EVEN AS I WAS covering the agriculture beat in the early 90s, world tuna production, especially ours have been declining at a time when climate change and warming global waters were not yet severe.
The problem was overfishing for which our commercial fishers were fishing for tuna and other ocean species in distant Pacific waters like Palau and others.
In May 2009, a BBC documentary entitled South Pacific, stressed that should fishing in the Pacific continue at its current rate, populations of all tuna species could collapse within five years.
It highlighted huge Japanese and European tuna fishing vessels, sent to the South Pacific international waters after overfishing their own fish stocks to the point of collapse.
A 2010 tuna fishery assessment report, released in January 2012 by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, supported this findings, recommending that all tuna fishing should be reduced or limited to current levels and that limits on skipjack fishing be considered.
OCEAN WARMING
Research data repeatedly point to increasing ocean temperatures as taking a toll on the tuna in the Indian Ocean, where rapid warming of the ocean has resulted in a reduction of marine phytoplankton, the food of tuna and other marine species.
The bigeye tuna catch rates have also declined abruptly during the past half century, mostly due to increased industrial fisheries, with the ocean warming putting more stress on the fish species. Tuna, belonging to the thunnus family, is an important commercial fish.
In 2009, global tuna stocks were recorded by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, which listed the most important commercial and recreational tuna as: yellowfin, bigeye, bluefin (T. obesus) and bluefin (T. orientalis and T. macoyi), albacore and skipjack.
MID 20TH CENTURY
Between 1940 and the mid-60s, the annual world catch of the five principal market species of tunas rose from 300,000 tons to 1 MT, most of it taken by hook and line.
With the development of purse seine, now the predominant gear, catches had risen to over 4 MT yearly, 68 percent of which is from the Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
Skipjack makes up about 60 percent, followed by yellowfin (24 percent), bigeye (10 percent), albacore (5 percent), and bluefin the remainder. Purse-seines take about 62 percent of the world production, longline about 14 percent, pole and line about 11 percent, and a variety of other gears the remainder.
Greenpeace International, in 2010, included the albacore, bigeye tuna, Pacific bluefin tuna, Atlantic bluefin tuna, southern bluefin tuna, and yellowfin tuna to its seafood red list, or those “commonly sold in supermarkets around the world that have a very high risk of being sourced from unsustainable fisheries.
Bluefin tuna have been widely accepted as being severely overfished, with some stocks at risk of collapse.
The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (a global, nonprofit partnership between the tuna industry, scientists, and the World Wide Fund for Nature), noted that Indian Ocean yellowfin tuna, Pacific Ocean (eastern and western) bigeye tuna, and North Atlantic albacore tuna are all overfished.
In April 2009, no stock of skipjack tuna (which makes up roughly 60% of all tuna fished worldwide) was considered to be overfished.
CALL FOR SUPPORT
Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. on Wednesday made an appeal for support to the tuna industry in view of difficulties in obtaining sustainability certifications to export their products, Business World reported.
Laurel said the tuna industry faces threats from “climate change, global sustainability mandates, labor issues, and the persistent threat of IUU (illegal, unreported, unregulated) fishing.”
He called for science-based management of tuna stocks and stronger support for the industry.
A recent Supreme Court ruling allowing commercial fishing operations to ply municipal waters has cast doubt on sustainability claims for Philippine tuna, the Philippine Association of Tuna Processors, Inc., has said.
Sustainability certificates enable the Philippines to access crucial export markets that require traceability and sustainability of fish resources, it noted.
Philippine tuna production rose to 494,047.02 MT in 2024 from 409,797.17 MT in 2023, the DA said.
Tuna exports rose 31% to $514.47 million in 2024, DA added.