A proposal to expand fishing restrictions in the U.S. Pacific Remote Islands Area, referred to as PRIA, has sparked debate about conservation of Pacific fish populations, as well as an unlikely conversation about competition between the U.S. and China in the region.

Situated in the middle of Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa, PRIA encompasses Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef.

Parts of the region’s waters were blocked off from fishing through the establishment of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument by President George W. Bush in 2009, and it was expanded by President Barack Obama in 2014.

A new proposal from President Joe Biden in March 2023 would further expand it to protect 777,000 square miles of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, known as the EEZ — an area larger than Alaska — essentially blocking it all from fishing and making it the world’s largest marine protected area.

It’s based in part on proposals from environmental advocates in Hawaii, who have pushed for further protections. But officials in American Samoa have charged that the new restrictions would “destroy” their fishing industry and potentially lead to the closure of the StarKist Samoa cannery. According to the territory’s government, the cannery makes up 85% of American Samoa’s gross domestic product and is responsible for 99.5% of its exports.

In a letter to the U.S. Office of National Marine Sanctuaries in September, American Samoa’s Gov. Lemanu Mauga wrote that “fishing prohibitions not only weaken U.S. fisheries but also increase seafood imports and jeopardize U.S. food and national security.” Mauga argued that “the activities of the American Samoa-based (fishing) fleet provide a critical counterbalance to China’s growing influence across the region” and called the proposal “another step in the U.S. ceding the Pacific to China.”

According to the Honolulu-­based Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, better known as Wespac, which oversees fisheries in Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific island territories, American Samoa’s fleet caught 5,000 metric tons of albacore tuna in 2007. But today it barely brings in more than 1,000.

Wespac, as well as local fishermen and officials in American Samoa, blame the growth in China’s fishing efforts in the area. William Sword, who hails from American Samoa and is the current council chair, said, “China really does not care for human rights, sustainable fishing or other countries’ boundaries or EEZs, and we should be tired of China catching our fish and selling it back to us.”

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But advocates for the sanctuary expansion say that it’s a necessary move that will ensure Pacific fish — and fishermen — will thrive for generations.

Rick Gaffney, a Hawaii fisherman and environmentalist with the Pacific Remote Islands Coalition, said sanctuaries are “absolutely essential to preserving the Pacific fisheries for America and everybody else. Climate change is causing fisheries to move already. And the larger the protected areas that exist, the more certainty there will be fish for the future. It’s that simple.”

Economic woes

The Pago Pago-based fleet fishes on the high seas and has for years paid to fish in the tuna-rich waters of neighboring Pacific Island countries. But as the Chinese fleet expands and makes inroads in neighboring countries, that’s become more challenging.

In 2014 China secured the right to fish in Kiribati, and Chinese companies began buying up permits en masse, essentially pushing out many U.S. flagged vessels. Since then, Kiribati has reduced the fishing time it had allotted to the U.S. fleet, and American fishermen have increasingly found the new arrangement uneconomical and looked elsewhere.

American commercial fishermen in the Pacific have long complained that as foreign fleets regularly flout regulations, they continue to get slapped with new restrictions that hamper their ability to compete. Mauga wrote in his letter that “the proposed National Marine Sanctuary would continue to displace U.S. fishing fleets to international waters where they must compete with foreign fishing fleets.”

When Biden announced plans to expand the sanctuary in March 2023, it drew quick praise from environmental advocates. But in American Samoa, more than 1,200 cannery workers signed a petition opposing the federal proposal.

In one of hundreds of comments submitted to the federal government from American Samoa in opposition, cannery worker Iosefa Tanuvasa wrote, “This company has provided for my family of 6 children. The proposal should have been more focused on the protection of our seas from illegal fishing by the Chinese fishing boats.”

During a public hearing on May 25, cannery worker Tanielu Malae said, “I have seven children between the ages of 2 and 17, they are all in school, and I have been supporting my family working for StarKist … do the people in Hawaii that made this proposal know what it is like for people like us?”

But William Aila Jr. — a prominent Hawaiian cultural practitioner and advocate for the sanctuary — said the situation is more complicated on the ground, telling the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that “people are not opposed to sanctuaries in American Samoa, I was there and that was a message that was loud and clear at the scoping session for the PRI marine sanctuary proposal.”

Some village chiefs have expressed support and several residents of the territory sit on the Sanctuary Advisory Council.

Aila said that Wespac and other opponents of the sanctuary are overstating the potential impacts to the cannery and the fishing fleet in Pago Pago. A May 2023 study by University of California, Santa Barbara scientists found that purse seiners based in American Samoa spent just over 4% of their time over the past five years in the proposed restricted area.

Aila also asserted that Wespac tends to side with commercial fishing interests and notes it has been the subject of federal investigations — in 2022 it was ordered to pay back $837,000 of more than $1.2 mil­lion flagged by federal auditors the previous year.

But the tuna industry plays an outsized role in American Samoa’s economy and even the territory’s infrastructure. Businesses in the territory rely on the ships bringing in supplies for the StarKist cannery — which otherwise would probably rarely stop in the remote islands — to also bring in goods they need, keeping shipping prices in check. Tankers make fuel deliveries that are split up to run both the cannery and the territory’s electrical system.

“Their concern, in terms of the impact to American Samoa is I think legitimate, because they really have no alternative economy right now,” said Aila. “Unfortunately, past governments and the current government of American Samoa have allowed that condition to occur — therefore, they’re at the whim of the cannery. But in terms of the 4% of the fish that is caught in the proposed closed area, our science basically says that it shouldn’t impact the cannery and they should more than make it up in other areas.”

But Archie Soliai, director of marine wildlife resources for American Samoa, said that 4% of the fleet’s catch is no small matter in light of the sharp decrease in tuna hauls since 2007.

As fishing hauls have decreased, so has the size of the fishing fleet in Pago Pago, from once more than 50 vessels to now just 26. Soliai said that just last month, another Pago Pago-based boat was sold and re-flagged to another country by its new owner.

Meanwhile, China’s fleet has increased from 100 vessels in the region in 2007 to now over 520, not including Chinese owned and operated vessels registered under other countries’ flags. In some cases, former American Samoa fishing boats have in fact been bought up by Chinese companies.

In Mauga’s letter, he writes that the U.S. is “losing influence in the international fisheries management organizations … due to weakened U.S. fisheries. These impacts are exacerbated by the loss of U.S. fishing grounds as a result of monument designations.”

Protecting fish

Gaffney said he shares concerns about the Chinese fleet’s activities in the region, but from a different point of view. He notes that China has invested heavily in developing ports and other facilities in places like Kiribati, which in 2021 opened up the Phoenix Islands Protected Area — once one of the world’s largest marine life sanctuaries — to Chinese fishing companies.

“I think we also need to be worried because they are effectively convincing some of the Pacific nations to take their money and their construction in exchange for opening up their sanctuaries to Chinese fishing,” said Gaffney.

Gaffney said the sanctuaries are critical, citing the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument northwest of Hawaii. A 2022 study led by two University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers and published in the journal Science found that catch rates of yellowfin tuna increased by 54% in nearby waters around Papahanau­mokuakea, while catch rates for all fish species combined increased by 8%.

Gaffney said that demonstrates the benefit to fishermen, explaining “if you look at Global Fishing Watch, you’ll see a solid line of fishing vessels working the 200 mile boundary of the protected area.”

American Samoa’s government cites other studies that have mixed appraisals of the effectiveness of large, deep ocean “blue water” sanctuaries compared to those focused on reefs and seamounts. Soliai argued that rather than expanding sanctuaries, there should be an international effort to cap the number of fishing vessels various countries can have in a region. This would cut down on overfishing by large distant-water fishing fleets — like China’s — to restore balance.

There is also debate on how best to actually enforce protections and prevent illegal fishing on the high seas and in the American EEZ. In 2020, the Coast Guard declared illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing — or IUU — the top global security threat in the high seas, and since then has worked to step up operations in the Pacific.

Mauga wrote that “thousands of foreign fishing boats, predominantly Chinese, surround that PRIA region border and often encroach and illegally fish upon it.”

Officials in American Samoa assert the Coast Guard — which has 11 vessels and three planes assigned to Oceania — lacks sufficient resources to monitor the vast blue space. American Samoa officials and some members of Wespac have argued that small numbers of U.S. flagged fishing boats with permits to fish legally can help serve as lookouts for foreign vessels fishing illegally in the U.S. EEZ.

“You’ve got U.S. vessels that are out there that can see and report, ‘We saw these guys here, they shouldn’t be fishing in these waters,’” said Soliai. “I think that’s one of the advantages of allowing U.S.-flagged vessels to fish in our EEZ, which includes this monument expansion area.”

Under international regulations, all commercial fishing vessels in the region are required to use vessel monitoring systems such as the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, to report their locations. Gaffney argued that “basically, through a multitude of tools already in use, the waters of the PRI, and around the PRI, are being monitored. Therefore, the assertion that fishing in PRI by U.S. vessels is necessary to monitor and/or prevent potential incursions by foreign flagged vessels, is specious at best.”

But some vessels have been known to turn off their tracking systems or manipulate their signals.

Gaffney noted there is a push to bring other technologies into the effort to account for that. In May 2022, the leaders of the United States, Australia, Japan and India — a group known as “the Quad” — signed an agreement to launch the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness in hopes of boosting information-sharing between the countries, along with plans for a network of new high-tech sensors and satellites to track “dark” vessels and document activity across vast stretches of the Pacific and Indian oceans.

But regardless of who spots and reports illegal fishing, actual enforcement for violations still overwhelmingly falls to the flag country a vessel is registered to. Soliai said that’s a problem when those countries are unable — or unwilling — to make vessels in their fleets comply.

”I think we need to be more realistic with our efforts,” said Soliai. “If we’re serious about IUU, let’s do something about it.”