Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority Director Glen Joseph said Thursday it is not just time the islands receive more benefits from tuna caught in their waters, they have already been put Asian, American and other fishing countries on notice that momentous change in fishing is imminent.
The “Parties to the Nauru Agreement” — eight countries stretching from Kiribati and the Marshall Islands in the east to Papua New Guinea in the west — are no longer satisfied with getting less than five percent of the $3 billion annual revenue from the tuna harvest in the Pacific, most of it taken from within the 200 mile ocean zones surrounding these countries.
“The status quo is not satisfactory,” said Joseph, whose organization earned a paltry $1 million from licensing vessels to catch tuna in Marshall Islands in 2007, a 50 percent drop over the $2 million the year before.
The current level of tuna fishing is “not sustainable, equitable or beneficial to Pacific islands,” Joseph said, and added the PNA nations see they have the power to enforce change to their benefit.
The two key issues for Pacific islands are over-fishing of yellowfin and bigeye tuna and the desire to get more than licensing revenue from the fishing industry, Joseph said.
Key to the aggressive new posture on both these fronts are actions taken by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, more commonly called the “Tuna Commission,” at its meeting in Busan, S. Korea in December.
The previous year, when the Tuna Commission met in Guam, island nations came away empty handed after trying to get the organization — which includes the major fishing nations as well as island countries — to approve cutbacks in fishing to make sure tuna stocks stay sustainable.
“The failure of the Guam meeting (in 2007) to adopt conservation measures prompted PNA members to get organized by adopting in-zone measures in anticipation of last month’s meeting in S. Korea,” Joseph said. “PNA action was the catalyst for the Tuna Commission to successfully adopt conservation measures.”
The meeting in S. Korea agreed to reduce yellowfin and bigeye tuna catches, and also confirmed closure of high seas “pockets” between the 200-mile zones of several islands.
“We established as a condition of in-zone licensing that fishing nations cannot fish in these Opockets,’” Joseph said. “If they don’t agree, we won’t give them a license.”
Joseph said that the eight PNA nations are “taking the lead within the Forum Fisheries Agency. People are now listening to us.”
He called the development a “paradigm shift.”
The PNA nations are expected to meet in New Zealand later this year to flesh out details of their plan to extract better financial returns on fish caught in their waters, Joseph said. “The PNA nations will become stronger as a force within the Forum Fisheries Agency,” he said.
Divide and conquer tactics by fishing companies and nations have, in the past, led to a very small financial return for island nations who control most of the resources, he said. “PNA nations realize this must be stopped.”
As the PNA nations flex their muscles, Joseph said distant water fishing nations should not take this as a negative message. “Our intention is to work together for our mutual benefit,” he said. “Everyone knows we’ve been at the bottom of the barrel in terms of benefits. We need help — technical and capital. We want more. The message to fishing nations is help us develop our resource and get the benefits.”
Joseph said most islands have high unemployment rates and want help developing domestic fishing fleets, on-shore maintenance facilities for fishing boats, processing plants and other value-added developments to increase jobs and revenue.
Joseph said it is “an open invitation to distant water fishing nations, not a threat.”
