Pacific tuna fleets pushed to lift ban in waters they barely fished
President Donald Trump’s order to re-open distant, protected Pacific waters to U.S. fishing fleets followed years of dire warnings by the region’s commercial seafood interests. Without that access, they said, American Samoa’s tuna industry could collapse.
“This is not just a policy issue,” Taotasi Archie Soliai, a senior policy director for American Samoa’s governor, said in May of the re-opening. “It’s a matter of economic survival for our people.” Soliai was among those in the Oval Office to celebrate as Trump signed the order.
However, data from the U.S. Pacific Marine Fisheries Service shows that neither the purse seine fleet based in American Samoa nor the longline fleet based in Hawaiʻi spent any real time fishing for tuna in those waters during the five-year runup to their closure.
Still, Soliai and other American Samoa leaders, along with key fishing officials based in Hawaiʻi, repeatedly sought for the federal government to re-open more than 400,000 square miles of deep ocean around Jarvis and Wake islands, plus Johnston Atoll.
That area was added in 2014 to the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, a protected area created five years earlier to better safeguard the ocean ecosystem — including imperiled sharks, seabirds, sea turtles and other marine creatures — against invasive species, pollution and climate change.
Conservationists say those protections across vast swaths of the central Pacific have helped keep the ocean’s tuna stocks more sustainable.
The purse seine fleet from 2009 to 2014 spent just 0.15% to 0.65% of its annual days fishing in the Pacific around Jarvis, according to figures provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are among the closest waters in the monument to American Samoa.
During the same period, the NOAA data showed, the Hawaiʻi longline fleet deployed no more than 1.88% of its annual sets in the waters around Jarvis and Johnston, which lies closer to Hawaiʻi.
Neither U.S. tuna fleet, according to the fisheries data, fished in the waters around the more-distant Wake.
“The bottom line to why they hadn’t been there previous to the expansion,” said Rick Gaffney, a member of the Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition, “is because they didn’t need to go there.”
“No longliner or purse seine is going to travel any further than they need to in order to fill their fish hold,” said Gaffney, whose group of scientists, fishers, cultural practitioners, traditional navigators and others, aim to support the monument’s conservation goals. “They were able to catch enough fish closer to the cannery or closer to Hawaiʻi for the long liners, so they didn’t go there.”
The purse seiners land most of their tuna catch in American Samoa to be canned, while the longliners land the tuna they catch in Hawaiʻi to be sold fresh.
The regional fishery leaders who’ve pressed for re-entry into those waters agreed with Gaffney.
“If you can find (tuna) closer, you save money on fuel, right?” said William Sword, the American Samoa-based chair of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, or Wespac.
Sword added, however, that “things have changed nowadays.”
A Steep Entry Fee
Sword and other regional fishery officials point to the rising costs for U.S. tuna vessels to fish in waters controlled by Western Pacific nations — a trend that coincided with the monument’s expansion.
Eight Pacific nations have banded together to form the world’s largest sustainable tuna purse seine fishery under what’s known as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, and that coalition charges both purse seiners and long liners a daily rate to fish in the 200-mile zone surrounding their shores.
The rate varies from vessel to vessel, said agreement CEO Sangaalofa Clark. Overall, though, the revenues those nations collect from purse seiners alone have grown from around $100 million in fiscal year 2007-2008, Clark said in an email, to $450 million based on the same level of fishing.
Those fees, along with caps on the total days foreign purse seiners and longliners can fish in the member nations’ waters, helps better regulate and sustain the tuna fishery, Clark said.
That the tuna vessels are still willing to pay the rising costs, Clark added in her email, “indicates foreign fleets got away with taking billions of dollars of tuna from Pacific Island countries over several decades for far less than the real value of that catch.”
Nonetheless, Eric Kingma, president of the Honolulu-based Hawaiʻi Longline Association, said those increased daily costs “changed the whole landscape for purse seine operations.”
“It’s very expensive to fish in national waters of the PNA members, and so then the high seas become more attractive,” said Kingma, who also supports access to the expansion area for the fleet he leads.
Meanwhile, the number of Chinese fishing vessels in the Pacific has grown exponentially since the marine monument’s expansion, Sword said, leading to increased competition among tuna vessels on the high seas.
“We need our boats fishing there,” Sword said of the expanded monument waters controlled by the U.S., where fishing by foreign fleets remains prohibited.
Hawaiʻi Sanctuary Next?
Historically, the U.S. purse seiner and longliner fleets did in certain years spend more time fishing in the waters that would later become part of the marine monument, NOAA fishing data going back to 1988 shows. Overall, however, their presence there remained limited.
The most active year for the purse seine fleet in future monument waters was 1997, according to the data, when it spent 21% of its total fishing time there and drew more than a quarter of its catch from there.
Most years, however, the two fleets only spent a fraction of their time in those waters — or no time at all.
Still, Soliai said the pre-2009 data shows the monument waters have historically been important to U.S. tuna fishing and could be important going forward.
A report from the National Marine Fisheries Service further states that 85% of the tuna caught between 1988 and 2008 in monument waters was landed in American Samoa to be canned in Pago Pago.
“I think that’s an important data set to consider,” Soliai said.
Regardless of historical fishing activity, the boom in Chinese fishing vessels or the increased costs to fish in other nations’ waters, U.S. commercial fishing interests along with Wespac have consistently opposed establishing marine protected areas across the Pacific.
Under Wespac Executive Director Kitty Simonds, Gaffney said, the fishery management group’s “agenda has long been to do everything you can to prevent the creation of marine protected area … Anytime anything comes up that even smacks of a protected area, (Simonds) has stood against it.”
Last month, emboldened by the lifting of the restrictions at the Pacific Islands Heritage monument, Wespac’s members voted to urge Trump to similarly lift the U.S. commercial fishing bans at the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary, which covers the length of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
“This executive order gives us a real opportunity to reform outdated policies,” Simonds said in a release, “and support our fisheries more effectively.”
Local researchers, however, say that the ecosystem-based management used at Papahānaumokuākea and, until recently, the deep waters of Pacific Islands Heritage, are the best way to keep tuna stocks sustainable.
“The way you look at these protected areas — and that was really the basis for the expansion — was to recognize that these are bank accounts,” University of Hawaiʻi Kewalo Marine Laboratory Director Robert Richmond said.
Closing those areas off to commercial fishing doesn’t just preserve the fish stocks but allows them to produce even more fish, Richmond said, kind of like the interest generated by a savings account.
“These are bank accounts not only for present day fisheries, but for future fisheries as well,” Richmond said. “The Pacific is, in fact, all connected.”
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.