Kiribati's Much-Lauded Marine Reserve A Farce: Sweetheart Deals, No Protection For 97% Of Area
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More disturbingly to some environmentalists, Kiribati’s success in winning international recognition without actually restricting fishing was spawning imitators. At the end of August 2012, at a regional meeting in the Cook Islands, its prime minister, Henry Puna, announced the creation of what he called the world’s biggest marine park – 400,000 square miles of the southern, largely un-fished half of the islands’ waters. But Ben Ponia, the secretary of marine resources, later wrote to me: “The marine park will not regulate fisheries.” At the same meeting, the self-governing French territory of New Caledonia announced that, inspired by the example of Kiribati, it was creating an even larger reserve, at 540,000 square miles. It was the same story there, too. “It’s too early to say whether there will be any restrictions on fishing,” said project spokeswoman Anne-Claire Goarant, stressing that the announcement was just the beginning of a multi-year consultation process. The two reserves were part of a grandiose scheme called the “Pacific Oceanscape” fathered by CI and Tong to string a necklace of giant marine reserves across the Pacific. Were they also destined to become paper parks?
At a glittering party last November at Wendy Benchley’s gorgeous Washington, DC house for the launch of the book Underwater Eden, Stone assured me that at a recent CI board meeting, Tong had announced that the decision had been taken to close the reserve completely. A few days later, I got an email from Tiarite Kwong, the environment minister, addressed to Stone and copied to me. It said, “As communicated to you (Stone) at the LA board meeting, HE the President has reaffirmed the position of his Cabinet to fully close PIPA with immediate effect.”
I didn’t believe him. “A statement from a Kiribati Minister was not sufficient?” Stone asked me. It wasn’t. I knew that closing the reserve at a time when tuna prices were soaring would make a huge ruckus, and I would have heard of it. Just to be sure, I wrote to Julio Moròn, the head of the association of Spanish purse-seiners, many of whom fish in Kiribati under Ecuadorean flags. He wrote back that he knew of no closure plans and warned that closure “would be most detrimental to the economic interest of the Kiribati Government that obtains good revenue from the licenses fees that they sell to the 260 purse seine vessels that operate in the region …. For us, it will suppose a serious setback for the normal fishing operation in the Central Pacific region.”
The best time to close the reserve was now, since the fleets were making huge profits on their catch. Why wasn’t Tong doing it? To try to answer the question, and to finally figure out what was going on, I applied for a travel grant from the Ocean Foundation. In April I was back in Tarawa. Nothing seemed to have changed except that the main road was worse. If Kiribati was making more money from tuna licenses (2012’s fisheries income of $60 million was double 2011’s), the government wasn’t spending it on anything visible. There were still few bathrooms, so people kept using the beach – unfortunately, above the high-tide line. Delicious fresh reef fish and small skipjack were still sold along the road and the I-Kiribati, as the people call themselves, were as handsome, kind, and absurdly generous as ever.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/09/01/south_pacific_president_became_environmental_darling_by_lying_about_conservation_partner/
