13 - Fiji Workshop

Over 4 days, from the 7th to 10th October 2009, the Secretariat for Pacific Community (SPC) and SCRFA jointly organized a subregional training workshop at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. The workshop was a response to a request to SPC for assistance from 5 Pacific Island Countries' (PICs) Fisheries Departments that wanted to start monitoring and managing their reef fish spawning aggregations (FSAs).

Within the last decade, FSAs have been targeted for live fish as part of the Live Reef Food Fish Trade. Setting up effective management measures is becoming an urgent need for the Pacific region since these aggregations support important nearshore fisheries critical for peoples' livelihoods. Management, however, requires a good understanding of these annual spawning aggregations in terms of their timing, periods of formation (season), and sometimes location, by species. Unfortunately, the fisheries research skills to address this challenge are largely lacking in PICs.

The purpose of the workshop was to address the identified need for training and was designed to give participants an understanding of major issues in coastal fisheries, in particular FSAs. Training was provided through a series of lectures, exercises, discussions and documentary films. To highlight the reality of the problems and issues of monitoring FSAs in the field, hands-on experience was gained and shared based on work in Palau and Fiji. Asap Bukurrou from the Palau Conservation Society talked about their aggregation work with SCRFA in Palau. The workshop was the first to cover such an important fisheries issue in the Pacific. In total, 22 PIC fisheries officers participated; 11 from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Palau, and Tuvalu, Samoa and Vanuatu, the rest from Fiji (Fisheries Department and marine conservation and management NGO's).

Outputs from the workshop include the need for outreach and educational materials as well as simple guidelines for conducting monitoring and long-term sampling protocols. Participants can now engage their countries to better understand the threats that FSAs present to the sustainability of their reef fish stocks and explain the need to monitor and manage them. The PICs will require policy advice guidance and follow-up meetings, preferably at the national level (this may be part of SPC work). A regional communication network was developed by compiling a contact list of participants for further discussing and sharing issues and experiences. A CD compilation of up-to-date reference and educational materials was also provided to each participant.

The workshop was jointly funded by the SPC Coral Reef Initiative of the Pacific, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Packard Foundation.

Being Yeeting¹, Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson², Aisake Batibasaga³ and Joeli Veitayaki⁴
1 Coastal Fisheries Programme, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
2 Society for the Conservation of Reef Fish Aggregations (SCRFA) This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
3 Fiji Fisheries Department This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
4 Marine Studies, University of the South Pacific This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it