The way to go for coastal fisheries management in the Pacific would be to impose limits on the fishery.
Suggestion came from Dr Transform Aqorau, the outgoing head of the Secretariat of the Parties of the Nauru Agreement.
By imposing limits you create scarcity, and through scarcity you add value to your resource, Dr Aqorau told the Pacific Coastal Fisheries Conference underway in Nadi, Fiji.
The ultimate goal out of all of this of course is empowering our people.
Figures released by Dr Aqorau confirmed this. When the PNA Secretariat was opened in 2010 in Majuro, Marshall Islands, the value of one day of fishing was US$1100. This rose to $5000 in 2012 and $6000 in 2014.
For 2015, one day of fishing is expected to be valued at $8000 although Dr Aqorau says some days are being auctioned currently at $10,000 a day.
Dr Aqorau, who will finish as head of PNA Secretariat in January next year, says trying to run the Secretariat independent of donor funds was daunting. He and his three staff had to locate money to pay for their salaries and run the office during the first few months of operations.
Four years later, the Secretariat, he said. is self-funded with most of its budget coming from the PNA’s Vessel Day Scheme – a sellers market for countries that want to fish in PNA waters.
Islands Business International