Niue backs PNG for a better Tuna Treaty

ISLAND BUSINESS

Niue is backing Papua New Guinea in ending a 25-year relations with the United States, after it abrogated the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, signed in 1987.

Making the statement a day after being re-elected Niue’s Premier, Toke Talagi said his country was on the same wavelength as PNG, which announced it did not want to continue under the present circumstances.

The treaty allows US fishing boats limitless access to the Pacific’s tuna stocks.

“We formally give notice to withdraw from the multilateral treaty on fisheries with the U.S.,” acting PNG Prime Minister Sam Abal was quoted as saying in April in the local daily newspaper Post Courier under a banner headline screaming “USA Ejected.”

The decision effectively ended two years of fruitless negotiations to renew the treaty. “We’ve been begging them for years to update it, but they haven’t been listening at all,” said Sylvester Pokajam, a senior fisheries official in PNG, who is also the chairman of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), an association of eight Pacific islands nations in whose waters most of the region’s tuna is caught. “Now the treaty is dead in the water,” he said.

The treaty had been in its third set of renegotiations since it was first signed and was due to expire in mid-2013 if no agreement could be reached between the United States and the other countries. Under its provisions, it ceases to exist a year after any one of four key members (U.S., PNG, FSM or Kiribati) withdraws.

The other treaty members are the Cook Islands, the FSM, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Samoa. New Zealand and Australia are also members but do not receive development aid.

The U.S. treaty is unique in the region in that it directly links development aid to access to fishing grounds, though such arrangements are common between European and African states.

The aid totals US$18 million a year and is shared by 13 countries. For some, which receive little money from fishing licences because their waters attract few tuna, the aid is significant; for others, like PNG or Kiribati or FSM, much less.

In addition, the treaty provides for the U.S. taxpayer to subsidise, to the tune of $6 million a year, most of the vessels’ licence fees, while the vessels contribute about US$5 million.

It caps the number of U.S. vessels at 40, but does not limit how many days each vessel can fish. It also provides a framework for such cooperative ventures as overflights by U.S. Coast Guard planes searching for poachers and other law-enforcement activities.

Talagi said the Pacific would need to ensure that whatever replacement they find should be better than what they are presently getting.

“This will be a key factor to see what our abilities are at leveraging this massive resource and earn more from it.

“The sea is our fish farm and so far, our returns from it has not been as good as they can be.

“I hope both New Zealand and Australia will support this and help us to better manage our returns from it.”

Talagi said the Pacific was getting closer to a solution to this than they had in the past and that all members of the Forum Fisheries Agency were of the same mind.

“We just need to agree on how to coordinate our efforts so we can all benefit from a new approach better than our current returns,” he said. 

“We should be developing partnerships in all stages in the process of catching, processing and selling.”

Talagi managed to gather enough support during the elections this year to retain his seat in parliament.

Talagi was delighted with the outcome of the elections as well as the premiership.

“It is heartening to know that people have shown their support for the policies my government has been advocating and promoting over the past three years,” he said.

“My re-election means that I can continue with our stated policies of continuing to manage our finances and maintaining financial stability, promoting economic growth with tourism as the main driver and encouraging private sector investment. This will assist us generate more revenues through NCT which will give us more resources to help people and the community.”

While he admitted he was not confident in retaining the premiership, he said politics was a funny beast, ‘but my own campaigning showed that people understood what I was trying to do and supported that”.

On major economic policies, he said his government had been working with New Zealand to start a major tourism development, particularly more accommodation, securing airline services, more targeted promotions and marketing, and more resources to help business grow more, and more services and tours.

“We will also sharpen budget costs and expenditures and seek to reduce costs and wastage and increase revenues from government trading operations such as the bond store, and so on,” he said.

His rival Coe said the outcome of the election and the premier’s position could have been better had their leader campaigned to gather more members from the other side.

He said this would be his final term and he wanted to be remembered as an honest and vocal member of the assembly, working for transparency and good governance.