Widespread Concern

Over Islanders'

Fishing Practices

The use of poisonous plants, ex plosives and small mesh nets to catch fish is a matter of serious concern in several Pacific territories because these practices have created a fish shortage.

At the South Pacific Conference in Lae in July, a BSIP delegate, Mariano Kelesi, said: "If we do not do something to protect our fish from dynamiting and the use of local plants to stupefy them, our reefs will be outfished" (PIM, Aug., p. 30).

He said that besides dynamite, Solomon Islanders used fire-crackers to stun fish. The plant they used to stupefy them was derris root.

Ratu K, K. T. Mara, Fiji's Member for Natural Resources, told the Lae conference that Fiji had had legisla tion prohibiting the use of explosives and derris root in fishing for about 10 years.

But several months ago, he had had to move the passing of legisla tion banning fishing over a large area to enable fish to build up in numbers again.

A Tongan delegate at the con ference, Masao Soakai, told me that fish were now scarce in Tonga be cause Tongans had "abused their natural resources" by using dynamite and small mesh nets to catch them.

—Robert Langdon.