Poverty, Corruption Threaten Pacific Tuna Fisheries - Last Healthy Stocks

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"There's a lot less fish than when I started 15 years ago," a third fisher, Soloseni Penitusi, told a visiting reporter later this steamy day on Funafuti atoll, a strip of sand and poverty in the remote mid-Pacific. Penitusi was peddling small skipjack from the back of a pickup truck, discards from a big American boat that had swept up hundreds of tons of better tuna.

"It's because there are a lot more foreign boats," he said. Then should the Tuvalu government sell fewer licenses to foreign fleets? he was asked. "No," he said, smiling at the dilemma. "I can't say that. We need that money." That money is needed and that dilemma is felt on scores of islands across the Pacific, the vast setting for what may become one of the great battles between consumption and conservation in the 21st century, as a growing appetite for fish meets oceans fast being emptied of them.

For islanders like Danny Wase, fisheries director for another Pacific nation, the Marshall Islands, his people's future hinges on the outcome. "The fisheries are the only resource we have for our economic independence," Wase said on Majuro atoll, 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) north of here. "It's really important we sustain that long term."

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Last month, the Fiji government suspended its fisheries director, alleging he took bribes from Chinese companies to issue fishing licenses. His department had sought to issue four times more permits for Fijian waters than recommended by consultants. He denied wrongdoing. Official corruption has long undermined conservation efforts in the impoverished Pacific, environmentalists say. But simple "pirate" fishing may be doing even more, both by unlicensed vessels poaching in the 200-mile (322-kilometer) economic zones and by licensed boats that underreport their catch, to save on fees paid by tonnage. "We can't solve that problem because we don't have anyone on board. They might report 10 tons caught when it's 100 tons," said Sautia Maloufenua, Tuvalu's fisheries director."

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http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-21/s_26052.asp