling it out: months at sea, limited communication, no real access to healthcare, and a crew member's near-total dependence on the vessel master's goodwill. Add to that the reality that many fishers are non-nationals recruited through opaque, multi-country arrangements, hired in one country, employed on a vessel flagged to another, working in the waters of a third, and you get a jurisdictional tangle that almost nobody is positioned to untangle in the moment a problem occurs.

The report's authors organise this complexity into a three-dimensional framework I found genuinely useful: the jurisdiction where fishing happens (from internal waters out to the high seas), the legal status of the fisher (national versus non-national), and the scale of the fleet (small-scale, medium-scale, or large-scale industrial). It sounds academic, but it's actually a practical diagnostic tool. It lets you ask, for any given labour problem: whose law applies here, and does that law actually reach this category of worker?

The Convention at the Centre — and Its Limits

Much of the international legal architecture the report describes revolves around ILO Convention No. 188, the Work in Fishing Convention, which sets minimum standards for safety, medical care, rest hours, and wages on board fishing vessels. It's a solid instrument. But as the report is honest enough to admit, ratification remains thin , only 24 states as of writing, and none of the major distant water fishing nations beyond Spain have signed on. That's a gap I've raised in my own writing too, from the theory and as a ILO-trained fisheries labour inspector.

What I appreciated is that the report doesn't just lament this gap; it goes looking for evidence that the underlying standards are spreading anyway, through domestic law, regional agreements, and market pressure, even where formal ratification hasn't happened. That's the subject I'll pick up in Part 2, because the most encouraging parts of this report, for me, aren't about the treaty itself. They're about what states, regional fisheries bodies, and even private industry are doing around it, often without waiting for Geneva to catch up.

For now, the takeaway from the first half of this report is simple but important: decent work in fisheries is not a side issue to sustainable fisheries management; it is part of it. Anyone still treating labour conditions as separate from fisheries management and IUU is, frankly, a decade behind where this field has already moved.

Part 2 continues with a look at how countries and regional fisheries bodies are actually putting these principles into practice — with mixed, but genuinely instructive, results.

What Happens to the Fish That Swim Away

A new study out of New Zealand's snapper fishery has put a number on something recreational fishers rarely think about once a fish disappears back under the boat: how many of those released fish actually survive.

Source: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/gear-summer-snapper-season-return-em-right

The paper, published this month in Fisheries Management and Ecology by Jade Maggs and colleagues from Earth Sciences New Zealand and Blue Water Marine Research (whom I worked with in 2004 on a similar area), tackles the SNA 1 stock (the snapper fishery on the upper east coast of the North Island, and by some measure, the largest recreational fishery in the country).

Private boats alone harvested more than 1.3 million snapper in the 2022–23 season, with another 237,000 taken by charter operators. But harvest is only half the catch. Because of a 30 cm minimum legal size and increasingly restrictive bag limits, well over half of everything hooked in this fishery goes back over the side, 62% in the private sector, 69% on charters.

The question the authors set out to answer is deceptively simple: of all those released fish, how many die?

How they did it

Rather than relying on lab trials alone, the team combined three things. First, they sent interviewers to eleven boat ramps and observers aboard charter vessels for a full year (January 2024–January 2025), recording fork length, capture depth, hook location (lip, foul, or gut), and fate (kept or released) for nearly 24,000 snappers. Second, they used mortality probabilities from an earlier controlled field experiment by Maggs and colleagues, which had already shown that depth of capture and where the hook lodges are the two strongest predictors of whether a released fish lives or dies. Third, they scaled all of this up using national harvest survey data, so the sampled proportions could be converted into fishery-wide tonnes and numbers.

The result: an estimated 1,110 tonnes (2.6 million fish) were released across the SNA 1 fishery over the year. Of those, roughly 248 tonnes (about 580,000 fish) were expected to die from the stress and injury of capture and release, even though they swam away. That is 200 t in the private boat fishery and 48 t in the charter sector, and it lines up almost exactly with the 20% mortality rate found in the earlier experimental work, which is a nice bit of internal consistency for the model.

Put another way: 22% of the biomass of snapper released in this fishery is expected to die anyway. Nearly a quarter of every fish anglers believe they are returning to the water unharmed don't make it.

Most of the mortality risk can be traced back to two things. Deep-hooked and foul-hooked fish die at much higher rates than lip-hooked fish, and fish caught from deeper water, where barotrauma and rapid decompression come into play, fare worse than those taken in the shallows. The good news is that most snapper in this fishery are lip-hooked (around 89–95%, depending on sector), which keeps the overall mortality rate from being far worse.

The less good news is that the current stock assessment's allowance for "other sources of mortality" across all three fishing sectors is only 450 t a year, and recreational post-release deaths alone account for more than half of that, without counting under-reporting, ghost fishing, or illegal take.

Why this matters beyond the numbers

I wrote a piece back in May about the New Zealand Fisheries Amendment Bill debate, and one of the threads I pulled on was the discard and minimum legal size provisions and how the entire argument, on both sides, tends to collapse into slogans like "legalising discards" without engaging with what discarding already looks like in practice or why it happens.

The core point I was making then is that incentives, not intentions, drive outcomes. Under the current rules, undersized fish, commercial or recreational, can be released without consequence, even in situations where we've known since the mid-2000s that survival is often poor.

There's no cost attached to catching a fish you can't legally keep, so there's little built-in incentive to avoid catching it in the first place. The Bill's proposal to require landing and counting undersized fish against quota in low-survival commercial fisheries was, I argued, at least a coherent attempt to fix that incentive gap, even if it opens up other legitimate concerns about markets for small fish.

This new snapper study is exactly the kind of evidence that the debate needed and largely didn't have. It's easy to argue about minimum legal sizes in the abstract. It's harder to argue with 580,000 dead fish a year, quantified with published mortality probabilities and a proper bootstrap-derived confidence interval, sitting inside a species-specific allowance that's clearly too small for the job.

And it cuts both ways politically, which is what makes it useful rather than just another talking point. It's not an argument for scrapping the minimum legal size — the authors are explicit that removing or lowering it wouldn't necessarily reduce the number of releases since around 15% of released snapper were already above the legal size and released voluntarily or to stay within bag limits. But it is a strong argument that regulatory settings built around size limits and release-and-hope have a real, quantifiable biological cost that current management allowances don't reflect.

The paper's authors put it plainly: the current 450 t allowance for "other mortality" across all sectors is very likely insufficient once you actually measure what's happening at sea rather than assume it away.

The encouraging part of the story is that SNA 1 is, right now, a stock in good shape, rebuilt substantially since the 1990s low. Better hook and gear choices; awareness of depth-related mortality; and, as I said in May, clearer, less politically charged rules agreed upon before the pressure arrives, rather than fought over in the middle of a crisis.

Fish that swim away aren't necessarily fish that survive. If we're going to build fisheries policy, recreational or commercial, around the assumption that release equals conservation, we need studies like this one to keep testing whether that assumption actually holds.

The Tahiti dFAD Workshop: From Diagnosis to a First Real Ledger

Back in February, I was in Tahiti for the International Workshop on Mitigation of dFAD Loss and Abandonment in the Pacific, organised by SPC with the Direction des Ressources Marines of French Polynesia, ISSF, The Nature Conservancy and IATTC. I wrote about the experience at the time, first describing it as a waste crisis in the WCPO, and then, once I'd had time to sit with the FAO/IMO framing, arguing that dFADs are effectively ALDFG — abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear — whatever the legal semantics say.

The official workshop report has now been published, and it's worth going back to it, because it puts numbers and structure around what was, at the time, mostly a feeling of watching a slow-motion train crash.

The scale of the meeting itself tells you something: 110 participants from 25 countries and territories, 35 presentations, three group exercises, spread across three themes — building shared definitions, exchanging stranded data, and identifying what a sustainable dFAD fishery would actually look like. This was the second such gathering, following the first international workshop on FAD recovery in Galapagos in 2024, and the difference in maturity between the two is, I think, the real story.

The numbers that frame the problem
Between 46,000 and 65,000 dFADs are deployed annually across the Pacific. More than 70% are never re-observed in the Eastern Pacific. An estimated 23.4% of EPO-deployed dFADs cross or drift into the WCPFC Convention Area. In the WCPO, at least 11.3% end up stranded, and 82% have an unknown ultimate fate.

That last figure is the one that matters most: we are managing a fishery input at an industrial scale while being unable to say, for the overwhelming majority of units, what happened to them. You can't govern what you can't see.

Finally, some shared language

A large part of the workshop went into something deceptively basic: agreeing on what "lost," "abandoned," "discarded", and "stranded" actually mean for a dFAD. Different stakeholder groups (fishers, governments, NGOs, scientists, regional bodies) proposed and voted on definitions, and the spread of answers was itself revealing.

Fishers, for instance, pushed hard on the idea that a dFAD drifting into a zone they're not licensed to fish or an MPA, is not "abandoned" in any meaningful sense, even though it is abandoned in law. That's exactly the tension I flagged in the ALDFG post: intentionality is a legal question, but ecologically irrelevant.

The workshop didn't resolve that tension so much as map it, producing a full lifecycle table that traces a dFAD from deployment through to its three real endpoints — retrieved, stranded, or sunk — with "lost," "abandoned," "discarded" and "reused" as the intermediate, contestable states in between.

The money is starting to move

This is where the report earns its keep. At the first Galapagos workshop in 2024, the funding discussion apparently went nowhere, and no concrete model emerged.

In Tahiti, that changed. Danielle Ferraro and Erin O'Reilly from UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Markets Lab presented an actual deposit-refund model: a deposit paid by the fishing company on deployment, a refund paid to whoever retrieves the dFAD, regardless of whether that's the original owner.

SPC's own feasibility study laid out five mitigation options side by side, deposit-refund among them, alongside dedicated cleaning vessels, better deployment siting, and shore-based "FAD watch" retrieval. None of these is mutually exclusive, which is a useful correction to my own instinct to look for one silver-bullet mechanism.

Interestingly, my friend Craig Heberer and I submitted a proposal a month ago to a PNA consultancy opportunity to help with initiating a FAD Buoy Recovery Programme. Let's see how it goes.

More concretely still, a sustainable funding initiative to recover dFADs before they strand was presented by an industry-backed body — the Ocean dFAD Recovery Foundation, drawing on several purse-seine associations (ATA, ATUNEC, OPAGAC) — and was positively received by a significant segment of the EPO fleet, with some WCPO uptake. And the three dominant buoy manufacturers, Marine Instruments, Zunibal and Satlink, the same trio whose competitive pricing I've argued turned dFADs into disposable, buy-forget-abandon commodities, signed a first-of-its-kind joint declaration of intent to align on recovery and circularity practices. Whether that translates into anything more than a press-friendly commitment remains to be seen, but it's a different starting position than a year ago.

What's actually happening on the water

The report is refreshingly concrete about existing programmes: SPC's regional stranding database now holds over 4,000 entries (with records going back to 2006); the Solomon Islands programme has logged more than 600 strandings across four dedicated trips; Tuvalu pays fishers for buoys brought in; Hawaii runs a bounty system for derelict gear, including FADs; French Polynesia has collected over 1,500 stranding reports through community networks. A 250kg-capacity portable crane developed by AZTI was floated as a practical fix for the very unglamorous problem of small vessels being unable to physically lift a stranded dFAD off a reef.

Workshop groups also produced a list of 51 candidate performance indicators for recovery programmes — cost per retrieval, weight of material recovered, response time, proportion of fleet participating, and so on… and four draft project proposals, including a genuinely interesting one to test whether sunk dFADs actually biodegrade at 200–6,000m depth, versus simply assuming they do.

Where this leaves things

None of this closes the legal gaps Justin Rose's review for SPC surfaced — when a dFAD counts as "fishing," who owns it once it drifts, whether MARPOL, Basel, BBNJ or UNCLOS actually bite on an artificial structure adrift in someone else's EEZ. MSC's revised standards, phasing in from 2027 for new fisheries and 2030 for recertification, will force some of this into certification audits regardless of how the legal questions get resolved.

But the shift in tone between the two workshops is real: from a room agreeing there's a problem, to a room with an actual bond mechanism on the table, an industry foundation with money behind it, and buoy manufacturers signing their names to something. It's still, as I said in February, a bill that the Pacific's coastal communities have been paying on our behalf. This report is the first sign that the industry is starting to reach for its wallet.

Why the "Pacific model" of fisheries cooperation keeps working

A while back, I wrote here about being part of the CAPFISH summer academy in Suva, and before that, about the very first CAPFISH workshop back in 2022. One of the nice things about staying involved in something over a few years is that occasionally it turns into a paper, just published in the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, that I was invited to co-author: "Regional patterns in coordination and cooperation in the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing", led by Kathleen Auld and Francis Neat at the World Maritime University.

Using Starboard.nz as part of the arsenal

The idea is simple. IUU fishing is too big and too expensive for most developing coastal states and Small Island Developing States (or Big Ocean Sovereignty States - BOSS as my friend Bubba Cook likes it better) to tackle on their own. Regional cooperation is about pooling assets, running joint patrols, sharing data, and establishing common rules.

So the paper examines four regions facing very different situations — West Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands — and asks what has actually worked and what hasn't.

My contribution was the Pacific case study, and I want to use this post to explain why, out of the four, the Pacific comes out looking like the most successful example. Not because Pacific people are cleverer than anyone else, but because of how they chose to organise.

Large ocean states, not small islands

The first thing to get right is the framing. The Pacific Island Countries are usually filed under "SIDS", but that label misses the point. In reality, they are large ocean nations, custodians of an enormous combined EEZ, and home to one of the biggest tuna fisheries on the planet.

Fisheries are not a side issue there; in many of these countries, the majority of government revenue comes from fishing, and communities depend on it for jobs, food and livelihoods. That vastness is exactly the problem; no single country can police that much water by itself, and it is also exactly why cooperation was never optional. Necessity did the organising.

A regionally agreed policy that becomes national law

Most of what makes the Pacific work runs through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA). The centrepiece is the Harmonised Minimum Terms and Conditions for Foreign Fishing Vessel Access (the MTCs), first developed in 1983 and updated ever since. This is the clever bit that I think other regions can learn from. The MTCs are, legally speaking, just a regionally agreed policy — soft law. But they are made hard by being written into each member's national legislation, so that every distant-water vessel wanting to fish in the region has to meet the same baseline, no matter whose waters it is in.

On top of that framework, the region has bolted on the tools that actually catch things. Observers, government-nominated people placed on board, who started out collecting scientific data and now also handle compliance; purse seiners in Pacific waters carry one at all times. A satellite-based VMS since 1999, one of the first in the world, tied to the FFA regional register so that every licensed vessel reports its position port to port, not just inside the EEZ. Standardised electronic reporting of catch and vessel movements. A ban on transhipment at sea in coastal waters has been in place since 2005. And, since 2020, minimum labour standards based on the ILO Work in Fishing Convention (C188) have been built straight into the licensing conditions; don't comply with your crew's minimum rights, and you lose your good standing on the register and your fishing rights.

Sharing the picture and sharing the assets

Behind all of this sits what I think is the real jewel: the regional surveillance picture, hosted at the Regional Fisheries Surveillance Centre in FFA HQ. It pulls together, in real time, the positions of vessels reporting to FFA, the WCPFC, and AIS, layered over vessel registers, licence lists, observer reports, and boarding records. From that, you can build a compliance index for each vessel and steer patrol boats towards the ones worth inspecting.

The legal backbone for all this data sharing is the Niue Treaty of 1992. And crucially, countries share not just information but hardware; twelve PICs run a handful of patrol boats between them and top up with aerial surveillance from the Quadrilateral Defence group (Australia, New Zealand, France and the USA). Enforcement stays a national responsibility, always, but nobody is doing it alone.

The clearest sign it works is the quantification of IUU in the tuna fishery. The estimates are low, and they fell between the 2016 and 2020 surveys. The dominant threat was never dramatic pirate fishing; it was unreported catch by licensed vessels, and better coordination and monitoring brought it down. There is also a nice detail I keep pointing to: the MTCs fold in port-state measures aligned with the PSMA, even though very few PICs have actually signed the PSMA. You get the substance of a convention without waiting for everyone to ratify it, and you can tailor it to local realities.

Honest about the gaps

I don't want this to read like a victory lap, because it isn't one. Longline observer coverage sits at a 7.5% target and often falls short because the trips are long and conditions on board are grim. Observers on foreign fleets face threats and abuse, and some have gone missing at sea. Any programme that puts people in that position owes them protection. The transhipment ban applies to purse seiners, but longliners can simply shift to the high seas. And the honest conclusion of the whole paper is one worth repeating: regional cooperation cannot compensate for a lack of resources. It multiplies what you have; it doesn't create it from nothing. External partners and, above all, a strong regional body remain essential.

That, to me, is the "Pacific model" in one line: a credible regional body, minimum standards everyone writes into their own law, shared data and shared assets, and the humility to know where the holes still are. It is not magic, and it is not free, but it travels well, and I think West Africa, Latin America, and East Asia can each take a piece of it home.

The full paper is open access in the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs. As always, the views here are my personal ones.