At Annual Meeting, SPRFMO Should Chart a Course Toward Modern Harvest Strategies for Valuable South Pacific Fisheries

February 6, 2026

More than 10 years ago at a meeting of a newly constituted regional fisheries management organization, countries with fisheries interests across the south Pacific Ocean came together to adopt a harvest control rule with a goal of rebuilding jack mackerel, a small pelagic fish that had become seriously depleted.

Fast forward to today, and members of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), after having successfully steered the rebuilding of the jack mackerel stock, have an opportunity to further embrace precautionary and science-based management across their diverse small pelagic, squid, and bottom fisheries.

On the agenda of the annual SPRFMO meeting beginning March 2^nd in Panama City will be a recommendation from an independent panel of experts, commissioned by SPRFMO, to review the organization’s performance. Notably, that panel is recommending the adoption of a harvest strategy (also called management procedure, MP) approach for all SPRFMO fisheries.

“A well-defined harvest strategy provides a framework for consistent decision-making and the application of the precautionary approach across different fisheries,” the review panel wrote in its report. “This approach would help ensure that management measures are designed with clear objectives, supported by scientific evidence, and adaptable to changing conditions. This would provide a practical framework for decision-making and goal-setting for each fishery, ensuring that the precautionary approach is constantly applied.”

SPRFMO members should heed that recommendation, thereby aligning the RFMO with others that have made the strategic choice to embrace harvest strategies to provide greater predictability and stability and to ensure the sustainability of their fisheries.

SPRFMO, which includes 17 members, manages important stocks of small pelagic fishes, squid, and bottom fishes across the south Pacific Ocean. SPRFMO is already undertaking work in relation to harvest strategies, but its efforts would receive a boost through a more strategic approach:

• In the jack mackerel fishery, members have been developing a management procedure to replace the harvest control rule that has rebuilt the fishery, but they need to finish the job. With the technical work still in progress and political decisions still eluding the Commission, adopting clear and defined objectives in Panama City for the new MP would be a step in the right direction. They also need to issue clear tasking to their scientists to finish the development process to enable MP adoption in 2027 without further delay. Thankfully, there’s a dedicated pre-meeting workshop scheduled for February 28^th that could help to secure this progress.
• In the fishery for jumbo flying squid, which is part of the world’s largest cephalopod fishery and deemed inadequately managed by the review panel, SPRFMO scientists have a workplan anticipating development of a management procedure. Now they need clear buy-in, direction and resourcing from their managers.

For other fisheries, like orange roughy, and toothfish, a workplan could be developed to tailor workable MP approaches, given the varying levels of data, knowledge, and fishing intensity. The MP approach is not one-size fits all, and it can be applied differently depending on the resources available and priorities of the Commission.

In rebuilding jack mackerel, SPRFMO members have demonstrated that they can cooperate and make decisions with lasting benefits. Now is the time to build on the organization’s past to chart out a sustainable future through the wider endorsement of the harvest strategy approach.

(Photo by Richard Ling, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND-2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)