(philstar.com) Updated January 16, 2012 11:01 PM
SUVA (Xinhua) - A skipjack tuna fishery managed by eight Pacific Island nations has been certified as sustainable to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said here Monday.
This move will promote the future health of tuna stocks in the region, bring major benefits to the fishing industry, and have positive repercussions for consumers around the world, said Seremaia Tuqiri, WWF-South Pacific Fisheries Policy Officer based here in Fiji.
According to the officer, the certification has been awarded conditionally to the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) purse seine free-schooling skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) fishery, managed by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission ( WCPFC) Convention.
The PNA free-school skipjack catch equates to an annual harvest of 275,000 metric tons roughly the same weight as 490 fully- fuelled Airbus A380s - at a value of approximately 1.3 billion U.S. dollars at the retail level, with minimal by catch of other species and juvenile tuna. Consumers, in the not too distant future, could see close to one billion 148-gram cans of tuna harvested from this MSC-certified sustainable fishery on supermarket shelves.
"The Western and Central Pacific skipjack stock holds about 10 percent of the world's tuna stock. This is the largest tuna fishery to have achieved MSC certification, a standard that will help ensure this valuable fishery can achieve a healthy state," says Mark Schreffler, Fisheries Policy Officer of the WWF-Western Melanesia Program.
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