July 19, 2023 — Iosefa Tanuvasa is worried.
Life isn’t easy, but she’s able to provide for her six children through her job at the StarKist Co. tuna cannery in Pago Pago, American Samoa. What worries her is the future of her job and family if the proposed Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Sanctuary restricts tuna fishing in the region, a vital piece of the economy to the U.S. territory.
“For now, we need money to survive and help develop our families, we don’t need a proposal that will lead to closure of our cannery due to higher cost of supplying fish for the cannery,” Tanuvasa wrote to the federal government. “This will heavily impact this nation.”
Tanuvasa is among dozens of American Samoans raising the alarm about the proposed marine sanctuary covering 770,000 square miles in the Pacific Ocean, bigger than the entire state of Alaska.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is entering the second phase of the process to protect the area around seven islands in the Pacific Ocean as a marine sanctuary. The land masses are among the nine claimed by the U.S. with no permanent population: Kingman Reef, Wake, Johnson and Palmyra atolls and Howland, Baker and Jarvis islands.
In addition to a variety of fish, the area has habitats for sea birds and coral reefs.
“The area has amazing coral resources that are found almost nowhere else in the U.S. territories,” said Brady Phillips, a senior policy specialist of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
The waters also are ideal for skipjack tuna, which travel the equator. Tuna fishing supports about 5,000 jobs in American Samoa, a U.S. territory with a population of about 49,000, according to Benar News. The StarKist cannery is among the island’s top employers.
National marine sanctuaries are designated to preserve environmental resources. NOAA can require a permit to alter the seabed, for instance, and place restrictions oil and gas drilling.
Many Samoans have implored the agency to avoid restricting commercial fishing, which they say could raise costs for StarKist and lead it to close the cannery.
President Joe Biden in March directed the Department of Commerce, which includes NOAA, to “consider initiating a sanctuary designation” to expand protection of the Pacific islands, part of the president’s announcement creating national monuments in Texas and Nevada.
However Governor Lemanu Palepoi Sialega Mauga said “not a single representative” of the Biden administration contacted anyone in American Samoa’s government before announcing the proposal. He said “without access to these traditional fishing grounds, our tuna industry and entire economy will be annihilated.”