One thing that merges clearly from the WCPFC meeting we just finished is the profound mess in almost every aspect that is the High Seas longline industry here in the region.
I’m not saying this as Longline “hater”; it is all the opposite… While all fishing gear have advantages and disadvantages (like everything else in life!) I have had a special thing for longline…. While in most gears, physics and oceanography (they are closely related), the longline has a lot of chemistry… is perhaps the most skilful and “scientific” of fishing gear I fished with. You need to understand and play with depth, currents, thermocline, primary productivity/temperature, target species chemoreceptors, length and spacing of branch lines, catch manipulation and quality, freezing physics and many more elements…
it shouldt be so unsusal to see one of these coing to ports in the region
I explored the chemistry side in my thesis on the development of a selective bait for the Longlining Fishery of Snapper (Pagrus auratus) and maintained an interest in it over the years, as you can read here, here, and all over here, to mention a few…, yet always from the perspective of understanding how a longliner catches a group of fishes but never thought on how longlines fish as a group until I was asked to collaborate on a paper on their fleet dynamics.
This is the link for a big picture of the longline sector in the WCPO and their market dynamics (albeit a bit dated - 2017).
And while I am fine with the domestic and EEZ-based operations, the High Seas fleet is a total mess. Their problems come up in one way or another in almost EVERY session I participated while at the WCPFC plenary.
The very limited MCS coverage of the High Seas in particular, and the (here I go again) abuse of the impracticability exemption has many consequences, below are some of them, starting with the one that is at the root of many other problems: the abuse of the impracticability exemption Transhipments in the High Seas.
The abuse of the impracticability exemption Transhipments in the High Seas.
Reported high-seas transhipment events in the WCPO have more than doubled from 2011 to 2019. In 2021, 62% of vessels listed on the Record of Fishing Vessels were authorised to transship in the high seas, 85% of which are longliners.
I have been over this a lot over the years, and I explain it here, and is illustrated here, fixing this will cascade on a series of benefits all related to the topics below:
Sustainability of Sharks and billfish and general bycatch
The tropical tuna stocks in the WCPFC are healthy, which is good news from the Pacific Community-SPC.
Sharks and billfish are a different story. As you can see in the table below… The limited knowledge of these stocks and their poor status are the direct result of the failure of the DWFN to monitor and manage the high seas longline fisheries properly. The graphs below from the latest status of the stocks are self-explanatory.
As per Seabirds… increasing observer coverage and EM would be a great start, but further bringing them to port would allow to apply PSM to the requirements of CMM 2018-03 on tori lines and weighed branch lines, also we have the capacity now to see if they were setting at night. The situation of some seabirds like the Southern Royal Albatross (Toroa) is threatened with most of the mortality coming from HS longliners., so we are reviewing the CMM since is not really working.
Misreporting
In 2016 and 2021, we proved with the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) IUU Quantification studies that misreporting, particularly in the LL fishery, is our biggest issue in the region. I quote: “MCS arrangements in place for the longline sector are weaker with lower observer coverage, a far higher proportion of effort on the high seas, and a higher proportion of the catch transhipped at sea which limits opportunities for port State MCS measures. Particular focus should be on strengthening measures to monitor and validate catch both on longline vessels and as it moves through the supply chain. Given the shared nature of stocks in the region, it is important that strong catch validation measures are applied across the full footprint of stocks, including on the high seas”
Overall, bringing them to port brings them under the purview of PSM… and that is only a good thing.
Crew issues
HS long liners rarely come to any port in the Pacific… I have seen vessels stay at sea for over 16 months… all reprovisioning and crew changes are done while transhipping at sea. No one has a mass balance of crew boarding and leaving. Any immigration status does not cover those vessels, so there is no really a verifiable identification of who comes on board and who disembarks when and where… that alone would already be, in my mind, a reason to close a fishery down on labour issues… yet it gets worst… (believe it or not)
As I pointed out here, the fishery has been declining in volumes and number of vessels over the years, but a more direct measure of effort (hooks fished) has shown a different trend. Total hooks fished in the WCPFC-CA increased from a level of 400 million in the mid 1970s to 600 million in the early 2000s to 800 million in the early 2010s. The peak year in hooks fished was 2012 at 888 million hooks; the level in 2021 was 612 million hooks, a decline of 12% from the 2020 level, and nearly 16% below the average of the previous five years.
And for me, this graph below (page 47 in the SPC WCPO status of the stocks) is indirect proof of the linkages of both.
You see fishing effort, in fleet sizes and number of hooks fished (bottom), for the longline fishery in the WCPFC
In 1993/4 when I was fishing these waters, it was the heyday of LL in the WCPO, peaking into 5000 vessels. Today as you can see, there is only 1/3 of that fleet left (1600), yet they are soaking almost twice the number of hooks. How can that be possible? Deck and gear setting technology are almost the same… response: overworking crew.. workload has been duplicated.
Since then, transhipment at sea has exploded (as I reported before), which allows the vessels to stay fishing longer and, sadly, massively increases the crew's workload.
Bringing the LL to port could help a lot with the overview of the labour conditions on board, and also give the crew the option to voice grievances.
Electronic Monitoring
I wrote about this in the past, the cameras onboard are just the visible tip of the iceberg when it comes to EM, and while some see camera monitoring as a viable alternative to onboard human observers, others feel that on-board observers will remain necessary for the foreseeable future, at minimum to perform biological sampling and compliance monitoring where cameras are insufficient. The reality is that EM systems can complement the role of human observers and enhance overall observer coverage most particularly in the longline fishery, which is barely struggling this year to push up to 10% coverage.
While “on board” internet prices are coming down rapidly, many LL fleets argue that “live video” footage through satellite transmission is not cost-effective at present, so the footage is stored on a hard drive that then needs to be sent to for analysis (not the best option for compliance). In any case, to pass HD to carriers at sea, to then be delivered to some analysis somewhere, adds an extra layer of complication and risks (I could easily corrupt the disk before passing them to the carrier and then claim they were working, and so on). Coming to port to tranship or unload is the best option, and perhaps we should require it as a licensing condition that if you don’t do live EM, you have to come to port with the HD… as not to be too draconian and give operators an option.
MARPOL
In 2021 a couple of friends (Alice and Robert) and I got awarded a contract for a study aimed to: 1) identify, then assess volumes produced board and then potentially dumped, and then 2) come up with practical and policy-based alternatives that are aligned to the regional framework (a WCPFC CMM) and the international one (MARPOL convention) while thinking laterally around how to do under limited enforcement opportunities. (see here)
As part of part 2, we proposed among others these resulting strategic points.
Either waste is dumped into the sea, or it is returned to port at some point, and in some form. MARPOL does not allow the dumping of any solid wastes considered in this study to be dumped into the ocean, including incinerator ashes, thus: All vessels should return with some quantity of waste to be off-loaded at port.
The issue of onboard waste management is fundamentally a logistical challenge; all of the materials that become waste were put on the ship either in port or during a carrier transhipment, thus: Existing reversed logistical pathways must be used.
Pacific Island ports already have a domestic waste crisis and are, in very large part, unsuitable places to take foreign waste generated by overseas business operations. Therefore, aside from local-based fishing vessels, vessel waste needs to be returned to originating home ports, thus: Wastes from vessels of distant-water fishing nations should not be off-loaded at Pacific Island ports.
Larger vessels are much better placed to have better waste management systems because they have more space, can operate small compactors to increase waste density, can operate safe and compliant incinerators, and can handle and stow larger waste containers thus: Carrier vessels must accept waste from fishing vessels.
There is presently no way to control MARPOL compliance at sea or transhipments at sea… (EM has a potential role) for the proposals to work, longliners need to come to port and tranship their rubbish to carriers prior or after their fish… otherwise nothing is gonna work
So yea… this is not a comprehensive list, and surely there are more aspects that I’m not considering, but the above ones are already compelling.
So yeah… LL is a mess, I see an inevitable decline in the fishery as the money isn’t there, yet its geopolitical value is immense for the DWFN (if you have a presence, you have rights) and LL are relatively cheap to subsidize (since they pay crew shit and they bunker at sea), so is going to be around for a while, and we need to control it better.