November 12, 2009

South Korea to promote tuna farming  

South Korea will introduce a plan to promote the farming of tuna, which is now suffering from overfishing.

South Korea will support other coastal countries to secure their tuna resources and develop methods to farm the fish, in order to better deal with growing international restrictions on tuna fishing, according to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on Tuesday (Nov 10).

Tuna is the largest export item among South Korea's agricultural products, with shipments reaching US$332 million last year. South Korea caught 290,000 tonnes of the fish last year, accounting for 42 percent of the country's deep-sea fisheries production.

But tuna population worldwide has dropped sharply due to excessive fishing and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which handles fishing in the southern Pacific, plans to reduce the bigeye tuna fishing quota by 10 percent per year in phases over the next three years.

The ministry expects South Korea to turn to tuna farming in four or five years, as the tuna fish farming project located off Jeju Island is doing well, with the farm's three net cages hosting a total of 400 juvenile bluefin tunas. 

Complete tuna farming will be possible when the fish start to produce fertile roe, and South Korea will also be a resource-developing country of tuna by releasing artificially produced roe into the ocean, said Park Jong-gook, the minister's manager of marine policies.

South Korea had also agreed to form a consultative body with eight countries to improve economic cooperation, and official development assistance will be expanded for those countries.

The eight countries are Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau.