US Pacific leaders - Obama's marine proposal will hurt economy

Transcript

US Pacific territory leaders say President Obama's proposal to expand marine protected areas in the Pacific will hurt their economy and cultural values.

The plan is to widen the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument from the current 50 nautical miles, to 200 nautical miles.

But the governors of the Northern Marianas and American Samoa have asked the president to abandon the proposal.

Leilani Momoisea reports:

The governor of American Samoa, Lolo Matalasi Moliga, has written to Barack Obama asking him not to go ahead with the expansion of the marine protected areas. Our American Samoa correspondent, Monica Miller, says Lolo believes the fishing fleet in the territory already abides by strict standards. She says the governor believes the proposal will take away some of the fishing grounds that local fishers depend on to supply the territory's tuna canneries.

MONICA MILLER: There's concern that our canneries in American Samoa have been hit by high prices, and also with the minimum wage laws, that anything else that will affect their operations is going to be detrimental, and this is the only industry we have.

Taulapapa William Sword is a member of the Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council, but is speaking as a community member in American Samoa. He agrees that the expansion of protected waters will have a huge negative impact on the tuna canneries, and will do more harm than good for Pacific Islanders.

TAULAPAPA WILLIAM SWORD: The benefits to us in the Pacific are hardly there. Even the monument expansion here in American Samoa and in the CNMI have not benefitted the people very much. A lot of false promises from the environmental groups that have been pushing it. American Samoa is really the big marketplace for fishing in the region, when that slows down you end up with no market that would benefit everybody else in the region.

He says when the Pacific monuments were first set up, jobs, tourism opportunities and visitor centres were promised, but none of this has materialised. In the Northern Marianas, its three northernmost islands are part of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument that President Bush designated in 2009. Our correspondent in Saipan, Mark Rabago, says governor Eloy Inos is also against the expansion, pointing out some of the promises made by the Bush administration were not fulfilled. And he says the governor believes it will strip locals of their traditional fishing grounds, and will alienate them from an important part of their culture.

MARK RABAGO: They are preventing future generations from doing what their forefathers have been doing, which is fishing around those areas. The three islands the CNMI surrendered for the Marianas Trench monument, those were traditional fishing grounds, and now they cannot do anything with it. And any expansion that would include other islands and areas of the Pacific would infringe on that right.

Mark Rabago says the expansion will also essentially prevent CNMI from having a fishing industry in the future.

MARK RABAGO: We only have subsistence fishing, but who knows, in the future you might have that kind of industry. If we don't have the rights to the waters around the islands then how can we exploit that? And it's not as if the islanders can go anywhere, you know, this is their land.

He says Pacific Islanders feel they know best how to look after and sustain their own resources, so there is no need for this kind of expansion. The last day for submissions to the president's proposal to expand the Pacific Islands Remote Islands Marine National Monument was on Friday.