Pacific tuna. (Photo: The Nature Conservancy)

New technological platform will contribute to tuna catch tracing

NEW ZEALAND
Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 03:00 (GMT + 9)

The implementation of a real-time electronic reporting platform will help verify and validate Pacific tuna deliveries from sea to port.

The initiative, which consists of putting ruggedized tablet computers into the hands of fisheries officials in key landing ports around the Pacific, was welcomed by WWF, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the Pacific Community (SPC).

This approach, complemented by the new Observer eReporting App for on-board fisheries observers, will provide supply chain transparency and traceability in the Western and Central Pacific tuna fisheries.

Those supporting this new technology insist it will directly address non-reporting, misreporting, and under-reporting, which represents the greatest proportion of illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing (IUU).

Through the recent SPC Tuna Data Workshop held in New Caledonia, 13 fisheries officials from nine Pacific countries were trained on the use of these devices.

In these member countries, port inspectors are now being trained using SPC’s Tails application and fishing vessel captains are being trained to use the OnBoard application to electronically report effort and catch data.

“Getting timely and accurate verification and validation of catch records at the point of landing has always been extremely difficult with a paper-based record-keeping system, but now port inspectors can go to the dock and input information that will immediately be fed into management systems,” pointed out Bubba Cook, WWF’s Western and Central Pacific Tuna Programme Manager.

For his part, Cook Islands Ministry of Marine Resources (MMR) Offshore Division Director, Tim Costelloe, said that MMR welcomed the introduction of the tablets to support the work of fisheries officers in the field.

It is expected that this initiative will lay the foundation for further rapid adoption of these technologies in the region, which are designed specifically to target improved transparency and traceability of seafood products.

As a next step, the Tails application will continue its first phase of testing with Fiji, Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Niue, and Tuvalu.

Besides, an updated version is set to be released in August 2017 with the aim for a wider roll out to other member countries.

The OnBoard application will continue its first phase of testing with five vessels in New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and Cook Islands. An updated version is set to be released in August 2017 with the aim for a wider roll-out to other member countries and longline vessels.

With roughly 60 per cent of global tuna catches, the Western and Central Pacific Ocean is home to a variety of tuna species that supply markets around the world. Estimates have put the value of the fishery as high as USD 7.2 billion in recent years.
 
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