What's a Marine 'Park' doing in Madang?

Last year at this time the Greenpeace ship Esperanza documented both legal and illegal Philippines flagged and owned vessels transshipping skipjack and yellowfin tuna in a high seas pocket between PNG, The Solomon Islands and the FSM, Marshall Islands and Indonesia. This was only one of countless unobserved, unreported but growing acts of tuna piracy in the southwest Pacific waters. Transshipments at sea by foreign purse seiners are prohibited under the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), and most Pacific Island Countries prohibit transshipment inside their own Exclusive Economic Zones, requiring the vessels to come to port. Only the Philippine fleets have been given an exemption. Greenpeace reports that, “It is widely recognized that, worldwide, transshipments of fish at sea facilitate illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. Unfortunately, it seems that the exemption given to the Philippine purse seine fleet is exploited and taken advantage of by illegal Philippine vessels. The lack of monitoring, controlling and surveillance measures and resources in the region provides incentives for illegal vessels to operate side by side with legally registered vessels plundering the Pacific high seas.” (Plundering the Pacific, Greenpeace International Oct 2008)

In this case, the Philippine purse seiners were fishing at sea without a mothership, and as one of their captains reported, they had already effected six separate transshipments to other vessels in the previous month. All of this occurred in the high seas pocket just north of PNG, a ‘Pacific Commons’ that runs from above the mainland of the island of New Guinea all across the underside of the FSM, and begins again just east of the Bismark Archipelago and between PNG and the Solomon Islands (see map in other file). The eight PNA countries had declared these Commons no-fishing zones that very month, but clearly this act means nothing without teeth, and enforcement is sorely lacking in all the fishing authorities and PIC agreements. The collective desire to stem over fishing and halt the documented decline of bigeye and yellowfin stocks in the Pacific can come to nothing without strong regulations and oversight. Philippine fleets continue to come back and transship from the Commons. As Greenpeace report on their findings says,  “It is of great concern that the Philippine fleets seem to target this high seas area in particular, as this has the potential to undermine the effectiveness of the PNA effort in the recovery of the tuna stocks.”

All three vessels recorded by Greenpeace were owned by the Philippines based company, TSO Marine Industries, of South Cotabato. Their owner is the Taiwanese businessman Domingo Teng, who manufactures and wholesales all kinds of marine edibles, and is beloved by General Santos City for supplying most of the jobs in their industrial ‘mall’ named Kimball Plaza.

That high seas zone right above the New Guineamainland is clearly a temptation for many Philippines

fishing boats. In 2006, several RD Tuna Fishing PNG personnel spoke off the record with a Pacific tuna fisheries researcher about their suspicions regarding RD transshipments. They explained how RD motherships Dolly 767 and Dolly Triple 888 each carry 600 tonnes, and Dolly 889 carries 1000 tonnes, of fish, and they all travel full top the Philippines once a month. It is assumed they deliver a total of 2200 tonnes per month of yellowfin tuna and other non-allowable fish caught outside PNG waters (which are therefore barred from being manufactured within PNG). These fish are brought to Vidar, frozen (which is, in fact, a form of processing), and stored at the wharf until the ships are ready to travel to the Philippines. The seven RD tally workers (three at night, four by day) are strictly prohibited from tallying these fish, and so they remain unrecorded, unallowed, untaxed and unlicensed (RD Tuna pays no license fees whatsoever anyway).  This is the kind of hidden extraction that is threatening all Pacific tuna stocks.

Industrial distant water fishing vessels from all over the world are now stealing from the worlds richest tuna grounds, just offshore from PNG. Here live more than half the world’s tuna, and everyone but Papua New Guinea

seems to be getting rich from fishing these waters. The 8 countries that surround this rich maritime resource make less than 5% of the total profits from the US$2 billion industry. But the levels of theft, piracy, illegal transshipment and fraudulent tallies are rising exponentially, creating a dire threat to the West and Central Pacific’s tuna stocks.

This is the result of overfishing the Mediterranean’s own tuna, combined with generally lax policing of these vessels in the Pacific. Mediterranean bluefin tuna is so overfished right now that conservation groups are asking for endangered species status. The European Commission last year forced the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, the organization responsible for looking after tuna) to reduce the totals allowable catch of bluefin in the Atlantic from 28,500 tonnes to 22,000 and eventually 19,000 in 2010 (a total cut of 30%) just to ensure its viability. This cut is far below what ICCAT’s own scientists suggested, and may still threaten the viability of the stock---if only because it is understood that fishermen generally take about twice the allowable catch anyway (see The Economist Nov 29 2008 p 83). 

Now that the Mediterranean fisheries are restricted, countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, theUSand the EU are simply moving over to the Pacific gobbling up more of these tuna than ever before. Meanwhile, the PNAs are only seeing a pittance in fees. Of course, in the case of tuna pirates, hidden depletions and  illicit offshore transshipments, these countries see no revenues whatsoever.

PNG has long bemoaned its inability to truly profit from its own tuna stock, when so many overseas vessels haul the majority catch away and this country sees a meager amount from licensing revenues. This is why the country has turned to canning tuna, to recoup some of the profits otherwise seen in the Marshall Islands and Fiji

(where so much processing takes place). It has left PNG in a critical dilemma: do we take up the lead in Pacific loining and canning of tuna, or invest in policing this free for all (even if the license fees are negligible)?

For developing Pacific Island countries, it seems to be a one or other prospect. Those agencies responsible for policing the industry and managing the sustainability of tuna have dropped the ball in recent years, ignoring conservationists’ suggestions and bowing to fishing industry demands now that Mediterranean stocks are restricted. Instead, the consensus seems to be to beat the exploiters at their own game. Before investing in improved fisheries management, regulations or even the policing of standards, Papua New Guinea

’s national government has chosen to invite the industry to process all the tuna in its own backyard.  

Let’s turn the historic centre of Madang, the Vidar Plantation at Alexishafen, home to the first Lutheran, then Catholic Missions in Madang, and site of important WWII landings, into an Industrial Park! 

Just prior to this event in May the country got first word of a planned Marine Park for Madang, when the PNG Commerce and Industry Minister explained that this is a means to recoup the profits lost by PNG in the Pacific Tuna Industry:

“He said presently the Pacific region contributes 67% of tuna to the world tuna market and only gains US$67 million (K1.9 billion [sic]) from fishing access fees from foreign vessels that fish for tuna in the region.” (The National 3 March 2008).

[John Burton, blogging in response to this comment wrote: “K1.9 billion! Holy smokes. Ha the kina dropped to 3.5 cents us?]

In January 2008 eight Pacific countries agreed to tuna catch restrictions in an attempt to conserve Western Pacific tuna stocks. Ironically, two of the countries that had voted in January of 2008 to impose catch restrictions on Western Pacific tuna stocks ( Nauru and  Solomon Islands), were amongst the first to express an interest in investing in this manufacturing Shangri-la. Plans for this industrial clustering can be found on the IPA, the FFA, and the PNG NFA websites, on the last of which we read that the Madang Marine Park Holdings Ltd was registered as early as 2007 (--who knew?) as a vehicle for the joint private-public venture, sponsored by the National Government’s Public Investment Program.  The total projected investment is said to be US $33 million, but the National Government is said to have invested K7 million already, even before any ground has been broken. According to a statement published by the National Fisheries Authority and the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Industry, Anton Kulit,  “a study tour was conducted to PNG and the Philippines

in February 2007 to assess the potential for value-added shore-based activities covering transshipment, dockyard and slipways, wharves, provisioning and downstream processing activities.”  That must have been some package tour.

Eight PIC countries are parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) and it is their waters that contain some of the richest tuna stocks left in the world today. The proposed Madang Marine Industrial Park Project, as it is called, is an attempt to harness greater profits from these stocks in the form of a regional transshipment and processing hub for the entire region. This means loineries, fish meal processing plants, canneries, spin-off businesses like rope-making and snack food manufacturing, catering services, dormitories, you name it. And with them, sex work, sexually transmitted disease, domestic abuse, ethnic tensions, landowner strife and a general mushrooming of a peasant economy dependant upon the North Coast people’s gardens and private fishing sources. Yes---here in Madang, just up the north coast road. At Alexishafen, the historical base for both the Lutheran and Catholic Missions in Madang. Where Catholic nursing sisters still provide critical care to North Coast

people from Rempi to Siar. Site of important WWII landings, and home to several war wrecks, and focal point of the province’s WWII tourism.  How extraordinary that none of us here in Madang have known of these plans that date from 2007. Every one of our businesses that depend on tourism, clean water, employee housing and safety, all of which have just begun to feel the pinch of MCC’s presence at Basamuk, have not benefited from any of these backroom deals.

Plunder and ‘progress’ in the Pacific

It is a cost benefit question. First, for those tuna canning businesses already established in PNG, the attraction to having all the value-added services aggregated in this country, and perhaps eve in one coastal site, it irresistible. Economies of scale make the proposed Fishing Eco-Zone in Madang especially attractive, because the 7 to 10 canneries that might be established over 100 hectares of Vidar Plantation land, where they could then share electrical, water, fuel, and most importantly labour costs; with flexible investment laws, discounted access fees and huge tax incentives (all part of the DCI prospectus), they could all see better profits than ever before.

But for Madang people, the down side is bleaker. Despite talk about 40,000 jobs being created (The National 3 March 2008) at the Marine Park, it is hard to imagine how Madang people will benefit. Our experience with MCC tells us that most of those jobs will go to foreign nationals, and our experience with RD further suggests the bulk of low-paying labour openings that might exist will go to young women, standing for 8 to 10 hours a day for 6 days a week to earn K80 a fortnight (after deductions). The RD Tuna website tells us: “The Company’s 3500 strong workforce form a merry mix of personalities from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Just like the company, a majority of the employees are young with ages ranging from 18 to 30 years.”

When the Provincial and National government tell us a Marine ‘Park’ represents job creation, we are not told that these jobs are peasant labour bringing only the gloss of cash into the community, not lifting the overall standard of living. The women working at RD generally spend the majority of their pay packets on the clothes and grooming required to be an employee, and their families are actually tasked with supporting their subsistence. K80/fortnight will not feed a family on money, so all the Siar and Kananam people are currently burdened by the care of this important demographic group—looking after them as if they were dependents not breadwinners. Instead, that K80 goes right into the town shops that sells endless assortments of the same foreign goods, and virtually siphon off the income to their overseas account. This is certainly a factor in some of the anti-Asian sentiment in Madang and elsewhere: the fact that no one makes a living wage, and that money gets frittered away to non-national businesses. In Wewak, for example, the women who work in SST freely admit that they would make more in the markets every week, and would, in addition, be feeding their family as they gardened, but they work at the factory so that they can established a working history and get a foothold in the cash economy for the time when a better job might be available.

Imagine ten such canneries here in Madang, and the non-national population that necessarily arrives with them. Imagine thousands of young women migrants from around the country, willing to leave villages and domestic chores aside to live in a dormitory outside Madang. Yes, its true, this is perfectly legal and no one will have forced them to come. But because no one is required to, no one is taking a broader view of the consequences. NGOs are beginning to make noise about the overfishing dangers, the industrial pollution and the radiating woes of clustered manufacturing sitting at one of the world’s most important marine biodiversity spots. But the Madang public has been kept in the dark about the Fisheries and Tuna Industry’s plans, so they may be confused by these one-sided warnings.

Madang’s business community has also been kept in the dark.  The MCI-NFA prospectus explains that Madang is called “’Beautiful Madang’ because of its rich array of flora and fauna. The Province is a popular tourist destination because of its rich culture and friendly local inhabitants.”

These promotional materials sing the praises of this town fully aware, not doubt, that they also spell their death knell. Marine ‘Park’? Maybe it can itself become  another tourist attraction? Dancing dolphins? Water slides and ice cream vendors? Anyone who has  visited Fiji’s tax free zone, or Majuro’s cannery slums, will see the humor in that. Those of us who have knowledge of Kiribati will also note the sex tourism irony in that proposition.

Around the world, the seas are suffering. In the Pacific, the tragedy is that they are suffering not at the hands of their traditional caretakers, the people who have for generations fished and managed these waters. But they suffer at the hands of a global fishing industry, feeding people far away from these waters who have no idea of the impact their palettes make on these irreplaceable ecosystems. Today there are new discussions of harvesting seabed minerals, and energy, and even of using it to store carbon. Technology has made all of this simpler and affordable, just as it has turned what were once thought inexhaustible supplies of fish into beleaguered small schools of them. A paper published by Nature in 2003, shows 13 charts of the catch per 100 hooks in different fishing zones around the globe, and the authors report that their analysis “suggests that the global ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes”---these are cod, groupers, salmon, tuna and all the other ones we love to eat. (cited by The Economist Jan 3 2009, p 10-11). If we cannot manage this precious tuna resource in PNG’s own waters, and manage it for the future, not simply for the short-term gain, then how can we be expected to look after our seabeds, our carbon storage and our marine energy sources?

Comments

[John Wasko]

Pretty exhaustive article, but pretty one sided too. Here in American Samoa we watched cannery worker families grow and prosper and send the next generation of kids to college and better jobs.
Our loss is your gain.

From Pago

JW

[Peter Pamundi]

I see the picture on PMIZ differently. If countries like Thailand who have 30 canneries and 200,000 jobs supporting a family of 2 million people in a US$ 2 billion annual industry is denied raw material(tuna stock) as a result of PMIZ, what would Thailand do?? would it undertake economic terrism tactics to finance NGOs, radical landowners to sabbotage PMIZ? Be real, LDCs or theird world countries have always been at the recieving end as suppliers of raw materials. Its time for PNG to take the lead and form a tuna cartel and control the tuna stock, determine where production and jobs are created. I have not seen any enviroment pollution in General Santos Fish Port and see no cause for alarm.

Peter Pamundi