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°Õ³ó±ðÌý issued a press release late Thursday that read more like an editorial strongly advocating on behalf of commercial fishermen in Hawaii.

The council described how a quarter of the 145 active vessels in Hawaii’s longline fleet have been unable to fish for bigeye tuna since they hit their quota limit in August, earlier than in previous years.

“Arbitrary quotas not linked to conservation objectives are keeping them tied at the docks,” Wespac said in the release. “These struggling vessels and small businesses they support are accumulating millions of dollars in debt each month, causing untold anxiety for the local fishing community and consumers.”

The fleets can still fish for bigeye in the eastern Pacific, but that is much farther away.

“This travesty has happened because of two international quota systems — one in the Eastern Pacific for larger longline vessels and another in the Western and Central Pacific for all longline vessels,” Wespac said. “Both allocate the United States a miniscule amount of bigeye tuna.”

The council says industrial foreign fleets catch most of the tuna, and that it’s purse-seine fleets — not longliners — that are really to blame. The purse-seine fleets use fish-aggregating devices when fishing for skipjack tuna, which is sold to canneries. But they inadvertently catch the bigeye tuna, which the longliners target for Hawaii’s sashimi market.

Wespac also faulted an international regulatory body that it helped to establish 15 years ago in an effort to prevent overfishing. The has “conspicuously failed to address these critical issues,” the release says.

The council is gearing up for a meeting next week in which it hopes to strategize for the commission’s next meeting in December in Bali. The commission sets the limits on how much bigeye Hawaii’s longliners can catch — it was just over 3,500 metric tons this year, roughly 7 percent lower than the previous year.

Meanwhile, a federal judge is considering a lawsuit over a proposal by the National Marine Fisheries Service to let American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands transfer some of their bigeye quotas to Hawaii. 

Earthjustice attorney David Henkin, who represents the three environmental groups who filed the lawsuit against the plan, has called this a “shell game” that allows overfishing to continue.

The case was heard Sept. 25, but the judge gave the parties two more weeks to file additional arguments, according to an .

Henkin has said that the United States must play a leadership role in protecting fish stocks even though Hawaii only accounts for a small percent of the bigeye caught in the central and western Pacific. If the U.S. were to come up with rules to skirt the quotas, he said other countries might quit adhering to them as well.

Read past Civil Beat coverage about Hawaii’s prized ahi here.