US President's vow to expand Pacific no-fishing zone under fire

Transcript

A United States fishery scientist says the US President's vow to dramatically increase a no-fishing zone in the Pacific is nothing more than a gesture.

Barack Obama has declared war on illegal fishing, signalling he will use executive powers to bypass Congress to increase the Pacific Remote Islands Marine national monument over seven times to more than a million square kilometres.

But a senior scientist with the Western and Central Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, Paul Dalzell, says the move will hurt US fisheries more than the distant water nations that have been blamed for depleting stocks.

Paul Dalzell spoke to Alex Perrottet.

PAUL DALZELL: The net conservation gain from expanding out to the EEZ boundary is minimal, and at the same time it could penalise US fishermen, for example, Palmyra is about 1000 miles south of Hawai'i, and it's been a principal, one of the main fishing grounds for the Hawai'i longline fleet. They've caught up to 10 to 12% of their catch from there. Howland and Baker has been a very important fishing ground for the US purse seine fleet and I think in one year, I think it was 1997, 20% of their catch came out of the US EEZ around Howland and Baker. And if you're talking about things that stay in one place, like reef fish, and coral reefs themselves, then a measure of protection is fine, and 50 miles certainly will do that. But to push it out to the boundary, it will have no conservation benefit on tunas, and other highly migratory species, because they move about so if they're not subject to fishing mortality in one area, they may be in another. We just don't see this as anything more than really sort of being a gesture more than anything else. It will not have any major conservation benefits for tunas, and in the Western Central Pacific they closed off two huge areas, what they call the high seas pocket, in one year and the fishing mortalities of tunas did not go down one iota, it actually went up, because all the boats just fished in the surrounding EEZs and there was no conservation benefit.

ALEX PERROTTET: What do you think could be done in setting more realistic (limits), and limits that could be policed, in terms of what and how much the distant water nations are fishing?

PD: It's a very, very tough question to answer, it's all to do with compliance. I know, as a scientist, working within the US infrastructure, that we are very dedicated to ensure that every pound of fish that we fish can be traced, and properly documented and that we provide information to the commission. I don't want to bad-mouth any other country in terms of their performance but what I do know is that distant water fishing nations, yeah they've got big fishery administrations so they should, like the US, be able to manage their own fleets and make sure they are compliant. And the smaller Pacific nations, they have much more of a tougher time of it, and in fact much of the discussion at the last Tuna Commission meeting was on the disproportionate burden that these countries have to bear because of the various conservation and management measures that stem from the commission.