Cover Story
Leaders Launch Keep Seas Clean Campaign
The target: United States and China
Pacific Islands Forum member states have launched a campaign to keep their seas clean that, among other aims, targets Chinese and United States weapon tests and purse-seine fishermen accused of sweeping the Pacific Ocean clean of fish.
A regional ocean policy was adopted by the 33rd Pacific Islands Forum summit.
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It declares that the Pacific Islands are "acutely aware" that 98 percent of the 38.5 million square kilometres of Earth's surface is controlled by them and that "it has the potential to support Pacific Islands communities in perpetuity".
However, there are serious threats to the Pacific Ocean's health. These threats include the accidental and deliberate dumping of fuel, chemicals and other pollutants from ships, aircraft and satellite launches.
China and the United States both test fire rockets into the Pacific while United States aerospace company, Boeing, with Norwegian and Russian joint venture companies, launches satellites from a floating platform located near the atoll republic of Kiribati.
The policy commits the Forum to an initial five-year phase of research, education, policy setting and regulatory measures to protect an ocean area containing the "most extensive coral reefs in the world, globally important fisheries, significant seabed mineral deposits and a high number of threatened species".
Eighty percent of all ocean pollution flows from the land as a threat to near shore ecology, public health and the social and commercial use of the sea, the policy statement says.
It suggests that as well as being described as small islands developing states the Pacific Islands should also be thought of as large ocean developing states.
In its main communiqué, the Forum calls on operators of purse seine net fishing boats in the region, including the United States, Japan, the Philippines and Korea, to increase the mesh size of the nets they use so that juvenile tuna and other small fish could escape.
Intensive purse seine net fishing was badly hitting tuna stocks, causing a "drastic" decline of artisan tuna caught, and destroying "huge" amounts of other fish caught but discarded, the communiqué complained.
