Last Tuesday the Mauritian fishing industry hosted a regional conference in Balaclava as the industry gears up to push back against an Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) decision pressed by coastal states in February imposing restrictions on fish aggregating devices (FADs) used by foreign fleets when it meets in Mauritius in May.

On March 28, the Sustainable Tuna Association (STA) – a private sector group run by the IBL’s seafood arm – organized a regional conference in Balaclava, along with the US embassy, to chalk out the industry’s position ahead of a summit of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) to be held in Mauritius in May. Opening the conference, the US embassy’s deputy chief of mission, Satrajit Sardar, said, “The United States, as both a major consumer and major producer of seafood, has a particularly strong stake in promoting sustainability and combating IUU fishing.”

The point of the conference was to push back against a decision taken by a special session of the IOTC in Mombasa in February this year where a group of 11 coastal states of the Indian Ocean led by Indonesia succeeded in pushing through a series of restrictions on the use of fish aggregating devices (FADs) used by European and East Asian fishing fleets and blamed by coastal states and conservation groups for helping contribute to an overfishing crisis in the Indian Ocean that has pushed species such as yellowfin and bigeye tuna to the brink of stock collapse. The EU’s fishing fleet – primarily French and Spanish purse seiners using FADs – reportedly caught 217,000 tonnes of tuna in the Indian Ocean in 2020 and accounted for 60 per cent of the yellowfin tuna catch.

According to the IOTC’s Executive Secretary Chris O’Brien, “catches have been rising. They have just been going up”. He pointed to how each year 2.1 million tonnes of tuna are fished out of the Indian Ocean with 30 per cent of that caught by purse seiners between 2017 and 2021. With another 31.8 per cent caught by fishing ships using gillnets, 18.5 per cent using pole and line technology and 8.3 per cent using longliners. O’Brien stated that more than half of all the tuna caught in the region – 52 per cent – were being fished by just four fleets: the EU, Indian, Indonesian and Iranian.

The IOTC decision in February

So what were the decisions taken by the IOTC in February and why has the local tuna industry come out in force against the decision? The first sets of decisions have proved relatively uncontroversial: a FAD registry to help clamp down on abandoned FAD devices – up to 80 per cent according to estimates – that end up tangled on coral reefs and killing other species such as sharks and turtles. The other was the proposal by Indonesia and 11 other coastal states to bring down the number of FAD devices allowed on each ship down from 300 to 250 in 2024, and then further down to 200 by 2026. The EU wanted these numbers to be 280 by 2024, and 260 by 2026.

The real problem was a 72-day prohibition period to be put on the use of FADs each year to allow regional tuna stocks to recover; this prohibition would be in force on the high seas, and not on the territorial waters of small island states like Mauritius and Seychelles. It is this proposal that has raised the ire of the EU and the local tuna industry – its canneries are dependent on tuna supplied by EU fishing ships to process tuna for export to European markets. “This is an example of a majority imposing something on a minority that it cannot implement,” Marco Valletta, head of the EU delegation at the IOTC, told the conference on Tuesday, terming the decision of the IOTC as an “existential moment” for the industry. Also speaking at the conference was Anne-France Mattlet, director of Europêche Tuna Group – an industry group representing Europe’s purse seine industry – who warned that “a 72-day closure would lead to a reduction of skipjack tuna by 35 per cent,” adding that “the closure as it has been proposed would leave little possibility to import tuna from other oceans for processing”.

The Mauritian industry has big stakes at play in what happens at the IOTC when it meets in Mauritius in May: its tuna processing-for-export industry dates back to 1972 when a joint venture was set up between Mitsubishi and IBL, before Mitsubishi sold its stake to the UK-based Princes Group in 1999 to establish Princes Tuna Mauritius (PTM) and in 2015, PTM merged with Thon des Mascareignes. Mauritius is today amongst the top 10 canned tuna exporters in the world. In the UK market, for instance, 50 per cent of its canned tuna comes from the Indian Ocean, with John West brand tuna processed in Seychelles and Ghana, and Princes in Mauritius.

Sensitive to market sentiment in its major export markets, in 2021, Princes announced that it was reducing the processing of Indian Ocean-sourced yellowfin tuna by 50 per cent, the same year that Tesco – a major UK retailer – announced that it was shunning Indian Ocean yellowfins from its own branded tuna. Today, processed tuna exports account for nearly a quarter of Mauritian exports. Until 2000, Mauritius ran its own purse seiners – financed by Japan and including the ships Lady Sushil I and II and the Cirné fishing in Mauritian and Mozambican waters and targeting mainly skipjack. Today it is European ships that supply the tuna with Mauritian canneries processing 105,000 tonnes of tuna a year.

It’s not just the EU that the local industry is appealing to at the conference to try to reverse the IOTC decision at the Mauritius summit in May, but also other regional states such as Seychelles – itself a major canning country with Sharif Antoine, economist at the Seychelles Fishing Authority, telling the conference that tuna exports brought in $355 million in 2017, accounting for nearly 27 per cent of its GDP and 13 per cent of its employment. Like the Mauritian industry model, restriction on FADs on EU ships equally affects them too. As well as Madagascar and Oman, each also looking to set up – or expand – their own canning operations.