Controversy over tuna laws

A BID to impose management of tuna in American Samoa’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) has caused a major controversy in the territory. The United States Congress is planning to amend the Magnuson Act so that tuna at present exempted from management in all waters of the US and its territories would come under government control. This is being opposed by

the fish-canning companies in Pagopago

out of fears that there may be restrictions in the future in American Samoa’s EEZ which would affect their commercial viability.

Hearings will go ahead this month when Congress members from the House of Representatives committee on merchant marine and fisheries convene in Honolulu to consider the changes to the Fishery Conservation and Management Act (known as the Magnuson Act after its original sposor) under Hawaiian congresswoman Pat Saiki. It is Saiki who is sponsoring this amendment. She is supported in her move to bring tuna under management in all US and territory EEZ waters by the Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council.

Leading the opposition is American

Samoan congressman Faleoamavaega Eni Hunki, who does not have a vote in the US House of Representatives. He has issued a statement from his Washington office saying the amendment will jeopardisc the jobs of the 5000 people who work at the two Pagopago canneries, and he claims the Saiki amendment is also

opposed by the US tuna industry.

Congresswoman Saiki does have on her side the American Samoa governor, Peter Tali Coleman. A source close to the governor said Faleomavaega’s stance

was “politically expedient given the eco-

nomic power of the tuna canneries and the fishing fleet based in American Samoa”.

When the Magnuson Act was originally enacted, it was the prevailing scientific theory that the species was highly migratory, so making it resistant to management within any one EEZ. That belief has partly been discredited, and marine scientists have since found tuna do not migrate nearly so far as they had previously thought. Moreover, Coleman and other proponents of the amendment argue, only the US and the Bahamas remain as countries which do not control tuna within their fisheries laws. What

this meant is that US authorities had no say in what was happening to the spe cies, unlike fishery administrators in other nations.

The political ramifications are con siderable.

The two tuna canneries plus the 25 boats which use Pagopago as a base are the mainstay of the territory’s economy.

Star Kist canneries President Robert

Hevpzler has been reported as saying

that tuna cannot be managed unilateral ly, that its cannery operations are built on international tuna management.

There has also been the argument put forward that American tuna boats in fighting for access to other countries’

EEZ waters have been able to use the fact that US does not control tuna in order to negotiate with island govern ments.

Coleman’s office counters that very lit tle of the tuna catch processed at Pago pago is, in fact, caught within American Samoa’s EEZ. Most of the boats range much farther south and west- The controversy is made more fuzzy by the fact that no one knows what form this management would take in the case of American Samoa. There is no policy, no mechanism for it to happen that is assuming the amendment makes it through both houses of the Congress. □