Q: A large part of your research over the past decade has been on the sustainable development of tuna resources in the Pacific Islands region within the context of changing governance systems and globalization. In your opinion, is the region as a whole making significant progress in addressing three important factors which are impacted by globalization: (i) illegal fishing by distant-water fleets; (ii) equitable access to developed markets for tuna; and (iii) the predicted migration of tuna stocks due to climate change?

A: Due to the large exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Pacific island countries relative to government revenues, conventional coast-guard style monitoring and enforcement for illegal fishing is too expensive to do effectively, and Pacific island countries have long used regional cooperation with larger countries like the US and Australia to boost their “eyes-on-the-water” capacity. Capacity is also enhanced by electronic monitoring, which has been in place for a couple of decades now. Implementation of video monitoring on vessels could help detect illegal activity in terms of fishing and also labour rights and observer safety.

I am interested to see the changing consequences for “illegal fishing”. Market power is now being used to prevent access to high-value markets such as the EU, US and Japan of catches deemed illegal. I would like to see an expansion of the definition of “illegal” fishing to include not only breaching of fish stock conservation rules but also labour and human rights laws. If vessels found to breach human rights or labour laws are removed from lists of good standing or if their catch is refused entry to the large market states, that could have significant impact on the problems with continuing human rights and labour abuses in some tuna fishing companies.

Large-scale operators in the Pacific have had fairly equitable market access over the decades. Some, such as Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Fiji have had trade preferences, meaning good access to EU markets. On the other hand, distant-water countries subsidizing their fleets have had inequitable advantages over Pacific producers. Foreign investment arguably remains necessary for the large-scale operations because of the “deep pockets” needed for investors in industrial fishing and processing, and waiting out bad years in volatile tuna markets. Pacific Islands economies generally don’t have local companies with the required capital capacity, or the global trade connections. Foreign companies investing in tuna fishing and processing in the Pacific vary in local development outcomes. Some companies, such as Soltuna processing company and NFD fishing company in Solomon Islands, have since the late 1990s employed mainly locals on their fleet and onshore, including in skilled and managerial roles, contributing to local human resources development. But some other companies around the Pacific only use local employees for low paid manual labour. This is not equitable.

Scientists, including Johann Bell and colleagues, have shown that there will likely be a reduction in the amount of tuna available for fisheries in the EEZs of Pacific island countries.1 I am concerned about the effects of shifts in stock availability for fleets on governance and the flow of benefits from these fisheries. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) group has been able to implement management measures on purse-seine fleets and extract high revenues because a high proportion of catches have been within their collective EEZs. Conversely, in the Pacific, the longline fleet has operated mainly in the high seas and coastal countries have been much less able to control the longline fleet. Several Pacific Islands countries, for example, Kiribati, rely heavily on tuna access fees for their government revenue. What will happen to the balance of power between coastal States and fishing States, and the flow of benefits, if the purse-seine fishery is less focussed in Pacific Island country waters?

Q: Regional cooperation between the respective Pacific Island nations has been instrumental in the sustainable management of shared tuna resources while bringing in revenue for the region, the Vessel Day Scheme being an example. But has this regional success come at the expense of developing strong domestic zone-based tuna industries for each island nation, especially for those which may be economically vulnerable and neither lacking the governance capacity to protect their own coastal stocks nor having a strong community-based fisheries management system in place?

A: For Pacific Island countries I don’t think regional efforts come at the expense of stronger domestic or community-based fisheries management. All of these countries have small populations; the largest, Papua New Guinea, has around 10 million people, most countries are much smaller than this, and many also have a significant proportion of their economies as non-cash (subsistence), so their cash economies are small. From small revenue bases it is not possible to put public resources into developing the kinds of strong national or community-based fisheries management that we might see in larger economies. Regional collaboration is a more feasible way to develop resource management for small island countries. The Pacific Community (SPC), a regional organization, supports community-based, national and regional fisheries management.

Q: You recently collaborated with other authors in publishing a paper2 which stated the obvious importance of promoting sustainability and preserving stocks, but that we also should not forget the people and communities who depend on fisheries for their food security and livelihoods. The main thrust of the paper was that social Harvest Control Rules (sHCRs) can complement the use of biological Harvest Control Rules (bHCRs) in the determination of socially-beneficial harvest strategies for fisheries. What might a typical sHCR look like and what are the preconditions for its incorporation into a management strategy?

A: A typical sHCR would be the ‘doughnut’ type, following Kate Raworth’s circular representation of a ‘safe and just operating space for humanity’3, with the harvest strategy sitting between equitably meeting human needs (the inner circle) and the predicted biological limits of fish stocks (the outer circle). This form of sHCR is about allocation of the catch between different fleets or different social groups. Currently allocation decisions are usually made downstream of the decision about how much catch to allow, which is based on biological or bioeconomic considerations. Making allocation part of the catch decision as an sHCR means that social objectives are made explicit, there are data-based indicators for those objectives, and the rules about what happens when those indicators reach reference points are made ahead of time. Currently, social and economic objectives are usually implicit; they are not determined through a high-quality public policy process, and the achievement of social and economic objectives is assumed rather than evaluated with evidence. Decisions to change allocations are generally made ad hoc, rather than on an evidence-based assessment of the social and economic performance of previous decisions.

There are already fisheries that specify allocation of the catch, such as the ‘Trawl Ladder’ in the Northeast Arctic Atlantic cod fishery, which since the 1990s has allocated catch between smaller coastal vessels and larger trawler fleets, with coastal vessels treated preferentially when catches were reduced. Another example is in Australia where fisheries resources are split between commercial, recreational and (indigenous) cultural fishing.

However, existing examples do not meet the preconditions of a sHCR. One main precondition for incorporating an sHCR into a harvest strategy is a participatory, deliberative public policy process to determine social and economic objectives for particular fisheries, that is accepted as legitimate by stakeholders. Social and economic objectives could be about contributions to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, profitability, preserving cultural heritage, food sovereignty, and so on. Broadly participatory and deliberative processes are needed to arrive at objectives that are accepted by stakeholders as right for that fishery. Another precondition is to establish social and economic monitoring of fisheries performance, to build time series data for indicators to measure progress against those objectives. Ongoing monitoring and evaluations of the social and economic performance of fisheries against those objectives is what would be used to set social and economic reference points and as the basis for decisions about allocation – similar to the way biological monitoring is used for HCRs.

Q: Linking to the previous question, and with regard to communities which depend on a fishery like tuna for their food security and livelihoods, could you suggest ways in which the socio-economic value and benefits of such a fishery can be assessed? How might this knowledge be useful in further developing the communities as well as the fishery itself?

A: A key way of assessing the social and economic benefits is through looking at the associated livelihoods, including formal and informal employment and businesses. How many people have livelihoods in fisheries value chains? Beyond the numbers of people, it is important to know the quality of the work. Are working conditions safe and is the work reasonably secure? Are people earning a living income? Are the livelihoods benefits and opportunities equitable, by gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, disability and so on? If we had good ongoing monitoring of the livelihoods generated in fishery value chains, we would understand so much more about who gets what kinds of benefits from fisheries. Interventions for community development from fisheries could be much more targeted. We would be able to see clearly which people need assistance, how extensive that assistance should be, measure the impacts of that assistance and adjust assistance accordingly.

Q: Moving on to gender, an article that you wrote for the January/February 2023 issue of the INFOFISH International titled “Women fish too: Invisible women in tuna industries”4 carried the key message that although women make up about 11 percent of participants in small-scale fishing activities globally, their role in the sector is rarely valued as highly as that of men. To remove the cloak of invisibility around women, in the article you called for progress on gender issues that would need action in three areas: industrialscale operations; national policies; and monitoring, evaluation and research to better understand gender equality in the tuna industry. Could you provide examples of what such actions might be at national and sub-regional/ regional levels in the Asia-Pacific?

Q: Calls to mainstream gender and human rights-based approaches into fisheries management policies have only grown through the years, and yet, at least in the Asia-Pacific, real progress on the ground has been lacking. The problem seems to be not so much the drawing up of policies, but rather, that they have been slow to translate into action. What are your thoughts on why this is so, and what can representatives of fishery groups in these countries do to move this agenda forward?

A: Co-authors and I considered this question extensively while working on the Pacific Handbook on Human Rights, Gender Equity and Social Inclusion in Tuna Industries.5 We concluded that one of the main reasons is that gender and human rights-based approaches go beyond the expertise and jurisdiction of fisheries management agencies, so multi-stakeholder collaboration is needed. To come up with effective interventions, collaboration is needed between fisheries agencies, gender affairs agencies, labour agencies, social services providers, immigration agencies, embassies and consulates, trade unions, ports authorities, and so on, at scales from local to national and international. Representatives of fishery groups can push for the establishment of local and national multi-stakeholder forums to collaborate on designing and implementing actions.

Q: And on a final note, this year (2024), being the 10th year of the existence of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines), is an opportune moment in history to renew global commitment to its ideals. We started this interview with a question on the current state of global fisheries; in this last question, we would be interested to know your thoughts on how globalization processes such as migration; demographics; competition with the industrial fishing sector; access to new markets and technologies; and rapid urbanization will continue to shape tuna small-scale fishing livelihoods and communities in the Asia-Pacific?

A: It will be different in different parts of the Asia-Pacific region. The growing middle-income countries of southeast Asia are different from the established industrial economies of northeast Asia, and the small island Pacific countries are different again. For countries developing industrial and service economies, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, small-scale fishers’ access to land and resources is being squeezed by urbanization, proliferation of ports, militarization of fishing grounds, and the development of coastal areas for tourism. For established industrial economies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, urbanization and industrialization pressures peaked some time ago; now the continued existence of small-scale fisheries is more dependent on policy directions.

Neo-liberal fisheries policies in favour of individual transferable quotas and incentivizing profit over employment tends to work in favour of largeover small-scale fishing units. Schemes of government support for smallscale fisheries as part of rural development in northeast Asian countries have not halted the decline. In the Pacific Islands, where population pressure and competition for coastal land is less; where customary tenure for small-scale fishers is more entrenched; and where tuna stocks have been better protected from overfishing, access to resources is less of an issue than in Asia. However, there are fewer market opportunities within these smaller economies; production costs are relatively high; there is less government support; and remoteness from major trade routes means that freight for inputs and exports is expensive.

Potentially, blockchain and platform technologies could break the hold a few tuna supply chain/trading companies have on canned tuna and sashimi tuna markets globally, but it is not clear how beneficial that would be for small-scale fishers. In southeast Asia and the Pacific, small-scale tuna fisheries are generally informal. If fishers are going to export directly rather than via trading companies, there are new tasks they would need to undertake, such as communication with buyers, likely not in the fisher’s first language and requiring a good internet connection and time online every day; as well as the operational and reporting requirements for food safety and quality; and significant work on freight arrangements and documentation.

In many Asian countries, traders have done this work for fishers, which has been a “double-edged sword” in that it enabled small-scale fishers to access high-value markets, but it has left fishers quite dependent on the traders. In the Pacific, trading companies have mostly not sourced from small-scale tuna fishers, so small-scale fishers have not had access to lucrative export markets. If platform-based technology does become widespread for sourcing tuna, it may be that more small-scale fishers can take advantage of global markets, but it might also mean a proliferation of smaller trading companies. Small-scale fishers who cannot handle the paperwork and communication associated with more direct sales, and these are generally the most disadvantaged fishers, will remain reliant on traders.