| Summary: | The Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) stretches approximately 6,000 nautical miles across numerous jurisdictions, from the archipelagos of Southeast Asia to the remote atolls of Kiribati in the Central Pacific. This vast ocean is home to the world's most productive tuna fisheries, supplying global markets with skipjack, bigeye, yellowfin and albacore worth approximately US$5.5 billion.3 These fisheries are critically different from other tuna fisheries in that 87 per cent of all reported WCPO tuna catches are harvested from waters under national jurisdiction.4 Unlike the high seas tuna fisheries of the Eastern Pacific, Indian Ocean and North Atlantic, the WCPO tuna fisheries are predominantly owned by a small group of developing coastal States.
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