Kiribati
Fish And Ships
Fishing Fleets Pose Social and Environmental Challenges
Fishing and prostitution might be the two oldest professions. But the exploitation of both is creating new vulnerabilities for Pacific islands as the whole world increasingly comes to fish in its waters.
The deck of the Taiwanese purse-seiner bustles with activity. At anchor a few kilometers off Tarawa in Kiribati, tons of skipjack tuna are lifted from a refrigerated hold up onto the sweltering top deck for transshipment to a mothership moored beside it. Whistles blow, nets of shimmering fish are raised and swung onto the mothership, which will take its cargo to canneries in Papua New Guinea and Taiwan.
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In the Pacific, the practice of sweet young girls paddling out to foreign boats to introduce their charms to restless seamen is nothing new, it is almost a cliché of Pacific history. European sailors were fond of dropping anchor in places like Tahiti knowing they would be warmly welcomed after long and lonely months at sea. The love of such women caused mutiny on the Bounty and much else to inspire romantic notions in Europe that the Pacific islands were an Eden of sorts.
Although the practice continues today, there is little romance and far more dangers involved for the girls – the spectre of AIDS and social/psychological consequences of girls as young as 12 involved gives the fishing industry a dark side that is rarely contemplated when consumers open a tin of tuna.
For years, socially conscious consumers have checked their supermarket tins of tuna to see if it is “dolphin friendly”. But as fishing fleets from much of the world now descend on the Pacific, it may be time to ask whether your sandwich tuna is “Pacific islander friendly”. Like dolphins, small Pacific nations are increasingly being caught in a net of deceit and swallowed up by larger prey. There are growing social consequences as a result of a fishing industry worth an estimated US$2.7 billion per year. More than half the world’s tuna, about 2 million tons per year, now comes from the Pacific region.
Scientists warn that some species like bigeye and yellowfin are headed for the endangered list if fishing is not controlled immediately. Within 3-5 years, some stocks could be critically overfished.
With 71-78% of world fish stocks fully exploited, according to the FAO, responsible management of fishing worldwide is now considered critical. The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery, the world’s oldest, in 1992, is a case study of what can happen with failure to address overfishing: the Canadian government ignored scientific warnings and stood by as catches fell from 233,000 tons to zero in two years.
The Pacific Ocean holds the world’s last great fish supply since many of the world’s oceans have been substantially overfished in recent decades. The EU, after enforcing a moratorium on cod fishing in the Atlantic which put much of the European fleet on dry dock, has recently signed a number of bi-lateral deals with Pacific island states to fish in their waters.
Europe now sources much of its tuna from the Pacific – in Germany for example, half the tuna consumed there comes from Kiribati alone. The EU fleet now joins China, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, America, The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and others who are ranging far into the Pacific , often unmonitored, to harvest schools of fish (mainly tuna) on an industrial scale.
For many smaller island states, fish are their only real asset, especially when, like Kiribati, you are a nation of low-lying coral atolls with a small landmass but a huge Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of sea around them. Kiribati has a landmass of just 719 square kilometers of sprinkled islands, yet its territorial EEZ covers 3.5 million square kilometers, making it one of the largest maritime nations in the world. To patrol this vast area, Kiribati has just one patrol boat – provided by the Australian government through its Pacific Patrol Boats program.
Island nations, made up of saltwater cultures, are invariably getting ripped off on what is often their one and only asset. Greenpeace International, working on data provided by the South Pacific Commission (SPC) in Noumea estimates that the financial return from access fees and licenses back to Pacific states is just 5% of the more than US$2 billion the fish is worth on the global market.
“It’s true we are not maximizing the benefits of our fishing industry” claims Roniti Teiwaki, a former Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati. “Our income each year (between US$20-40 million) has not changed much since independence in 1979 and we have no real way of monitoring how much fish gets taken out of our EEZ”.
Teiwaki says there is some frustration within the Kiribati community that it has not been able to value-add to its fisheries by having an onshore cannery or more locals employed on foreign fishing vessels.
“We have all these advisors who tell us it is not viable to have a cannery here because it needs too much fresh water to operate, which we don’t have. That may be true but we need to find ways to manage our resources better. Personally I think we should be going back to pole-and-line fishing, which is more sustainable and creates more local employment. Or we could auction our fish rather than just sell off licenses”.
Some Pacific leaders have even mooted the idea of establishing an OPEC-like arrangement among Pacific fishing nations to better control the price and supply of fish in the same way OPEC countries do with oil. But Pacific nations are at a disadvantage since they cannot effectively patrol their vast maritime areas and the fish are migratory, not stationary. Many island states have neither the manpower, resources nor economies of scale to maximize returns on fishing and this leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by big commercial fishing fleets.
The impact is also felt by local fishermen who rely on coastal waters to feed their families.
“The fish are getting smaller” says Atera, an old fisherman who goes out most mornings and still hand-makes his fishing lures. “When I was growing up, we could fish in the lagoon here and there was always plenty of fish. Now I have to go kilometers out to sea to catch good size fish – and petrol is getting so expensive”.
Like many local fishermen and their wives who sell the day's catch from coolers along the main road, Atera also complains that when the big fishing boats come into port, they also offload a lot of by-catch; the reject fish from their huge nets, onto the local fish market. This cheap fish, called “korakorea fish” sells for just 90 cents per kilo and is undermining the local economy that many locals rely on to make a living.
The term “korakorea” was first coined to describe local girls who went aboard Korean fishing vessels, but is now more generally used for girls going onboard fishing boats from any country as well as being slang for “cheap fish”. Many do it because of poverty at home and the chance to earn money, clothes and fish to take home. Some girls get pressured by their families to do it. Others claim they do it so they can get “drinking money for their friends” and because the foreign fishermen treat them better than their local men do.
There is no law against prostitution in Kiribati, which was highlighted recently when 80 girls were rounded up and brought before a local court before being released. Yet there is growing concern that Kiribati maybe breaching international conventions on child protection since many of the girls are only 14 and 15 years of age. UNICEF is preparing to release a damning document relating to underage prostitution in several Pacific countries, including Kiribati.
One girl involved in the trade, “Kathy”, claims girls as young as 12 are involved. “I know about one 12-year old girl who was taken out to a fishing boat by her aunty and she has disappeared. Her family is very worried since she has been missing now for four months”.
Kathy is a pretty 21-year old girl who lives with her father, an unemployed former government worker, in a crowded settlement near the Betio port on south Tarawa. She claims there are many local girls involved in the trade and they all have different motivations.
“It all depends because some they really need money to support their families with food, so they feel some pressure. Other girls need money to buy drinks for themselves and friends when they want to go out to the bars”.
Kathy says that even though their have been crackdowns by local authorities the girls are not scared of getting caught by police because “their family are supporting them”.
This is what makes prostitution in Kiribati and other Pacific islands a complex issue. For many Pacific cultures it is not a big deal; sex, kastom and fishing are all intertwined, subject to tabus. Many islanders do not view such exchanges as “prostitution”. Fishing and sex have long been linked to traditions that were, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing, because everything was shared within communities and remote islands needed “new blood” to prevent inbreeding and keep the tribe strong to defend from raiding enemies. Ritual exchanges of things like fish and women kept the peace among neighbors.
In Kiribati, as a recent UNICEF document points out, prostitution is not new.
“In 1826 prostitutes were referred to as Nikiranroro, meaning those who had lost their virginity or had eloped. Whalers were much criticized and blamed for having increased prostitution in the islands…and that venereal disease was said to have been more widespread after whaling contacts. In some outer islands of Kiribati there was a custom practiced where a girl could be taken to the king on first menstruation and families in return would receive a plot of land from the king.”
As President of the Kiribati National Council of Women (AMAK), Mere agrees the korakorea issue is a complex one but believes that young girls should be in school and better guided by their parents or guardians.
“It is an issue here because it is against our culture and tradition. In the olden days, at age 14 or 15, girls were kept in the home doing work that assured your future life as a woman and they were very restricted in their night time outings. But now Kiribati is in the swell of globalization and the issue of korakorea…well, that’s how things happen now.”
Modernity, a cash economy and the loss of tradition has created new vulnerabilities for coastal communities of the Pacific. Legal and illegal fishing by foreign vessels have introduced a range of social problems apart from the environmental impact of depleted fish stocks. Mere believes there is a “dangerous cycle” linking alcohol abuse, violence, sexual abuse and disease that is afflicting many Pacific nations including her own.
Communities that once shared everything now find a new rich/poor divide is splitting them and AIDS is an ever present danger. According to the HIV/AIDS clinic at Tarawa General Hospital, Kiribati (population 92,000) has 43 confirmed AIDS cases of which 26 have already died.
“I’d say almost all the cases of AIDS here are related to the fishing industry” claims one of the nurses testing blood samples. “It is coming from both foreign fishermen and our own sailors returning home."
David Yee Ting, Kiribati’s Permanent Secretary for Fisheries, claims that the government is getting on top of the situation.
“Our new Police Commissioner has been enforcing the laws to stop girls – and those who help them – go out to the boats.”
He confirms that the situation got so bad that for a period in 2003, Kiribati actually banned all Korean fishing boats from entering Kiribati ports after reports in the Korean Herald that 30-50 girls, mostly underage, were servicing the Korean fishermen.
Asked whether he thought Kiribati was also getting ripped off on its core asset, fisheries, Ting says “That’s a bit harsh, but yes, we could be getting a better return. We only have one patrol boat and we don’t have many trained fisheries officers who can be stationed on boats to monitor catches.
“But as Pacific states come together through regional bodies like the FFA (Forum Fisheries Authority, based in Solomon Islands) and the WCPFC (Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, based in Marshall Islands), I believe we will have more collective power to get a better deal on our fish resources”.
Ting is upbeat about the recent deal signed between the EU and Kiribati, believing the EU will help develop the local industry with more local employment and training. Other observers are not so sanguine: “I don’t think we should have vessels from 5,000 miles away fishing here. Why are they fishing here? Because they have stuffed their own region and now they are coming down here to do it” is the blunt assessment of Captain David Lucas, manager of Solander Pacific Fiji. “We’ve got purse-seiners from the European Union fishing in Kiribati. Why should they be down here? What have they done to their own? Who’s next?”
Gazing out across Tarawa’s brilliant aquamarine lagoon as an outrigger canoe glides by, children frolic in water and women clean fish on shore is to sense how important the sea is to the I-Kiribati. Living as they do on marginal, coral atolls that form the rim of an extinct volcano, there is no substantial agricultural tradition here as elsewhere in the Pacific. For generations before European and Asian contact, the I-Kiribati literally lived on just fish and coconuts. Their whole livelihood, culture and spirituality for the past 3,000 years of settlement is reflected in a deep connection to the sea.
A former British governor during the colonial period (Kiribati was formerly known as the Gilbert and Ellice islands and was the last territorial acquisition of the British Empire), Sir Arthur Grimble, was moved to write: “This is the heart of the matter: the Gilbertese of old were a sea people as no race before or since has been a sea people”.
Already faced with the threat of rising sea levels, the loss of their fisheries might send the I-Kiribati back into moana – the deep blue sea – all over again.
*This article was commissioned by Greenpeace Australia Pacific
