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III. ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT AND MONITORING OF FISHERY RESOURCES IN SAMOA
[ III-A | III-B
| III-C | III- D
| III-E | III-F |
III-G ]
A. Selection of assessment criteria
[ A | A-1
]
Assessing the Fishery Resources of Samoa as an integrated
natural resource/economic account has not been attempted. The Statistics
Office and the Asian Development Bank's "Strengthening Capacity for Macroeconomic
Analysis, Planning and Policy Formulation in the Treasury Department" team
members in Apia indicate they believe SEEA will
eventually be incorporated in Samoa's national accounts (Lucas, personal
communication 1997).
Simplified data linkages between the Framework
for the Development of Environmental Statistics (FDES databases), System
of National Accounts (SNA) and Natural Resources Accounting are shown in
Figure 7. While this system of greening national accounts could, in theory,
be applied to stocks of fisheries resources in Samoa, ascertaining the
basic statistics for stocks, or indicators of depletion and degradation
have never been accomplished for inshore fisheries in the Pacific Islands.
Even data on extraction is available for only a small fraction of the fishery
resources and this data is suspect.
Figure 7. Data linkages between FDES, NRA, and the SNA (United Nations
1991)
The offshore tuna industry is the only fishery in the Pacific that approaches
the capability of SEEA. Obtaining a profile of the tuna industry is simplified
by having:
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Only four primary species of fish: skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis),
yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) and albacore
tuna (Thunnus alalunga)
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1,366 registered boats of known (and standardised) fishing capability
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Catch and effort log sheets provided by the fishers.
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A management oriented regional body (Forum
Fisheries Agency)
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A statistics body (South Pacific Commission Oceanic
Fisheries Programme) supported by fees from Distant
Water Fishing Nations.
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Highly qualified staff and adequate budgets (the professional manpower
and budgets of the two regional organisations exceed the combined professional
staff and budgets of all the Fisheries Agencies within the South Pacific
Small Island Nations).
Even though the SPC statistics programme on tuna has been active since
1981, a bioeconomic model of Western
Pacific Tuna Fisheries is only now reaching completion. The bioeconomic
programme is a collaborative effort between the University of Queensland,
the SPC and the FFA. The overall goal is to integrate the available information
on the population biology of major tuna species in the Western Pacific
with economic information on the fisheries and markets to provide advice
to FFA member countries on the optimal economic levels of sustainable fishing
effort (OFP 1996).
Inshore fisheries are made up of hundreds of species of fish and invertebrates.
Fishing activities are fragmented through nearly the whole rural population
of men, women and children living in 330 villages. The people use a bewildering
variety of fishing techniques from simply picking invertebrates off the
reef to long-lining far at sea. Since the great bulk of fisheries products
is not sold but eaten by the families who collect them, it is difficult
to place a market value on many of the products (how much is a jellyfish
worth?), let alone find out how much is extracted. There are very few funds
available to collect data or analyse it, and no manpower to do so on a
national level.
While an accurate national accounting of the parameters in Figure 7
is a long way in the future, the United Nations SEEA model may be applicable
to fisheries resources on a village level. The scale of data collection
and level of analysis might be crude, but then most fisheries data is crude
and at best a rough estimate of actual conditions in the marine environment.
Sectioning the resource by village also highlights the difficult issue
of "environmental externalities" where one village may benefit or be damaged
by the action of another village. For example, fish protected in a sanctuary
by one village may increase recruitment and catch in another village further
down the coast. Logging or farming activity by one village may cause sedimentation
of a river which destroys lagoon fish habitats adjacent to another village.
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