May 24, 2023 — I’m taking this opportunity to reply to the Op-Ed written by William Aila, Jr. and Rick Gaffney and published by Samoa News on Wednesday, May 17, 2023. Aila and Gaffney represent the Pacific Remote Islands Coalition (PRI), proponents of the proposed Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Sanctuary.
The Hawaiian environmental advocates have erroneously stated that expanding the existing PRI monument boundaries throughout the EEZ and excluding commercial tuna fishing by the American Samoa based U.S. flag purse seiners will not negatively impact the economic viability of StarKist’s large-scale tuna cannery in American Samoa. They claim that opposition to past environmentally-based fishing area closures would lead to cannery closures, and nothing happened. They are dangerously wrong!
American Samoa previously had two active canneries. One of those, Samoa Tuna Processors, closed at the end of 2016, not long after the loss of much of the traditional fishing grounds of the American Samoa based U.S. flag tuna purse seiners.
Three things happened that reduced those traditional fishing grounds: Kiribati[1] reduced the number of fishing days available to US purse seiners to 300 days, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument which closed the U.S. EEZ around Jarvis Island, a rich traditional fishing ground for the U.S. fleet; and, the U.S. Government voluntarily gave up 760 high seas fishing days in the Western and Central Pacific[2].
This perfect storm on unrelated events took away almost half of the American Samoa U.S. flag purse seiner fishing grounds. As a consequence, two things happened. The U.S. purse seiner fleet based in American Samoa was reduced from 40 to 12 boats and Samoa Tuna Processors closed its doors.