Bleak Vision For Oceania's Future

The Pacific Ocean is our biggest asset, 32 million square kilometres of it, seven million Pacific Islanders constantly hear. It isn't so big that it doesn't need caring for.

The ocean is used and abused by fishermen, carriers of toxic cargo, weapons testers and people who dump sewage, oil, garbage, chemicals and plastic bags in it.

Pacific Islanders are guilty despoilers too, usually by agricultural, construction and other activities that cause pollution of their inshore areas.

Two years ago, at the annual Pacific Islands Forum meeting, Pacific Islands leaders accepted a policy for caring for the Pacific Ocean. They haven't yet said how the fine words of the Pacific Ocean policy should be translated into action.

Some international conventions and regional agencies offer some shelter for the Pacific but it is clear their present total efforts aren't enough. In February, the University of the South Pacific's School of Marine Studies was the setting for a five-day meeting at which about 150 participants sketched the outline of a plan for making the Forum's ocean policy a workable one.

The health of the Pacific Ocean critically affects the existence of everything living in it, including half the world's tuna supply and also the existence of the life forms, animal, vegetable and human, that live on the islands surrounded by it.

The Pacific Ocean affects the weather, not only regionally, but also globally. Rainfall, drought, hurricanes, and temperature‹the moods of the Pacific drive them all.

Huge although it is, the ocean is under stress. That brings the existence of all that live in or by the ocean under stress also. The 2002 Forum ocean policy is a world first. No other oceanic region has one.

It declares that Pacific Islanders are "acutely aware" that a great area of ocean is controlled by them and that "it has the potential to support Pacific Islands communities in perpetuity".

The Law of the Sea Convention adopted by the world 20 years ago confers islands and coastal countries with the ownership of all ocean wealth inside the 200 miles (320 kilometres) of their shores.

In the Pacific Islands, the boundaries of the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) as the convention terms them, enclose the 32 million sq kilometres area Forum countries claim as theirs.

The policy adopted in 2002 is at the heart of a campaign to keep the Pacific Ocean clean.

"Clean" means free of the accidental and deliberate dumping of fuel, chemicals and other pollutants from ships, aircraft and space rockets. It means free of overfishing and protection for reef and coastal areas threatened by agricultural, engineering, construction and recreational activity.

The policy committed the Forum to an initial five-year phase of research, education, policy formulation and rule making for the protection of an ocean area that contains the "most extensive coral reefs in the world, globally important fisheries, significant seabed mineral deposits and a high number of threatened species."

Internationally, the policy was formally launched by the Forum's then chair, the Fiji Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, on behalf of the Pacific states when he spoke on their behalf at the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002.

A Pacific Islands' regional ocean policy is not enough, Qarase said when opening last month's ocean's conference. "We should express our unrelenting opposition to the polluters and exploiters who are contemptuous of our desire to preserve a precious environment. We have to campaign strongly against global warming and its consequences, and give full support to our brothers and sisters whose homes and villages are likely to be submerged through rising sea levels." Qarase called for vigilance against the poaching of tuna and other marine resources.

A gloomy view about the Pacific Ocean's future was heard from Asterio Takesy, director of the Samoa-headquartered South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).

He rates as "bleak" prospects for averting pollution, overfishing and the degradation reaching large areas of the ocean.

Pacific Islanders are rapidly approaching a crossroad at which they must decide on strict policies for rescuing the ocean from all forms of attack by pollution and stress, he said

While he knew he might be accused of being "overly pessimistic", population growth that would double the population of the region's 22 countries and territories every 20 years was generating economic and social pressures that made the outlook for keeping the region healthy "quite bleak." Takesy stressed that the ocean dominates the lives of Pacific Islanders "because, quite literally, there is little else".

"The prospect of an unhealthy Pacific Ocean has global implications."