A major problem in the Pacific is illegal fishing. About $1.7 billion is lost through illegal and unregulated fishing activity in the Pacific. Sean Dorney reports on "tunanomics".
ANALYSIS: The Asian Development Bank has just held a two-day conference in Sydney with media people drawn from a wide range of Pacific Island countries.
I was part of a panel invited to address the final session on the subject: "Reporting Pacific Business - What's the Biggest Story?"
The first speaker chose renewable energy and it was an informative address about the dramatic increase in renewable energy use in the Pacific and how costs are constantly coming down.
But my choice was tuna and I began by speaking about a story I had covered when I was in my first stint as the ABC correspondent in Papua New Guinea in 1982.
I told the gathering that when I began my journalistic career - which admittedly was a fairly long time ago, 1971 - if somebody had been talking about something that had happened 32 years previously they would have been speaking about 1939, the year the Second World War broke out.
That was 12 years before I was born and, to my mind back then, almost pre-history.
So I offered my apologies to those who might have thought that 1982 - 32 years ago - is some time way, way back in the distant past.
Biggest story
But, to me, it was a really significant year in relation to what I regarded as the biggest story in reporting Pacific business.
1982 - the year of the tuna
Why 1982? Well that was the year eight Pacific governments gathered in Nauru to establish the PNA - the Parties to the Nauru Agreement - in an effort to try to exercise some control over the economic resource that is most common to them all, tuna.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the few journalists there in Nauru all those years ago to witness and report on the signing of that agreement.
Noel Levi, then Papua New Guinea's foreign minister who later became the Secretary-General of the Pacific Islands Forum, invited me and one or two other journalists from PNG to accompany him to Nauru on the PNG's Government's VIP jet, the Kumul.
The creation of the PNA was not welcomed by some. In fact, the United States was quite cross about the fact that its then three United Nations' Trust Territories, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Marshall Islands and Palau were all intending signatories.
All had by then achieved self-government, but they were still some years away from independence.
The FSM and the Marshall Islands gained their full independence four years later in 1986 and it was not until 1994 that Palau was fully independent.
Thumbed noses
But these three self-governing Trust Territories thumbed their noses at the US and its powerful tuna lobby joined with the five independent Pacific nations (Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati) in setting up the PNA.
American officials who had flown into Nauru to try to talk them out of signing were far from happy at the outcome.
In recent years the PNA really has started to flex some muscle.
But my interest in this big Pacific business story, tuna, was sparked a couple of years earlier than that signing ceremony, It was in 1980 at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting in Kiribati.
It was then called the South Pacific Forum. Incidentally, 'South' was dropped from the name after those three northern Pacific island countries, Palau, the FSM and the Marshall Islands joined the Forum when they did emerge to full independence.
The late Robert Keith-Reid was at that 1980 Pacific leaders' forum writing for The Fiji Times. Soon after, Robert took over Islands Business magazine.
Robert helped convince me how important the tuna story was, and at one of the social functions associated with the Forum we spoke with an official from the PNG Government who told us of a grand plan to get the Pacific nations together to create what he described as the OPEC of the tuna industry.
Oil prices
OPEC - the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries - was then at the height of its power setting the world price for oil.
I sent a radio report off to the ABC and Radio Australia not identifying my source but using the information.
It created a bit of a stir but that is exactly what the signing in Nauru two years later was all about - Pacific nations trying to take control over what is paid for their tuna resources.
Fishing limits for foreign fleets
It took a while but the PNA eventually set up its own secretariat thanks to two countries in particular - the Marshall Islands where it is based in the capital, Majuro, and Papua New Guinea.
The recently dumped head of Fisheries in PNG, Sylvester Pokajam, provided $US1 million from his department's budget to help fund this creation of a PNA headquarters.
It is headed up by one of the Pacific region's best technocrats, Transform Aqorau, who previously was deputy director of the Forum Fisheries Agency.
The PNA has introduced a Vessel Day Scheme where Purse Seiner fishing fleets have to bid in something like an auction for fishing days in the Exclusive Economic Zones of the eight member countries.
Frozen days
Just last week at a meeting in Honiara, the PNA agreed on a 44,623 day limit for 2014 and to freeze the days at that level for 2015 and 2016.
The current minimum price of a fishing day for foreign fishing vessels is $6,000 and according to the PNA the Vessel Day Scheme is now worth $240 million to member countries.
At the Pacific Media Summit in New Caledonia last month there was a whole session called "Tunanomics" at which we heard that the tuna catch from the Central and Western Pacific is now worth an estimated $7 billion US dollars a year.
We also heard from Monica Miller about the problems facing the local fishing industry in American Samoa and from Robert Matau from Islands Business about how the fishing company his son works for as a marine engineer has 35 boats but only five have been operating lately because there is not enough fish.
"Their tuna catch has dropped and it's not viable for them to continue fishing in Fiji's waters anymore," he said. Part of the blame for that is put on heavily subsided Chinese fishing fleets.
Economic independence
A major problem, too, is illegal fishing. Anthony Bergin, the Deputy Director of the Australian Security Policy Institute, estimates that about $1.7 billion is lost through illegal and unregulated fishing activity in the Pacific.
Bergin proposed that the Australian patrol boat programme should not only be a Defence Department commitment; that Australian aid should also contribute to what is now being developed to replace the 22 patrol boats that Australia has donated to Pacific countries but which are coming to the end of their work life.
He says it is all about trying to help Pacific Islands nations become more economically self-reliant.
That is something that PNA's Transform Aqorau also stressed in an interview I did with him in the Cook Islands at the Pacific Islands Forum a couple of years ago.
He says it's tuna that provides an opportunity for island countries to free themselves from an over reliance on aid.
"The way to break away from that," he told me, "is to move away from how we are currently selling licences and move to a real auction system for the 'vessel days'."
"You can then maximise your economic returns and once you do that.
"You don't need donors to support you to build your wharves, your schools, your roads. And then you reduce your dependency on donors."
Aqorau concluded by saying: "That's the whole essence of being free, being free in the sense that you're drawing upon the reserves of your natural resources to become truly independent."
Sean Dorney is senior Pacific correspondent for Australian Network News.
Pacific Media Centre
