LONGLINE FISHERY
38. As an interim measure, CCMs listed in Attachment 1, Table 3 shall restrict the level of bigeye catch to the levels specified in Table 3. Where the limits in Table 3 have been exceeded, any overage of the catch limit by a CCM listed in Table 3 shall be deducted from the catch limit for the following year for that CCM
*Provisional and maybe subject to revision following data analysis and verification
**For the United States and those who maintain a 5% observer coverage level, no catch increase is allowed.
Any increase in BET tuna catch limit, up to 10%, by a CCM in table 3 shall correspond with a proportional increase of observer coverage, (eg observer + Electronic Monitoring (EM) coverage increases from 5% to 10%; and for example, a 2.5 percentage point increase in observer + EM coverage corresponds with a 5% increase in the catch limit; and a 5 percentage point increase in observer + EM coverage corresponds with a 10% increase in the catch limit.) A minimum level of 5% ROP coverage shall be maintained.
Any CCM who wants such an increase shall notify the Secretariat by the end of February of the year of fishing operations. If such CCM fails to achieve the required observer coverage level assessed for the year of increase of catch limits, then it will be subject to a payback penalty of 110% of the increased portion of the catch limit that
can be repaid in either of the next two years, and will be assigned a status of priority non-compliant through the CMR process for this obligation.
***Any observer coverage above 5% can be achieved by human observer and/or EM coverage
In accordance with the deletion of paragraph 9 of CMM 2021 01, catch and effort of U.S. flagged Hawaii based longline vessels will no longer be attributed to US Participating Territories, future attribution for the US territories shall remain separate.
Japan will make an annual one-off transfer of 500 metric tonnes of its bigeye tuna catch limit to China.