Needs must where devil

drives for Kiribati

Hard financial considerations are likely to compel Kiribati to renew a controversial fishing rights agreement with the Soviet Union, according to a former Kiribati government offi cial now living in Hawaii.

Roniti Teiwaki, formerly Kiri bati minister of natural re sources and now employed by the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Cen ter in Honolulu, said the USSR had offered US$2.4 million a year for rights to fish tuna within the 200-mile exclusive econo mic zone of Kiribati. He said this was more than twice the

amounts offered by other na tions, including the US.

Teiwaki said Kiribati was forced to make the best of its tiny available resources. The republic, which was from 1892 until 1979 the British colony of the Gilbert Islands, is made up of 33 islands scattered over half a million square miles of the Pacific. It once earned hard currency from phosphate (guano) mining (Ocean Island and Nauru are close by) but deposits have now been work ed out and the country has no other source of export earnings than its fish.

Money such as the Soviets offered was vital to the 60,000 people of Kiribati, said Teiwaki.

Kiribati now had reserves of only about US$l5O million in hard currency “and an eco nomy consisting of a bunch of islands with coconuts nobody wants.”

Kiribati’s President leremia Tabai signed the fisheries agreement with the Soviet Un ion last year, arousing concern in the US, Canada, Australia and the Pacific itself that he was attracting superpower rivalry into the previously serene is land region.

Political leaders from the pre dominantly Catholic Northern Kiribati islands have generally opposed the agreement, while those in the largely Protestant southern islands have sup ported.