PACIFIC ISLANDS, FRIDAY 15 JULY 2011: The Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) are one step closer to gaining the globally recognized MSC eco-label for sustainable harvested tuna, after the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) accepted and today published the very detailed consultation and assessment report by consultants, Intertek Moody Marine Ltd, which strongly recommends MSC certification of PNA free school skipjack tuna.

This would lead to MSC certification of almost 70% of skipjack tuna caught in PNA waters - which includes Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. However, the next step towards certification is a second objection process, in which organizations opposed to MSC certification, may challenge the MSC assessment within 15 days.

The Intertek Moodys report stated:

The MSC process is based on an independent, objective and factual assessment of the fishery. Inevitably this will identify both strengths and weaknesses in fishery management. These are then reported openly by the assessment team. Overall the unassociated fishery comfortably met the MSC requirements for management of the stock (P1 score 84.4 (out of 100)), for management of ecosystem interactions (P 2 score 86.3) and for an effective management system (P 3 score 85.5).

If the certificate is issued, PNA free school skipjack tuna can bear the MSC eco-label in recognition of the high levels of governance and environmental standards demonstrated in the PNA purse seine fishery to catch free school skipjack tuna.

MSC eco-labeled skipjack tuna is already in high demand among global retailers, as consumer awareness and environmental campaigns are increasingly putting pressure on the global food industry to source sustainable fish.

While this week the International Union of Conservation for Nature (IUCN) has pointed to the 5 tuna species which have an endangered or vulnerable status, skipjack tuna in the Pacific Islands region is not rated as under any threat of overfishing. The stocks are independently declared healthy and well managed.

The PNA has taken many world-first conservation and management measures to help protect its abundant skipjack tuna stocks such as restricting effort through limiting fishing days, introducing limits and closed seasons on the use of Fish Aggregating Devices, closing unregulated adjacent high seas areas to purse seine fishing and having 100% monitoring of fishing through observers onboard and satellite tracking on every purse seine fishing vessel. Current new initiatives include minimum mesh sizes, electronic reporting and FAD tracking, amongst many other measures.

PNA Director Dr Transform Aqorau said today: “The PNA office exists to maximize the economic benefits to Pacific Islanders from sustainable management of our tuna. Achieving MSC Certification is an important step towards this goal, so that consumers of our tuna, can recognize the value of our work here.  PNA has also established Pacifical, which we hope will promote and trade MSC certified and socially accredited tuna.  We are happy with progress so far and after over a year of intense scrutiny by the assessing team from Intertek Moody Marine Ltd, and now published by MSC, we hope to soon be able to use the MSC eco-label on our skipjack tuna.”

About the MSC and its eco-label: The MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) is an international non-profit organization that was set up by WWF and Unilever to promote solutions to the problem of overfishing. The MSC, independent of its founding organizations when the MSC was incorporated as a legal entity in 1997, runs the only certification and eco-labeling program for wild-capture fisheries consistent with the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards and UN Food and Agricultural Organisation’s guidelines for fisheries certification. 

Together the fisheries already engaged in the MSC program record annual catches of close to 9 million metric tonnes of seafood, representing over 12 per cent of global capture production for direct human consumption.