Overfishing and the RFMOs: Are They Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?

Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMOs) now manage most of the world’s straddling pelagic fish stocks.  Their decision-making processes are governed by multilateral treaties and their consensus-based conservation and management measures (CMMs) are created and adopted by commissions whose members represent the parties to the treaties.  The stated goals of the RFMO treaties aspire to achieve preservation and optimum utilization of highly migratory fish stocks throughout their range.  However even after years of effort the commissions have failed to reverse the continuing decline of almost every economically-important pelagic fish stock on the planet.  The failure to achieve treaty goals can be traced to the CMM-making process itself, which is slow, political, and in the end favors short term economic considerations.   

Notable examples of this are the ICCAT’s management of Atlantic bluefin tuna and the WCPFC’s management of Pacific bigeye tuna.  Although both of these RFMO’s have been struggling to manage these stocks for years and data collection has improved greatly, catch level reductions have not been sufficient to prevent the overall biomass of the stocks from continuing to decline.  Large, reproductively-valuable individuals of both species are targeted by hook and line fisheries for the lucrative sashimi trade and there is a substantial take of juveniles by purse seiners.   The catch limits set by the ICCAT and the WCPFC almost always exceed those recommended by the commissions’ scientific bodies and tend to go into effect two to three years after the collection of the data that indicated the need for them.  Furthermore, a safety margin is not factored into the final catch limits to compensate for the impact of taking top predators on the pelagic ecosystem or the take by illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing operations.  

To help correct the structural problems of the RFMO system, parties need to agree that science, not short term economic considerations, shall control the CMM process.  Catch levels must be set by the scientific bodies of the RFMOs, leaving the issue of how those levels are allocated to political considerations, but total take must never exceed the levels recommended by the science.  Other issues compromising effective management include the lack real time reporting, rapid data analysis and adaptive management measures, the tolerance of flags of convenience, the use of fish aggregation devices, and overcapacity.