MELBOURNE, Australia (Radio Australia, Oct. 23, 2009) – The Pacific tuna fishery - worth billions of dollars, and sought after by some of the world's most powerful countries - is managed by some the world's smallest island nations.

Steve Peter works on a fishing boat, but he not a fisherman.

The Micronesian man is an observer on board a foreign-owned fishing vessel which has come to the anchorage off Phonpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, to transfer its tuna catch to its mother ship.

That makes him one of the new foot soldiers helping stamp the authority of the Pacific Islands over the management of the world's biggest tuna fishery.

His job is to collect data about the tuna that make these Pacific waters so lucrative to commercial fishers, and to make sure those on board follow the rules.

The work is not easy, and Mr Peter says communication is a constant problem: "Language is always the problem. These people are, what they say, 'No English! No English!'"

The observers come under all sorts of pressures. Some have been offered bribes and one reported last year that he couldn't get into the shipping vessel's wheel house because it was guarded by two vicious dogs.

But Pacific fisheries officials say the observers' work is absolutely important to managing the region's tuna resources.

Without observers on board, "We don't know what they catch and we don't know how they take the fish," say Sylvester Pokajam is the Managing Director of Papua New Guinea's National Fisheries Authority.

"It's very, very important that we have observers on board so that they can physically supervise those catch and come back and report to us," he said.

Papua New Guinea and the FSM are two of the eight tiny Pacific countries that form the Nauru group, which wields enormous power when it comes to regulating the multibillion-dollar international tuna trade.

Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru, Solomon Islands, Palau, and the Marshall Islands complete the Nauru group, who are all members of the Forum Fisheries Agency - the Pacific Islands Forum subsidiary body that provides more than half the membership of the Central and Western Pacific Fisheries Commission, also known as the Tuna Commission.

In 1982, when the Law of the Sea was coming into force with 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones, the Nauru group decided they would try to control tuna - like OPEC controls oil.

"These eight countries control about 60 per cent of the global tuna supply," says Transform Aquorau, Forum Fisheries Agency's Deputy Director.

"A lot of the measures that we now have in place have been, sort of, initiated by this group."

That includes the observer program, which the island countries have insisted on. From next year, every purse seiner operating in the fishery must have an observer on board.

The new chairman of the Tuna Commission, Ambassador Satya Nandan, from Fiji, was one of the architects of the Law of the Sea Convention which has given these mostly impoverished island countries control of a massive resource.

Andrew Wright, director of the Tuna Commission, has a huge responsibility.

The Tuna Commission overseas just slightly less than 20 per cent of the earth's surface.

"But the majority of the catch in most years is taken in the western region from Kiribati, Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Philippines," Mr Wright said.

Wendell Sanford, the Canadian diplomat who is chairman of the Tuna Commission's Compliance Committee, says the Pacific Islanders have realised the real strength they have if they stay unified.

"Pacific Island countries are just, just past masters at this. They caucus frequently to come up with what is known as a Forum Fisheries Agency position," he said.

"Of course, inside the Forum Fisheries Agency there are divergent views. There are islands with a lot of fish, there are islands with not much fish and everyone has their own special considerations.

But they do an excellent job of developing unified positions and then by virtue of strength of their position they do exceptionally well in terms of achieving their objectives in this organisation."

One of the most feisty of the Nauru group is the Marshall Islands, where Glen Joseph is the Director of the Marshall Islands Marine Resource Authority.

"The amount and the value of the fishery taken out of the Pacific Island waters amounts to about four billion dollars," Mr Joseph said.

"And by all assessments the Pacific Islands are not getting a fair share of that four billion dollars."

One of the issues is the transfer of the tuna catch from fishing boats to their mother ships. At present, a lot of the transfers occur far out at sea.

The Pacific countries would like more transfers to happen near the ports, where they not only get the economic benefits but they can also keep an eye on what's going on.

"When these vessels come ashore, come in our ports to trans-ship, there are economic benefits as a result - provisioning, fuelling, crew exchange," Mr Joseph said.

"Small as they are, with the numbers of vessels that are out there, and if they do trans-ship in port, it adds up with significant economic gains."

But the scientists are warning that two of the three tuna species in the Pacific are not doing so well. Dr Tony Lewis is in charge of a major tuna tagging program that the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the SPC, has been contracted to do by the Tuna Commission.

So nearly 250,0000 tuna have been tagged.

"It provides some of the absolutely key information that we need for our stock assessments," he said.

Dr Lewis says Skipjack is the most abundant tuna and which makes up about 70 per cent of catch, is in "quite good shape."

However the other two species in the world's largest tuna fishery - the Yellowfin and Bigeye - "are either over exploited or so close to full exploitation that it doesn't matter."

Meanwhile, the ABC's Lateline program has reported that the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin tuna has been examining a secret report by its scientific committee.

The report estimates the spawning stock of the Bluefin tuna is as low as 5 per cent of 1940s levels, leaving scientists debating whether the species will be able to survive the current fishing levels.

Countries which fish southern Bluefin tuna, including Australia and Japan, met October 23 in the South Korean island of Jeju at the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna, to decide what level of fishing should now be permitted.

Though the meeting in Jeju was behind closed doors, the ABC has been told the Australian Government delegation put forward a recommendation to cut the total allowable catch by 50 per cent.

If that cut was implemented across the board, the biggest impact at the fishing end would be on Australia, which catches more than 40 per cent of the southern bluefin take.

Not all operators obey the rules and illegal fishing is a major problem.

Mr Aquorau, of the Pacific Forum Fisheries agency, say losses from illegal fishing are huge.

"There's various figures, I think, ranging from 300 to 500 million dollars. That's a fairly significant amount of money that we're losing," he said.

One weapon the Tuna Commission has to combat poaching on such a massive scale is its blacklist of fishing vessels caught fishing illegally, or not reporting their catch.

The blacklist, known as the IUU list, is anathema to fishers because once on it, processors will refuse to take their fish.

Mr Wright, the Tuna Commission's director, said last year two vessels were added to the IUU list, one from Venuzeula and one from Taiwan.

This year the commission's Technical and Compliance Committee has recommended 15 vessels be added to the list - including ones from Panama, Indonesia, China and Taiwan.

But as Pacific nations work to curb illegal fishing, they are also aware that many of the culprits are also generous political allies.

Environment group Greenpeace, which patrols for illegal fishing in the Pacific, recently told Cook Islands reporters have identified about 1,500 Taiwanese vessels illegally fishing in four pockets of the high seas.

Cooks Islands journalist Ulamila Kurai-Wragg told Radio Australia's Pacific Beat program that Greenpeace described the illegal fishing as "daylight robbery".

She says Greenpeace is trying to pressure the Tuna Commission to crack down on illegal fishing, but Pacific countries are in a tough spot politically.

"I spoke to the Cook Islands Government yesterday, the marine resources. They told me that they have to be very careful because there is a lot of lobbying, there's lots of countries included involved in shutting down any pockets of the high seas," she said.

"The Commission is really where the owners of the resources are on one side of the table, and on the other side of the table you have those that are coming in to fish and those are countries like China, Taiwan, the US, Korea, so you can understand really how important it is to be very diplomatic given that we get a lot of funding from these countries as well."

Though there is still a ways to go, Mr Sanford, the Compliance Committee Chairman, says although the Tuna Commission is the youngest group of its kind, it has made great progress.

"We're four and a half years since the inception and already we have many elements that are more highly developed and more sophisticated than the other tuna organisations in the world," he said.

He says the Tuna Commission has been able to work quickly to implement the world's only boarding and inspection program for high seas tuna.

In April the commission implemented a satellite tracking system for fishing vessels. Mr Sanford says over 1,000 vessels are already on that system.

"We've made enormous progress in a very short period of time doing as well or better than any of the other tuna organisations in the world," he said.

A lot of the credit goes to the island nations which have been unafraid to use the power they have gained from the Law of the Sea.

Forum Fisheries Agency's deputy director Transform Aquorau: "We've always had that power and it's just a question of timing and the question of the right time in which to wield that power."

"And the Commission has really given those Island Countries that power, I think."

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