SPC/Fisheries 27/Working Paper 99
12 October 1998
ORIGINAL: ENGLISH
SECRETARIAT OF THE PACIFIC COMMUNITY
SECOND PACIFIC COMMUNITY FISHERIES MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP
AND
TWENTY-SIX-AND-A-HALFTH REGIONAL TECHNICAL MEETING ON FISHERIES
(Nouméa, New Caledonia, 12-17 October 1998)
FISHERIES INITIATIVES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
(Paper prepared by highly paid consultants)
INTRODUCTION
The South Pacific Commission, or as it is latterly known, the
"Secretariat of the Pacific Community", has always prided itself on being
responsive to the expressed needs of the region. As a result the Secretariat avoids
hidebound bureaucratic linear thinking, and the staff frequently remove themselves from
the distractions of the workplace to "brainstorm" in a total quality management
approach to the problems of the region. The following initiatives have emerged from this
continuous process of self-examination and constant internal criticism, and will be built
into future project proposals as the vehicle for driving SPC vibrantly into the next
millennium.
Oceanic Fisheries Year 2000 Initiative: The Pacific Community Bank
of Marine Resources
Increasingly, in recent years, the words "Fisheries
Management" and "Conservation" have become closely linked even though they
are concepts originally aiming towards different goals. Indeed, several international
legal instruments now include both concepts, such as the draft title of the proposed
"Commission for the conservation and management of highly migratory fish stocks in
the western and central Pacific Ocean". The precautionary principle, which recommends
"target reference points" to set fisheries management goals and "limit
reference points" to define when conservation should kick in, goes a long way towards
reconciling this apparent disparity, and towards harmonising activities, but fisheries
managers and biodiversity managers still seem determined to muddy the waters.
Half a decade ago, it was common for fisheries people to claim
conservation goals for their management plans, particularly if they wanted to see their
work actually funded, but more recently conservationists have started claiming fisheries
production improvements as a target ever since it became apparent that conservation is a
difficult goal for community resource custodians to achieve without a motivation somewhat
stronger than the "maintenance of global biodiversity". It is now common to hear
managers at both ends of the marine life "extraction-preservation spectrum"
claiming that their plans include achieving the goals of the other. Fisheries managers
point out that if fisheries are sustainably managed then species preservation is
automatic. Biodiversity managers point out that marine conservation, both of species and
of their environment, can only be achieved if they can control how species are exploited.
So is there a need for two different sets of managers? Most
biodiversity managers do not trust fisheries managers to achieve anything useful, and
fisheries managers see conservation as irrelevant provided they are given the resources to
manage fisheries and associated ecosystems properly. Perhaps one lot could be eliminated,
or the two merged? Perhaps that time will come, but at the moment the aims of the two sets
of managers, whilst strongly correlated, are different. Although this is neatly
encapsulated by the precautionary approach, and elaborated in the FAO code of conduct for
responsible fisheries (which provides a definite and separate aim for both marine
conservation and fisheries management) a different analogy may be appropriate. To put it
in banking terms, biodiversity managers are trying to conserve the capital that nature has
invested in the ecosystem whilst fisheries managers are trying to maximise the interest or
profit from that capital. Most of the current tension arises from what the capital
managers see as asset stripping.
Although it would be logically preferable to describe economics in
ecological and geological terms, in order to provide linkage to the ultimate basis of all
economic activity, it is useful to occasionally to view natural resources in financial
terms. It causes considerable complaint from those who feel that nature is invaluable, but
it is the only language that many national and multinational decision-makers understand.
Our vision for the 21st century is a "Pacific Community
Bank of Marine Resources". This would be a virtual bank, to which each Pacific
Community member would make a "virtual deposit" of the fish and other marine
resources within its EEZ, and which would earn "virtual interest" on this
capital, financed by the interest (licence fees) paid by fishers on taking loans
(entitlements to catch fish, or quotas). There would be a preferred resource equity level
for each country in accordance with the reserve stock biomass that the bank estimated to
be necessary generate the maximum biological surplus under current environmental
conditions, and the amount of interest earned would depend on the level to which the
quotas issued exceeded or underexploited the maximum assessed productivity. Countries
would be able to authorise loans (extra quota) against their assets in the bank, under a
sliding scale of penalties, but the capital would be essentially locked in for the
investment scheme period. For highly migratory species, or species reliant on distal
sources of recruitment, countries would be able to authorise loans against the total
assets of the bank across the whole region, and not just against their own deposits.
Fishers who wished to use a large proportion of the available capital for a particular
species could only do so at very high rates of interest, or by cancelling another loan
against another fishery. For example a company might finance an extension of its southern
bluefin quota either by paying a large amount of money into the bank or by giving up the
rights to catch yellowfin of an equivalent stock replenishment value (a complex formula
taking account of the remaining proportion of the virgin biomass, natural mortality, and
the current stage of environmental cycles).
This process would have to be fully compliant with HACCP* principles,
and would require the formation of another regional organisation. It is suggested that
during the interim setting-up period the Forum Fisheries Committee would function as the
Board of Directors of the Pacific Community Bank of Marine Resources, whilst the SPC
Oceanic Fisheries Programme would do the accounting paperwork, count the assets, and
recommend interest rates. The Forum Fisheries Agency would handle all aspects of the
customer interface and pursue debtors.
The main advantage of this scheme, of course, is that the whole
fisheries management and conservation process would become immediately understandable and
accessible to national planners, who could then balance the real long-term value of good
management against short-term economic needs. National fisheries departments would be
immediately subsumed by Ministries of Finance (where they are not already part of the
Department of Commerce), and fisheries specialists replaced by economic advisers at much
higher rates of pay.
* HACCP = Horribly Ambitious Complex Counter-productive Process
Coastal Fisheries Year 2000 initiative: The Unloved Species
Programme
The irony of continuing spend many millions of dollars on assessing and
maintaining the biological health of one of the most resilient marine species in the
Pacific region, skipjack (the "cockroach of the sea") or investing hundreds of
thousands of dollars campaigning against the fishing of turtles when the main threat to
their survival is adverse human impact on nesting beaches, is not lost on anyone who takes
a detached overview. The region continues to ignore the species that underpin ecosystems
in favour of those that are lucrative, scary, beautiful or pathetic.
Even polyps are getting good press nowadays, but concern is seldom
voiced, for example, over the virtual disappearance of Acanthaster planci, the
crown of thorns starfish, from the Pacific Islands over the last two decades. Crown of
thorns starfish are predators and an essential part of the marine lagoonal ecosystem, and
have been appreciated as such by Pacific islanders for centuries, but outside influences
have led to an erosion of traditional management wisdom and they are now subject to
human-induced mortality across almost their entire range. A recent survey within a Cook
Islands lagoon found only 3 A. planci in 3 days of underwater invertebrate
enumeration: - a density which would put this on most critically endangered species lists.
Although the trade has not yet significantly affected the Pacific
Islands, there is a huge demand in Asia for dried Crown of Thorns starfish, and they are
much sought-after for traditional Chinese medicines. Statistics are difficult to come by,
but the main method of capture in the Pacific region seems to be by cyanide fishing.
Poorly trained local divers are required to carry syringes filled with sodium cyanide and
inject this into the creatures. This poison remains within the ecosystem for some time,
redistributed by scavengers and detritivores, and SPC surveys of perceptions of reef
management show that some sections of the community are definitely worried by this.
Another unloved and unlovely group of species is the sea cucumbers or
holothurians. Managing fisheries for the few commercially-important species is important
to many Pacific Island governments, but despite this almost no research has yet been done
on them. Their value to the ecosystem is indisputable. Most of them are detritivores and
bioturbators, turning over the material that settles to the lagoon floor (including
radionucleotides in those places fortunate to have them), and digesting and oxygenating
and generally making them available to the rest of the food-chain. Yet the "Adopt a
Holothurian" campaign, the Pacific regional contribution to the 1994 International
Year of the Sandy Bottom, failed to be noticed even in the Pacific.
The Secretariat of the Pacific Community, working in collaboration with
other regional organisations and NGOs, is proposing a new initiative in the form of a
Regional Strategy for the Conservation of Minor Marine Species. A key part of this
strategy will be a campaign to raise awareness amongst taxonomists and other biodiversity
specialists that marine bacteria, fungi, and worms, whilst small in size, are just as
important to the ecosystem as the larger organisms that they currently patronise.
Another key concept would be the identification of key individuals, or
"sparkplugs" – local leaders and visionaries who are capable of motivating
communities, governments and nations to act to implement this strategy in the form of
local conservation areas. These motivating individuals would be given large amounts of
money in order to convince them of the wisdom of this new approach, and would initially be
tasked with identifying non-supportive individuals, or "dipsticks", who might
jeopardise the eventual success of the scheme. Empirical trials in other regions have
suggested that the best strategy for dealing with these individuals is to ignore their
views, unless they appear in peer-reviewed journals published more than three years after
their ideas were first put forward. It has also been demonstrated that the safest strategy
is to assume that everybody is a dipstick unless proven otherwise.
One practical advantage of this new focus is that marine conservation
areas for some of the smaller threatened organisms can themselves be small in scale. SPC
has already obtained funding to establish a trial conservation area for the
recently-described marine chytridiomycete fungus Pseudoblastocladiellopsis lewisii
inside an otherwise under-utilised beer-bottle located on the beachfront near the SPC
headquarters, and plans are already well advanced for the establishment of this as an
ecotourism destination, with a permanent local guide and explanatory brochures.
Conclusion
The meeting is invited to discuss these new initiatives, designed to focus the
attention of the SPC Marine Resources Division on the main new problems brought by the new
millennium, and to:
- Endorse the concept of the Pacific Community Bank of Marine Resources and support
approaches by SPC and its collaborators to all stakeholders in the fishery with a view to
developing ways of implementing the concept as rapidly as possible;
- Endorse the Regional Strategy for the Conservation of Minor Marine Species
as a potentially multi-agency collaborative initiative, and approve SPC’s role
as the "sparkplug" of this Strategy.