NOAA schedules public tuna fishing advisory meeting for May 27, 2026

The quiet but important part of Pacific tuna policy played out in a three-hour web conference, where NOAA Fisheries convened the Permanent Advisory Committee from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. HST on May 27, 2026. The meeting was open to the public and sat squarely in the run-up to the next round of Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission work, where the U.S. position on tuna limits, monitoring and regional priorities starts to harden.

NOAA set the meeting up as a briefing point for the 2026 U.S. objectives heading into the 23rd Regular Session of the Commission and the year’s subsidiary body meetings. Interested participants were asked to submit contact information by May 7 to receive documents by email, and Katrina Poremba of NOAA Fisheries’ Pacific Islands Regional Office was listed for call-in and submission details. The committee itself was created under the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Convention Implementation Act and includes 15 to 20 Commerce-appointed members, plus the chair or designee of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Advisory Committee and officials from fisheries management authorities in American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

That mix matters because it is one of the few formal places where territorial interests can get in front of U.S. commissioners before the bigger Commission session. NOAA said the Pacific Islands Regional Office works with other U.S. agencies on international fisheries agreements in the western and central Pacific, a region that covers waters around Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Pacific Remote Island Areas, along with many Pacific island nations and high seas areas. The fisheries in play include purse seine, longline, albacore troll and local fisheries for highly migratory species, which makes the advisory talk relevant far beyond commercial fleets alone.

For recreational and small-scale tuna fishers, the most telling part of the agenda is not a single decision made on May 27, but the set of fights queued up around South Pacific albacore, electronic monitoring and how far the U.S. pushes for enforceable rules. NOAA said the United States helped adopt a management procedure for South Pacific albacore at WCPFC 22 and that implementation details would be discussed in 2026. NOAA also said the U.S. secured the lead to develop an electronic monitoring measure for adoption at the next Commission meeting. Those are the kinds of policy moves that can shape catch accounting, observer coverage and the pace of future management changes.

The backdrop is a fishery running hot. WCPFC materials said 2024 produced the highest tuna catch ever recorded in the western and central Pacific, including a record skipjack catch. NOAA has also framed South Pacific albacore as a key economic driver for American Samoa’s longline fleet, which tells you where the pressure points are likely to land when quotas, stock rebuilding and access talks get serious. The next Commission meeting is already on the calendar for November 30 to December 4, 2026, in Port Vila, Vanuatu, so the May advisory session was the place where the opening shots were being lined up before the real negotiating grind begins.