World Wildlife Fund

Bill Fox

Posted 26 June 2008, 5.05 PM

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Bill Fox and I am the Vice President and Managing Director of the WWF Fisheries Program. There are many fisheries-related topics I would be happy to blog about, but I would really like to use this opportunity to talk about tuna.

I am currently attending the 78th Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) meeting in Panama, along with more than 250 delegates from 20 countries. My role here is to urge the 16 member countries and five cooperating countries and regions of the IATTC to adopt concrete conservation measures to protect yellowfin and bigeye tunas. Both species are being over-fished in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. In addition, the fishing capacity (i.e. the numbers and sizes of fishing boats) of the combined fishing fleets is too large creating a strong economic force that promotes further over-fishing.

The meeting has been going on for four days without coming to agreement on any conservation measures, a problem that has plagued the IATTC for over a year. Under consideration are combinations of closed seasons, closed areas and catch limits.

As the meeting comes to a close I will be blogging about the outcome and what this means for tuna conservation in the eastern Pacific - I am really looking forward to sharing this with you all, and if you have any comments or questions I'd be happy to answer them.

Thanks - Bill.

Posted 27 June 2008, 11.49 AM

Bill's update from the IATTC meeting:
It's Friday morning, the last day of this five day meeting and unfortunately the only agreement so far is that the members and countries of IATTC will meet again in October of this year. Sadly the conservation measures to protect the yellowfin and bigeye tuna are still far from complete.

But there is still time for some resolutions from this event in Panama, as the seabird protection resolution, a shark-fining resolution and other important matters, like Cofor 2009, are still being debated. I will have an update after the meeting comes to a close on the final outcome and next steps.

Posted 28 June 2008, 6.29 PM

Bill's update from the IATTC meeting:
The 78th IATTC meeting adjourned at 1am on Saturday morning, some six hours later than scheduled, as it struggled but failed to find consensus on conservation measures for the waning 2008 and coming 2009 tuna fishing seasons in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The failure to reach consensus is highly problematic since both yellowfin and bigeye tunas are already overfished and now there will be no conservation measures in place for all of 2008 following poor yellowfin tuna fishing in 2006 and 2007.

The next IATTC meeting is scheduled for late October or early November of 2008. IATTC made an unusually valiant attempt to reach agreement but the conservation measures under final discussion were, at best, less than 60 percent as effective as those recommended by the IATTC's own scientific staff following an independent scientific peer review. While only a few delegations openly supported the scientific recommendations, the real spoiler was a new member of IATTC. The new member persisted in proposing ad hoc roadblocks to consensus while proposing non-negotiable schemes that would basically exempt it's fishing fleet from the conservation measures. It was one of those schemes plus disagreement over the time period for a large area closure west of the Galapagos Islands to protect juvenile bigeye tuna that finally doomed consensus early Saturday morning.

Now for the good news, one highlight of the meeting is that for the first time the IATTC members agreed to allow one of the conservation group observers to participate in closed sessions. This is a huge step forward in transparency that assisted in consensus building and will bear fruit over time.

I have attended IATTC meetings since 1972 in one capacity or another. Despite advances in international agreements during intervening years, such as the UN Agreement on Highly Migratory and Straddling Stocks, the IATTC and most Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMO) have become increasingly dysfunctional due to some fundamental flaws but largely to the increasing diversity of economic interests of sovereign member countries that makes virtually impossible the forging broadly applicable and sufficient conservation measures that are perceived as equitable.

The fundamental flaws are: (1) requiring consensus in decision-making and (2) allowing fishing when no system of conservation measures are agreed to. Both flaws are relicts of international policy that date back over half a century. A reform of RFMOs like IATTC is clearly essential. Modern approaches to fishery management that have been successful at the national level are needed at the international level. These approaches better align economic interests with conservation and allow for business-like collaboration to obtain a greater sustained economic return that may be equitably shared. The World Wildlife Fund is working in over 100 countries on a global basis to help make this reformlity.

Signing off from Panama, thanks - Bill