Uniting to save

our resources

w E L L I N G T O N

David

Barber

It’s a sobering thought for anyone who lives in the Pacific that all the world’s oceans are fast being plundered of their fish. In 1993, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation esti mated that 70 per cent of the world’s marine stocks were either fully exploited,

over exploited, depleted or very slowly

recovering from over-fishing. There is no reason to believe much has changed since then and that estimate covered only species and areas for which data were available. “The high seas,” New Zealand’s former fisheries minister, Doug Kidd, pre dicted gloomily last year, “will be a desert in a decade or two unless drastic action is taken and soon.”

Most of the damage has been done in the Northern Hemisphere, where depleted fishing grounds have increasingly forced local fleets - many of them subsidised, inefficient and debt-ridden - to head south of the Equator, bringing their plundering tactics to our part of the world. The Pacific’s several species of tuna are one of the few fisheries in the world yet to be over exploited. But the big question is: How long will it be preserved? There are already signs that stocks of big eye and albacore are beginning to show stress.

The island states have some of the biggest Exclusive Economic Zones on the

globe - collectively covering 30 million

sq km of ocean - and most of the highly migratory tuna passes through them. But effectively policing the zones to prevent them being raped by far-away fleets is beyond their capabilities, even with the Forum Fisheries Agency work in coordi nating surveillance by the Royal New Zealand and Australian air forces.

Tiny Kiribati, for instance, with only 77,000 people spread over a total land area of 817 sq km on 33 atolls and islands, has

an EEZ covering 3.6 million sq km, the biggest in the Pacific. The Republic of the Marshall Islands’ 54,000 population on only 170 sq km of land, has a 2.1 -million sq-km EEZ to worry about.

Tuna is the most valuable economic resource of all the island states. They can not rely on tourism to boost their economies because they don’t have the air links or infrastructure. Some have timber but, unlike fish, its harvest is not sustain able. Estimates put the landed value of all fish taken from the Pacific EEZs at around SUSI.S billion a year. But the countries who under international law own the resource get about five per cent of this or less. It’s one thing to have sovereign con trol over a huge area of ocean packed with a high-value product, it’s another to get a fair return from it and be confident the resource is being exploited sustainably.

Policing the zones, which are fished by up to 1000 ships from the United States, Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan a year, is virtually impossible. Striking a hard bar gain with their governments for a reason able payment for the right to take their resource is difficult.

This year should see two major devel opments which will help the island states get a fair deal for their marine resorces.

A satellite-based Vessel Monitoring System should be installed at the FFA’s Honiara headquaters by the end of the year allowing the agency to monitor the whereabouts of boats within Forum mem bers’ EEZs. But that alone will not solve the problem. There is a crying need for the region itself to establish proper conserva tion and management practices. Given their vast EEZs, island states do not have the technical, financial and manpower resources to honour their obligations in this respect. And if they don’t do their bit,

they can hardly expect the countries fish ing in the high seas through which the migratory tuna move to play their part in conservation and resource management.

To this end a conference, officially dubbed the High Level Multilateral Consultation on the Conservation and Management of Fisheries Resources of the Central Western Pacific, will be held in Majuro in June. The FFA members will meet representatives of the five fishing states to try to develop strategies for the sustainable management of tuna stocks in accordance with decisions of the United Nations High Seas Fisheries Conference which ended in August 1995.

The challenge, says Fiji’s Satya Nandan, probably the world’s leading authority on the subject, who will chair the Majuro conference, is not “whether” but “how” to establish cooperation between the island states and the distant fishing countries. This will require the island nations to agree among themselves on whether to seek further multilateral arrangements such as the 1988 treaty with the United States which pays all countries for access to the EEZs of FFA members, or continue with bilateral agreements like the other four fishing states have negotiat ed. Last year’s Forum communique from Majuro said regional fisheries “must be developed sustainably and in a way that maximises the benefit to Forum mem bers”. New Zealand and Australia believe the FFA members have more clout work ing together and will strike better deals using the multilateral course. But some island states, keen to build up their own fishing capabilities through joint ventures, favour going it alone. It looks as though, once again, the concept of cooperation for the common good will be put to the test in the Pacific this year. ■