Top 10: The World’s Biggest Tuna Seiners

There are a small number of tuna seiners operating across the world’s oceans that boast tonnages far surpassing the majority. Out of more than 750 purse seiners fishing for tuna globally, we’ve identified the Top 10 biggest, including just some of the reasons fishing firms have chosen to add these giant vessels to their fleets.

But at a time when fleet overcapacity and the “effort creep” are now common terms in international management meetings, is the trend of “bigger is better” starting to fall out of fashion?

With most of the Top 10 biggest seiners recording gross tonnages of more than 4,000 tons each, they boast a combined total of over a whopping 41,000 tons together. The majority, if not all, according to RFMO information are owned or managed by Spanish fishing companies, and seven are flagged to Spain.

A representative of a major tuna fishing firm situated in Spain, previously told Atuna that one of the most economical advantages in operating such large seiners is that, despite the increase in vessel size, usually the exact same amount of crew is needed onboard, meaning increased labor costs are minimal compared to the seiner’s extra carrying capacity.

However, management of another Spanish fishing company, which states that its seiners do not appear on the Top 10 list, stated that the once obvious benefits from operating such large seiners may be void in the state of today’s tuna industry.

He said that as a firm, they don’t see the benefit of having such large carrying capacity these days, and that the increased costs of operating larger seiners have turned them off from having these giant vessels in their fleet, as catches per fishing trip averagely decline.

The main cost he pointed to was fuel, a commodity which is largely fluctuant in price, just like whole round tuna. When fuel costs are sporadically high, this then largely impacts the operational cost of these super seiners, more than for smaller fishing vessels.

Despite managing several large vessels in the past, he said his company has now ditched these for mid-sized seiners in both Pacific and Indian Ocean fishing grounds. The increased presence of catch quotas, fishing management restrictions, and the reported decline in stocks are all reasons why large seiners might not be as efficient now as they once were.

This realization was also echoed by our first source, who stated that the most recent seiners to be constructed by Spanish companies have been approximately 1,500 to 1,700 tons in fish hold capacity.

A concern of overcapacity in the WCPO is one of the main drivers in this trend, which has been high on the agenda at top tuna industry gatherings in recent years, with worries over the future of the global resource.

For our first Spanish source, the economic benefit of being able to remain at sea for a longer period of time was reason enough to build bigger vessels initially, which allowed the capacity to hold as much tuna as possible. However, he noted that the rate of recent catch means that it’s unlikely that the seiner will grow any more from the current biggest size.

“The catch is not increasing so much to justify increasing the size further,” he stressed.

But for Spanish firms in particular, according to him, the economic benefit of having larger seiners was once strong in the Pacific, and still is in some respects, as vessels have to run longer distances to reach important discharge ports. In the Eastern Pacific, he explained, there can be instances where seiners are more than ten days from shore at a given time.

For other countries, he said that the operational procedures are much different, and other than European fleets, most seiners based in the Pacific region are often operating a lot closer to their home ports. He also said that in this region markets are a lot more fixed, such as Bangkok and the Philippines.

Contrastingly, Europeans push to sell more on the Eastern side in South America mostly, giving the need for the extra capacity allowing vessels to remain at port, waiting for cargo ships.

The Intertuna Tres tops the 10 biggest list, and is flagged to the Seychelles, despite RFMO information noting that it is managed by a Spanish fishing firm. This same company also boasts two of the other Top 10 seiners in its fleet, and is reportedly landing around 170,000 tons of tuna per year, with operations totaling 26 vessels. While several sources state that the construction of super seiners is a thing of the past, these vessels continue in operation today, and likely will for years to come, at a time when the overcapacity of the global tuna fleet is a subject surrounded by heavy concern.

As presented at the Pacific Tuna Forum in Fiji in October 2015, at the time 17 new purse seiners were under construction to be added to the WCPO fleet, with oversupply being identified as the major problem this creates, and the bad news that this means for boatowners. As well as this, more seiners are also being built for EPO operations and for fishing in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Despite nothing indicating that there are super seiners being added to the global fleet, no matter their size, many in the industry have called for a total freeze in capacity. They believe that new vessels should only be built in replacement of old ones, while more room should be made for local small-scale boats.

In June 2012, the ISSF adopted a conservation measure aimed at beginning to address excess fishing by the global large-scale tropical tuna purse seiner fleet. The resolution to manage purse seine capacity called for direct action to prevent additional new vessels being introduced into the already over-crowded tuna fisheries, unless they replace older existing vessels. However, this was only imposed on vessels on the ISSF Pro-Active Vessel Register (PVR).

While the move was praised by many, others state that by replacing older vessels with new ones, you might not be increasing fishing capacity, but you are increasing efficiency, with new technology making catching tuna quicker and easier, giving big potential to increase the impact on stocks.

Despite Albacora adding three new seiners to its fleet over the last two years, the company noted that the size of its fleet has not expanded, with three vessel sales having also been noted in its books. The firm assured that the changes were fully compliant with ISSF capacity rules.

However, ISSF’s steps haven’t totally satisfied all in the industry, as environmentalists and several boatowners call for stricter rules to be put in place, preferably by RFMOs. Whatever measures are used to stop the global effort creep, they stress that the serious problem needs to be recognized soon, and a solution devised to tackle it.