Palau President Johnson Toribiong’s goal to host this summit is to further discuss the establishment of an OPEC-type body, said summit organizer Nannette D. Malsol, an official with Palau’s Bureau of Marine Resources, in a reference to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“This is the gold that we have control of and the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, or PNA, must strive to get more value from our tuna resources.”
The summit will bring together presidents and prime ministers from the eight nations that control the area of ocean where the majority of the tuna is caught in the Pacific. This group the Parties to the Nauru Agreement include Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands established its first headquarters in Majuro earlier last week.
The presidential summit to be held in Palau is designed to set in place a road map for the newly established PNA office, said Malsol. The new fisheries headquarters will facilitate the commercial aspirations of the parties as a first step in this evolutionary process.
Although fisheries ministers representing Forum Fisheries Agency member nations meet annually, there has never been a presidential summit on what is unarguably the Pacific’s most important natural resource: tuna. This is the first summit on fisheries at the presidential level, said Marshall Islands
Foreign Minister John Silk, who said Marshall Islands President Jurelang Zedkaia will be attending the summit in Palau. The summit is set for Feb. 25.
Although the Pacific is touted as having one of the last healthy fisheries in the world, scientists warn that two staples of the global sashimi market, bigeye and yellowfin tuna, are in danger of being over-fished.
