Fisheries Newsletter No 139 (September–December 2012)

Editorial

Non-fishing stakeholders — or, to be more precise, conservation stakeholders — have become regular and active partners of fisheries stakeholders in the Pacific Islands region. They are mostly involved in identifying and raising awareness of environmental issues, as well as helping to design management schemes that address these issues. In California, they have gone one step further to become financial partners of the fishing industry. In the last article of this issue, Jay Udelhoven from The Nature Conservancy explains why and how his organisation bought fishing rights to help struggling small-scale fishermen and local communities, while improving fishery and habitat. At first sight, it seems that there is little scope for such a scheme in the Pacific Islands region, at least in coastal fisheries where few formal fisheries allocation systems have been put in place. But, whether in the tuna fishery, with the Parties to the Nauru Agreement vessel day scheme, or in the sea cucumber fishery, with export quotas that have been set by several countries, the possibility exists and is certainly worth exploring.

As usual, we have tried to provide short stories about a little bit of everything related to fisheries in our region, including two articles that were spontaneously sent by the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources of American Samoa. Let’s hope they are the first of a long series.

Aymeric Desurmont
Fisheries Information Officer