UN General Assembly
2015

Our fisheries represent not only a vital sector for our own development, but also a wider contribution to international food security, because the Pacific is steward of half the world’s commercial tuna. Our foreign fishing nation partners, who not by accident are also the drivers of global influence, have held the purse to our own future for far too long. Key stocks in the Pacific are being plundered at unsustainable rates that jeopardize our future. Already, higher returns from foreign licenses have benefited our own national fiscal future, yet that is only a fraction of the true potential. It is unacceptable that, on the one hand, we are expected to achieve the SDGs and to demonstrate dramatic development progress while, on the other hand, we are blocked from further gains from our own resources by the self-interests of distant fishing nations.