Partner Profile: Sekol
Pioneering tuna fisher and rancher in South Australia
Sekol are award winning and pioneering Southern bluefin tuna fishers and ranchers in Port Lincoln, South Australia. They have been a part of, and witness to, the near collapse of the fishery in the 1980s, and then helped lead its recovery from poling, to purse seining, back to poling, to finally ranching. Their story, similar to that of the Southern bluefin, is one of despair, to one of being on the road to triumph — a fishery at maximum sustainable yield.
Despair to Triumph — the Industry
Sekol is a partnership between two South Australian families, the Kolega and the Skoljarev family that, along with many other families from the town of Kali, in Croatia, escaped Nazi occupation and fled to Australia where they took their fishing knowledge to the yet un-fished waters off the southern Australian coastline.
In the early years, the fishing was good, and the tuna were tinned for a low price per kilogram. The industry expanded rapidly employing more and more people, and switched to purse seining of the schools of tuna away from pole and line fishing. As freezer technology improved and deep freezers were put onto larger fishing vessels that could stay at sea for many months, even years at a time, far off shore fishing expanded — especially by Japan that prize all tuna species.
It wasn’t long before catches of the Southern bluefin began to decline rapidly. The mentality was like that of an F1 racing team — who don’t know what a car can do until it breaks. The sad reality of the fishing industry is that by the time it breaks there has been too much investment into the industry and too many people employed and the hard decisions are avoided until the inevitable. In this case, the industry practically collapsed and many jobs were lost.
During this time, higher quality tuna were entering Japan, where tuna is eaten raw as sashimi and sushi. The diet of the Japanese was also changing to fattier foods — something attributed to the post-war introduction of fast foods by the Americans. As a result the fatty ‘toro’ of the bluefin tuna became prized instead of being cat food.
Luckily for the Australian industry, Southern bluefin was a “fatty” tuna with toro. It was just a question of how were they going to get the tuna from the Great Australian Bight to the Japanese market in the condition required. They also needed to better manage the industry despite a self-imposed industry-wide ban on purse seine fishing. This came by way of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT) the world’s first and only single species Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) formally established in 1993. Originally a tripartite agreement between Australian, Japan and New Zealand, who began enforcing strict quotas in 1985, the CCSBT has added South Korea, Indonesia, and South Africa as full members, Taiwan and the EU as extended members, and the Philippines as a cooperating non-member.
Although there is still a ways to go, under the management of the CCSBT, the spawning stock biomass of Southern bluefin tuna has risen significantly — especially after Japanese over-catch was identified and action taken against Japan in international court resulting in a halving of their quota over a five year period. Recent cutting edge DNA based research has shown the spawning stock biomass to be 3 times higher than previous findings. The industry played a significant role in supporting this research, and to this day, through the tagging of every single fish, and underwater video counting of each fish that enters the cages, the industry is a world leader.
The other challenge the industry faced was getting the resource to Japan in sashimi-grade form. So the industry partnered with Japanese technicians and managed to create a tuna ranching industry whereby the tuna were able to be caught and towed alive closer to the infrastructure of the harbour city of Port Lincoln. This enabled the tuna to be harvested in small quantities and be trucked and air-freighted in a chilled state to the auction floors of Japan, or alternatively, instantly frozen to -60C for shipping to Japan.
Although the tuna are mostly fed the pilchards that they gather to feed on in the Great Australian Bight, the Japanese, initially, preferred a higher fat product and fattier baitfish had to be imported. The Japanese buyers also refused to accept tuna fed artificial feeds that took many years and many dollars to develop by the Australian industry and scientists. Although the industry would prefer to use more of the local pilchard, the government is still conservatively managing this fishery. Again, improvements can always be made. and the industry, based on past performance, will make them.
Sekol’s Story
Despite being one of the smaller to mid sized companies in the industry, Sekol was the first to achieve ISO9001, ISO14001, ISO22000, and AS4801 for company management, environmental management, quality management, and for occupational health and safety management.
The company is regularly members of joint management committees together with government representatives and scientists. The company also collaborates with scientists and students, and provides their fish and their farm as a research platform. One example of this was collaboration in the development of a fillet level traceability system that, together with Australia’s federal research organization (CSIRO), confirmed forensic traceability from a piece of tuna sushi back to the individual fish was possible.
Why Fishcoin?
Fishcoin is designed to incentivise the collection of the much needed key data elements at critical tracking events through seafood supply chains and this can provide traceability in order to access markets and selected buyers. Access and information is something that Sekol want to harness in order to identify buyers, form relationships, and to help them better meet the needs of the market. Further, fishcoin could also be used to reward fishers and farmers like Sekol who apply, or allow sensors to be applied to their boats or cages in order to gather data of value to them or their input providers, and identify areas of possible improvement.
Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?
Companies and organisations throughout the seafood industry are signing up almost daily to be rollout partners in the Fishcoin ecosystem. If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please read through our white paper, and contact our team.
Please note the views expressed by the author may not necessarily represent the views of the Eachmile and Fishcoin teams or their partners. Members are encouraged to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives.
