Islands Business - Fisheries: PUTTING POWER IN THE HANDS OF PACIFIC NATIONS

Aqorau wants increase in yearly returns

Dr Transform Aqorau... we’re custodians of a major resource.

New deputy director of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) Dr Transform Aqorau has called on Pacific Islands countries to work together and try to get more benefits from their fish stocks.

In an interview with ISLANDS BUSINESS, Aqorau said Pacific Islands Countries (PICs) were only getting returns of around US$80 million a year out of their US$800 million fish resource and efforts to get more than this 10 percent would go a long way to boosting PICs’ finances.

“It’s an industry dominated by international markets and we have to keep in mind that it fluctuates depending on demand and supply. We are custodians of a major resource and if we can translate that into economic terms, we can do well,” he said.

As the new FFA’s deputy head, Aqorau is the first Pacific and Solomon Islander to hold the post which previously was only held by non-Pacific Islanders.

He described his new job as one that presented a “big challenge and big responsibility”, as he is compelled to maintain the high standards set by his predecessors.

A specialist in international fisheries laws, Aqorau was seconded to FFA in 1991 as a legal officer, went on to join the Solomon Islands Government and then the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in Fiji before returning to FFA as its legal counsel.

“FFA’s work is to try an ensure the only renewable natural resource we have is not over-exploited and that we develop it so we benefit economically and financially—through employment and foreign exchange.
“We are sharing it with some of the most powerful countries in the world because they are interested in this resource.”

He said PICs are dealing with rich and powerful countries like the United States, China, Japan and Korea, who are endowed with manpower and finances, which PICs don’t have.

“Our job at FFA is to go out and work with PICs so that they have the legislation and policies in place to help them when they negotiate with these big countries.

“Because it’s a shared resource and we are not powerful enough, we really need to work together and cooperate.”

Aqorau said FFA was trying to look at innovative ways to manage the resources as they were presently being managed through foreign access agreements.

“We are looking at ways to do this, so we put power in the hands of Pacific Islands nations. But it takes time. The countries (PICs) are so used to a particular way of doing business. Our biggest challenge here at FFA is to ensure we have an incremental increase in the returns to fisheries every year. If we can do that on an annual basis, then we should be doing our job.”

Aqorau said the Pacific region’s tuna stocks are still generally healthy and some measures have been taken to maintain this status.

“We are dealing with countries (PICs) at different levels of developments. For some countries, tuna fishing is their only source of foreign exchange.

“We have to be therefore careful in reforms and there has to be a common agreement because of the different levels of impacts.”

Illegal fishing, he added, was a big problem in the Pacific and FFA is trying to develop a project to calculate the percentage of illegal fishing going on in Pacific waters.

“We are working on a system that will show a satellite image of all the boats in the area and compare that with the image of registered boats. Unreported fishing is also a problem and these are licensed fishing boats that don’t comply by providing reports or comply with regulations,” Aqorau said.