Pim Opinion

Contempt for tuna accord

When President Ronald Reagan sent the South Pacific tuna treaty to the United States Senate for its consent, he pointed out that the subject matter it embodied constituted the single most serious cause of friction between the US and the nations of the South Pacific. Despite that, the treaty continues to languish on Capitol Hill and, given the other procedures that must follow its formal approval, an operative date is impossible even to guess.

The Congress assigns higher priority to the Iran arms deals and the siphoning of funds to the Contra cause in Nicaragua. It assigns higher priority to an extraordinary array of trade measures, reflecting its own protectionist mood and the pressures being applied by interest groups in the electorate. Increasingly, too, it is preoccupied with the developing race for nomination as candidates for the presidency next year.

Obviously, all these matters are important. Unravelling the truth about Contragate is fundamental to the rule of law and the credibility of foreign policy in the United States. The US role in securing freer, fairer international trade without risking a severe recession in the West is crucial and the Reagan Administration’s recent bold initiative for a negotiated, multilateral trade settlement by the end of next year is a direct response to the protectionism in the Congress. And the outlook of the next American Administra tion will be affected significantly by events like this.

It is unfortunately true, however, that in times of stress the American political system finds it extremely difficult to maintain a balanced view of its overall role in the world. Compared with the other congressional preoccupations of recent months, the tuna treaty is a simple and, indeed, overdue measure to redress long-standing wrongs perpetrated by American commercial in terests upon a group of small but friendly countries in a region of

growing strategic significance.

The signing of the treaty was a significant gesture by the Reagan Administration acknowledging the case put by the Pacific countries and the spirit of the agreement. But the same commercial interests, represented by the American Tunaboat Association and its Washington lobby, the US Tuna Foundation, treats the accord with contempt. The result can only be an increasingly jaundiced view of the US in the states for whom the treaty is crucially important.

It needs to be remembered, for example, that when the authorities of Kiribati apprehended an American trawler, fishing illegally in its economic zone, no fewer than ten other American trawlers escaped, though their illegal activities had been well documented and their identities established.

Kiribati claims, quite justifiably, that those who escaped also should be made available to face the legal consequences of their actions. One of them was the infamous Jeanette Diana, arrested in one of the first incidents of this type by the Solomon Islands Government, which suffered American economic sanctions for its pains.

We have progressed since then, but how far in real terms? The island governments lack the physical resources to mount more than token or sporadic efforts against the high-technology tuna pirates of the American West Coast.

They believed, with good reason, that with the signing of the tuna treaty, such action was no longer necessary that they would, in fact, be properly compensated at last for the exploitation of a critically important resource. In reality, nothing has changed.

If the extensive resources of the American diplomatic service deployed throughout this region are not able to convey the message to Washington about the consequences of this situation it is surely no wonder that American foreign policy is in disarray.