Fisheries plan to help achieve goals

 THE Pacific fisheries industry may be on its way to achieving objectives set out in the “Future of Pacific Fisheries” study, according to Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA).

Deputy director-general Wez Norris said the Pacific was doing well as a region to protect and benefit from the fisheries sector. 

He said a road map called “A Regional Roadmap for Sustainable Pacific Fisheries” would be presented by Foreign Fisheries Committee Ministers during the Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting this week in Port Moresby on progress so far and what still needed to be done. 

Norris said the study done five years ago outlined potential scenarios for way that Pacific fisheries would look like by 2025.

“It (study) basically described 3 scenarios, best case scenarios where everything goes really well, a worst case scenarios where fisheries collapsed, and what it termed as business as usual case, or a missed opportunity case,” he said.

“And what we’ve (FFA) done over a year or so in conjunction with SPC (Secretariat of Pacific Community) was to do a review of, where are we tracking towards. It’s been five years and unfortunate conclusion of that is that while there have been some really huge advances made, in some aspect of the fishery, overall we are still on the track for business as usual scenario. Things are not getting worse, we are not heading towards worse case, but there are certain things that we should be doing to get ourselves on the track to achieve the best case scenario by 2025.

“And that is exactly what this road map sets out do.

“It sets out key objectives for tuna fisheries as well as coastal inshore fisheries, bother the rules for tuna fishery and coastal inshore fisheries and outlines a series of strategies under each.

“And specific indicators that we will use over the next 10 years to assess how we are going in terms of changing tracks in terms from missed opportunities scenarios on to the best case scenario.”