“Council Offended by Removal of Last Vestiges of US Ocean Waters Open to Fishing.” That was the headline on a press release issued June 23 by the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council. Members of the panel, the presser stated, were miffed at the idea that areas inside the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone in the Pacific Ocean might be subject to increased regulations on commercial and non-commercial fishing.
Specifically, the council was “offended” by two proposals. The first involves the process of designating the marine portion of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument as a national marine sanctuary. The second involves expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which was proposed to President Biden earlier this year by a coalition of Native Hawaiian practitioners, Chamorro cultural advocates, and others.
Accompanying the press release was a map depicting U.S. territorial waters in the Pacific. Outside the boundaries are yellow dots, representing foreign vessels fishing in the area from October to December 2019. Pink dots show where U.S. vessels fished in the same period. Apart from a lone pink dot in the EEZ surrounding Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll – probably representing a U.S.-flagged purse seiner – there appeared to be no fishing in any of the EEZs outside of the Main Hawaiian Islands.
The NWHI Sanctuary
The sanctuary designation process for the Papahanaumokuakea monument is the further along of the two proposals. It was launched in 2020 following the inclusion of language in a congressional appropriations bill by Senator Brian Schatz that called on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to begin the process. NOAA has yet to finalize the designation, something not likely to occur until next year at the earliest. Even so, as part of the required process, the council is preparing draft regulations to be forwarded to NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
Already commercial fishing is banned in the monument, which includes all of the waters surrounding the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands archipelago. What the council considered last month was whether and, if so, to what extent other fishing activities should be allowed, including non-commercial, cultural, and research.
As a member of the council’s own advisory panel on non-commercial fishing pointed out, non-commercial fishing in the area is virtually non-existent, given the difficulty and expense of sailing up to the remote islands from the Main Hawaiian Islands.
Still, Guam council member Manny Dueñas was indignant on behalf of Hawaiians. Dueñas, the press release stated, observed that fishing serves to perpetuate Hawaiian culture, and does not “preserve it in a pickle jar.”
The council eventually approved a motion that urged the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries to “clarify” certain issues relating to the proposed sanctuary:
- Limiting the boundaries to the current area “to honor the previous agreement made with the Kaua`i fishing community;”
- “Incorporating cooperative research, where fishing is conducted along with scientists, in the Monuments [sic] and proposed sanctuary to provide additional value to assessing stocks across the entire Hawai`i archipelago;” and
- “Approaches to address Native Hawaiian Practices that include fishing within the proposed sanctuary, including considering them along with other non-commercial fishing.”
Further action on proposed regulations for the sanctuary is likely to be considered at the council’s next meeting in September.
The Pacific Remote Islands Area
As for the suggestion that the PRI monument be expanded, that, too, got council members’ dander up.
At present, the monument consists of almost 500,000 square miles, encompassing seven islands and atolls: Baker, Howland, and Jarvis islands; Johnston, Wake, and Palmyra atolls, and Kingman Reef. Current monument boundaries extend out 50 nautical miles from land. Earlier this year, the Pacific Remote Islands Coalition proposed expanding it to 200 nautical miles, the full extent of the U.S. EEZ, increasing the protected area to more than 750,000 square miles.
Council staffer Mark Fitchett gave the council members a presentation on the proposal. The expansion area is already closed to all commercial fishing except U.S.-flagged vessels. While Hawai`i-based longline vessels on occasion fish inside the EEZ of the Pacific Remote Island areas, U.S.-flagged purse seiners also fish there.
Fitchett focused much of his presentation on the potential impact the closure of the area could have on American Samoa, where the Starkist tuna cannery is the largest employer, by far, in the territory. The U.S. purse seine fleet is already down to just 13 vessels, and the cannery relies heavily on the fish they deliver. “A further exodus of U.S.-flagged vessels jeopardizes the cannery’s viability,” he stated. As such, it also amounts to the perpetuation of equity and environmental injustice against Pacific Islanders, he said.
Council chair Archie Soliai – now head of American Samoa’s Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources and former manager of the cannery – referred to a June 15 letter the territorial governor, Lemanu P.S. Mauga, wrote to Biden, strongly opposing the expansion.
“The tuna industry is the largest private sector employer in American Samoa, supporting jobs for nearly a third of American Samoa’s workforce,” Mauga wrote. “I implore your consideration to keep these U.S. waters open to commercial fishing for the U.S. fleet so our tuna industry that supports our fragile economy can continue to be sustained. Without a sustainable fish supply, our local tuna industry will collapse and our economy soon will follow. This would lead to an economic catastrophe that no U.S. state or territory has experienced in recent times.”
In contrast, Hawai`i Governor David Ige expressed his strong support for the expansion in a May 27 letter to Biden. This action, he wrote, “will safeguard areas of open ocean ecosystems that are intricately connected to nearshore and terrestrial ecosystems. Expansion would also protect meaningful habitats for endangered and threatened species, such as sharks and birds, who are traveling well beyond the current boundaries to breed, forage, and rest. Additionally, the expansion will protect 98 undersea mountains, or seamounts, which serve as ecological hotspots for biodiversity.”
No one spoke in favor of the expansion at the council meeting. Without dissent, it passed a motion that directed council staff to write to Biden, “requesting a comprehensive evaluation of the unintended consequences, including social and economic impacts, of a proposed expansion” of the monument. It also directed staff “to write letters to U.S. territorial governors regarding the proposal’s impacts on U.S. fisheries and unintended negative consequences related to U.S. territorial economies and conservation.”
30 x 30
In 2021, four federal agencies – the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and the Council on Environmental Quality – proposed the “America the Beautiful” plan, which, among other things, called for conserving 30 percent of the country’s land and waters by 2030.
When it comes to setting aside marine areas for protection, Wespac argues, the Pacific region is doing way more than its fair share. Council staff has estimated that the existing marine managed areas in the Pacific are already so vast that there is little need to conserve marine areas elsewhere. Should the Pacific Remote Islands monument be expanded as proposed, the council argues, the percentage of marine waters protected would reach 31 percent, with almost all of that in the Central Pacific.
“The Western Pacific region has met 97 percent of the ‘30×30’ goal to conserve 30 percent of all U.S. lands and waters,” the council stated in a press release.
Yet when it comes to the very definition of what counts as conservation, the matter is still up in the air. Council staffer Fitchett reported to the council on the discussions during meetings of the Council Coordination Committee (CCC) subcommittee on Area-Based Management, which still had not come up with a definition. (The CCC is made up of leadership and top staff of all eight regional fishery management councils.) While a suggestion had been made to adopt the definition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature for OECM (“other effective area-based conservation measures”), the CCC subcommittee balked at that, since “many of our areas may not meet the OECM criteria,” according to subcommittee meeting minutes. Subcommittee members also proposed including all of the U.S. EEZ areas under council jurisdictions – effectively all U.S. marine waters – inasmuch as the Magnuson-Stevens Act “provides conservation for 100 percent of the EEZ.”
Council staff did eventually pull together a table of protected areas, including the Papahanaumokuakea monument, Rose Atoll monument (American Samoa), the Pacific Remote Islands monument, and the Marianas Trench monument, but also added in the longline exclusion areas around the Main Hawaiian Islands and the territories (the widths of which can vary from 30 nautical miles from shore to 75 miles).
Finally, the table includes the false killer whale Southern Exclusion Zone, an area of roughly 100,000 square miles – which, however, is only closed when the Hawai`i longline fleet’s take of false killer whales inside the EEZ exceeds the permitted level. The SEZ, the council states, establishes “nearly full protection for pelagic ecosystem when trigger[ed] by take of false killer whales by the pelagic longline fishery.”
“This area has remained closed the majority of the last three years,” the council states.
Actually, the SEZ was last closed in 2018. Although the trigger for closure was met in 2021, no closure was effected because the injury determinations for false killer whales taken late in the year were not made until 2022.
Council Budget Woes
For at least the last decade, the Council’s base budget has not included funds to cover personnel costs of some of its core employees. Supplementary grants from the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Pacific Islands Regional Office (PIRO) have for years paid for the council’s work to protect coral reefs and sea turtles.
But budget cuts to NMFS have meant that PIRO is no longer able to supplement the council’s expenses in the manner to which the council has become accustomed. Specifically, the council no longer has the funds it needs to cover these programs.
“We are taking a budget hit of $343,000 from NMFS for this year,” council executive director Kitty Simonds reported. “We have been going back and forth with our region to discuss the need for these funds, which include salary and fringes for one of our staff, our capacity-building efforts, and a share of the contract that produces the [Stock Assessment and Fishery Evaluation] report.”
On hearing of the cuts on the first day of the meeting, several council members voiced their anger at NMFS. American Samoa council member William Sword wanted to know, “Where is the equity and environmental justice in that? … This needs to be corrected. It’s fundamentally wrong.”
Guam council member Dueñas was outraged: “PIRO, you are the egg that came out of our okole.”
PIRO director Michael Tosatto told the council that PIRO had for years used discretionary funds to support the council in a number of areas. “This reduction,” he said, referring to the $343,000 cut, “was caused by a significant reduction in PIRO’s budget… PIRO took a hit.”
Tosatto went on to explain that he had advised the council to include salaries for permanent employees into the council’s base budget, adding that the PIRO discretionary funding was not available every year.
Two days later, during the council’s more expansive discussion of its budget, Simonds said it was “very, very important” that the council receive funding for the SAFE report coordinator, its capacity-building efforts, scholarship program, summer high school outreach, and its sea turtle program.
Regarding the turtle protection efforts, Simonds continued, in 2010, “Congress provided several million dollars for observers and the turtle program. The funding we received started to dwindle down until it was down to $200,000, which covered at the time our [turtle] program coordinator,” Asuka Ishizaki.
She said that the council must now dive into its regular administrative budget and find the funds to cover it. Also, she said, “we’re asking headquarters to provide the region with funds for these programs.”
Tosatto again attempted to explain why PIRO could no longer fund these positions.
“There are many reasons, many issues we could discuss,” he told the council. “I can tell you to characterize this as a budget cut [to the council] is not the most accurate way to portray it. It is more that these are extra funds that were provided in addition to the council’s appropriated amounts of money. These are monies PIRO took out of its own budget… As Kitty stated, this reflected a long-term commitment to sea turtle conservation, which peaked at $7 million in 2010. Now, literally, it’s been absorbed into the larger NMFS budget.”
Tosatto noted that the cost of running the observer program, which PIRO underwrites, has been “severely underfunded,” forcing PIRO to use more of its turtle-protection funds to cover that. PIRO’s core fishery management budget was cut by about $700,000, he said, and there were no longer the discretionary funds that were once directed to the council. “I needed that $700,000 that had been going to the council to cover the needs of the observer program,” he added.
Furthermore, redirecting funds in the council’s base budget to cover items that no longer are paid for by PIRO discretionary funds is not allowed. “There is the term ‘line-item integrity,” Tosatto said. “You can’t move funds across certain areas. The council can’t reprogram funds without approval.”
“Going forward, it would be helpful to the council to cover its base activities in its base budget. … If activities like the high school program are desired as base activities, the council has to work that into their base budget,” he said.
– Patricia Tummons
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