Thursday, January 19, 2012

PNA - free School Skipjack Fishery certified!

Totally unsustainable - purse seining around FADs.

Bravo PNA - again!
The Parties to the Nauru Agreement are the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, and this confederation of Tuna fishing countries have long been trailblazers in trying to manage their fishery sustainably.
The MSC certification is a well deserved recognition of those efforts - and what is even more important, it looks like the market loves it!

Free school means FAD-free.
As last posted here, FADs and the so-called Dolphin safe Tuna fishery are an ecological catastrophe and this fishery is finally completely doing away with it - incidentally, very much in spite of the strong objections of ISSF and others that I would generally file under the usual shenanigans, as recently confirmed by the arbitrator.
Coupled with their advocacy against abusing Whale Sharks as FADs, the PNA are truly showing the way forward to many other much bigger and one would think, much more progressive and enlightened countries - much like the small Pacific countries that have enacted the Shark Sanctuaries.
Kudos!

And what about the certification of Fiji's Albacore fishery?
We shall see. I read

Principle 2: Measures are in place to limit bycatch (living creatures caught unintentionally, including other fish species and marine animals such as turtles and dolphins). This could mean changing how fish trimmings are discarded so that seabirds are not drawn towards hazardous fishing gear.

Sharks are certainly other fish species.
As I said, we shall see.

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