Four tuna species spawn in one sea shared by six countries. Europe buys the catch and sets many of the rules it is caught under.

The ground

Six countries share the Coral Triangle: Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. They signed the agreement that gave the region its name in 2009. It is the global centre of marine biological diversity, and it is the spawning and nursery ground for the four tuna species that reach world markets: skipjack, yellowfin, bigeye and albacore. The wider Western and Central Pacific supplies close to half the global tuna catch. Fish and fleets both cross national lines, which is why almost nothing about this fishery can be governed inside one country.

The corporate question

One European buyer sits at the end of that chain. Europe is a large market for the region's tuna and, through import rules and certification schemes, a large part of how the catch is governed. In May 2026 the trade agreement between the European Union and Indonesia removed the 18 per cent duty on tuna fillets and the 24 per cent duty on whole tuna with no volume limit, and opened duty-free quotas of 800 tonnes of canned tuna and 5,000 tonnes of loins. Europêche, which represents EU fishing enterprises, objected that the agreement leaves out the ILO Work in Fishing Convention while Indonesia supplies more fishers than any other country. The buyer's own sourcing standard sits on top of all that, and it is the part the buyer controls.

What we ask here

We ask what a sourcing standard is worth when the vessel, the transhipment ship and the cannery sit in different jurisdictions and the fish crosses all of them. We ask who the standard actually reaches: the crew on a distant-water boat, the workers in a cannery in General Santos, the coastal fishers whose catch competes with an industrial fleet. And we ask what the buyer knows about any of it, and what it does with what it knows.