Countries shorten tuna fishing closure at Pacific summit with few conservation ‘wins’

2024 was a record year for tropical tuna catch in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, thanks to a big increase in skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis) catch, and stocks are considered healthy. So when the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), a multilateral body that manages tuna and other fish stocks in this region, held its annual meeting Sept. 1-5 in Panama, some coastal Latin American countries pushed for more time to fish.

The bid was successful: Commission members agreed to shorten an annual fishing closure from 72 days to 64 days. The outcome was a compromise between a U.S. proposal to maintain the 72-day closure and proposals by Latin American countries to lower it, one by as much as 17 days per year, to 55.

The 64-day closure, which will go into effect in 2026, is in keeping with recommendations from the IATTC’s scientific committee.

“They followed the scientific advice, which is important,” Pablo Guerrero, director of marine conservation at WWF Ecuador, told Mongabay.

However, negotiations over the closure and general commission budget matters dominated the meeting, leaving insufficient time for some key conservation proposals, attendees said.

“It was a meeting with little to report in terms of big wins for conservation,” said Guerrero, who attended the meeting.

The members did agree to move toward adoption, in 2026, of a long-term harvest strategy for bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus), though an NGO representative said the process should have been completed this year. The member countries didn’t adopt proposals to increase monitoring of longline tuna vessels or strengthen shark protection measures, due to resistance from East Asian members.

Tuna time

The IATTC is one of five regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) that manage tuna and tuna-like species, primarily in international waters. Like the others, it also carries some conservation and management responsibilities for associated species and marine ecosystems. The IATTC members are Belize, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the European Union, France (with respect to its overseas territories), Guatemala, Japan, Kiribati, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, El Salvador, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, Venezuela and Vanuatu; a few other nations also participate. Measures are passed by consensus, meaning all parties must agree.

At the Panama meeting, the tropical tuna measure that was adopted included, in addition to the 64-day closure period, other components that conservationists applauded. It maintained a seasonal closure of the corralito, a marine area roughly the size of South Africa to the west of the Galápagos that’s closed to purse seiner fishing for one month per year. Some of the Latin American proposals had called for the elimination of the corralito closure.

The temporal and spatial closures — the 64-day rule and the corralito — apply only to purse seiners, which operate by cinching giant nets around schools of tuna. The method accounts for roughly 90% of the tuna catch in the Eastern Pacific. The remainder is mostly caught by longliners, which deploy hundreds or even thousands of baited hooks at a time and are subject to different regulations.

The newly adopted tropical tuna measure includes support for two purse seiner monitoring programs. One keeps track of the amount of bigeye tuna caught by purse seiners. (Officially, bigeye isn’t a target of the purse seiners; skipjack and yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares, are.) The monitoring has been in place for a few years, but funding to continue it was in doubt. The second is a new program for tagging skipjack, aimed at improving stock assessments; it will be funded through fees paid by the purse seiner industry.

There was also a modicum of progress on long-term management. Member nations agreed to prioritize the development of harvest strategies for tropical tuna, starting with bigeye, with the aim of completing the scientific preparations over the next year and adopting it at next year’s annual meeting. Harvest strategies, which in RFMO lingo are often called management procedures, predetermine decisions about how much catch to allow based on incoming fishery data.

Harvest strategies are a way of moving “from short-term, reactive decision-making to long-term plans for sustainability,” according to Dave Gershman, a senior fisheries officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, a U.S.-based NGO. Adopting harvest strategies makes the process more automatic, shielding it from commercial or political pressure, and would make for “less contentious meetings in the future,” Gershman, who attended the Panama meeting, told Mongabay. Gershman said IATTC member countries should adopt harvest strategies and then immediately adjust temporal and spatial closures accordingly — i.e., based on population trends.

Overall, Gershman praised the agreement’s prioritization of harvest strategies. However, he expressed disappointment that more work wasn’t completed over the last year; originally, the bigeye harvest strategy was set to be adopted by 2025. Likewise, he criticized the lack of recent action on Pacific bluefin tuna (Thunnus orientalis) management, which is conducted largely through a joint working group between the IATTC and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). The joint working group’s last meeting, which took place in Japan in July, produced little progress toward adoption of a harvest strategy, Gershman said. At the Panama meeting, Japan and the United States helped arrange another joint working group meeting for early 2026.

The IATTC parties also refined rules on fish aggregating devices (FADs), which are floating structures commonly used to attract fish in purse seiner fishing, but that pose ecological and environmental hazards. FADs have been increasingly regulated by IATTC for the past 11 years, and there are limits on the number of FADs a vessel can deploy, depending on its size. The new rules allow vessels to maintain contact with FADs that are no longer in use for the purposes of recovery and not have these counted against their FAD limit. Recovering unused FADs is a conservation priority because, among other reasons, they can snag and kill a wide range of marine life. FAD recovery around the Galápagos Islands has gained particular attention, and a first-of-its-kind workshop on the subject was held there last year.

Conservation push meets pushback

The European Union pushed two proposals that failed due to resistance from the IATTC’s East Asian members, according to Guerrero. One was a proposal to increase fisheries observer coverage on longliners, initially with humans on board; these might eventually be supplemented or replaced with electronic monitoring. Currently, only 5% of longliner fishing effort is required to be observed. (The proposal would also have increased observer presence on small purse seiner vessels; large purse seiners are 100% observed.)

Longliners tend to supply highly valuable sashimi-grade tuna (whereas most purse seiner catch ends up canned) and, in spite of the difference in catch figures, they far outnumber purse seiners in the Eastern Pacific. Most of the longliners in the Eastern Pacific are flagged to China, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. All four oppose the observer measure, with China and Japan offering the most vocal opposition, citing the expenses involved, Guerrero said. He called their position “frustrating,” and said longliners need to be better regulated.

Japan and China also led opposition to an EU proposal to strengthen shark protections, attendees said. The proposal would have reduced alternatives to the IATTC’s “fins naturally attached” (FNA) rule. FNA is considered a best practice for reducing shark finning, which often entails cutting off a live shark’s fins and dumping the rest of the animal overboard to die; the fins are commonly used in shark fin soup, a delicacy in parts of Asia. In its purest form, FNA means that no fins can be landed at port unless they’re attached to a carcass.

However, the IATTC has relatively loose FNA rules — weaker than those of other tuna RFMOs, according to Iris Ziegler, head of fisheries policy at the German Ocean Foundation, an NGO. The commission allows for certain exceptions to fully attached fins that critics say act as loopholes to the rules. Ziegler and Guerrero both said the FNA rules need tightening but consensus couldn’t be reached.

“Japan and China simply refused to even discuss any changes at all,” Ziegler, who attended much of the Panama meeting virtually, told Mongabay in a message, referring to the FNA rules.

Delegation members from Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan didn’t respond to requests to comment for this article.

Banner image: A yellowfin tuna in the Pacific Ocean near Mexico. Image © Jeff Rotman/naturepl.com, courtesy of WWF.

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