Recently the Esperanza and crew had a short stop in Nauru, a small Pacific island country between Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.
Blogpost by Steve Connolly, webbie on board the Espy – 10-10-2011
Our stop here happened to come just days after Nauru called for the closure to longline fishing in the high seas at the Tuna Commission meetings. So we took this opportunity to meet with people from the fisheries department and show our support for their bold position.
After mooring close to shore, we invited some fishery authorities on board, congratulated them on the leadership they have taken (they were the first Pacific Island country to take this stance), and shared our findings from the tour so far.
They returned our gratitude by thanking us for the support our work gives them, arranged to take our divers out to some of the top diving spots around the island, and took our cook to the supermarket for a few supplies we were running low on.
I was fortunate to get an island tour by Camalus Reiyetsi, the acting CEO of the Fisheries. The island, like the other small islands we’ve been to, looked like tropical paradise when viewed from the ship. However, once on shore another side to this once prosperous island is visible.
The island’s main source of income over the past decades had come by way of phosphate mining. Thirty years ago the people living on this island were very wealthy, it was once one of the richest countries in the world (on a per capita basis). It seems it has been a case of short-term profits winning out over building up a long-term sustainable economy. Most of the phospate has been mined leaving little future for the 10, 000 people on this island. Camalus was telling me that a restoration program for the island promised by the Australian government several years ago has not materialised – instead there has been more mining for the little that is left.
© Paul Hilton / Greenpeace
I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the people living on this island. Being here and witnessing this first had has a lot more impact than reading about this on the 3 or 4th page of the newspaper back home in Sydney.
Nauru could be used as a case study, or a cautionary tale for other countries that exploit and plunder resources for short-term gains. In a matter of 3 short decades this country has gone from highly prosperous to very poor. The deserted mining operations around the island are a constant reminder to the people of Nauru that short term thinking, by countries and companies alike, does not leave much for the future.
Maybe this ever-present reminder has led to the strong stance that Nauru taken in protecting their tuna stocks.
Globally, there are many examples a mining mentality being applied to fishing – for example slow-growing deep sea fish being caught at a rate at which they simply can’t replenish until the population collapses – or even for faster-growing species, overfishing one area before simply moving on to the next. If Nauru and other Pacific countries allow this to happen to tuna, another of their key natural resources could be gone just as surely as if it was dug up and loaded onto a ship for export.
While I toured around the island, our dive team was exploring areas just off shore. The beautiful marine life their photographs and footage showed was an inspiration to us all, and reinforced the importance of establishing marine reserves throughout the Pacific.
We left Nauru with mixed feelings. It was upsetting to see how this country had been dug up and left impoverished, but encouraging seeing them leading the way by taking a firm stance to protect marine life in the high seas. Sometimes it is bitter experience that provides the deepest understanding: Long-term thinking and strong management are the only way to sustain the Pacific’s vital tuna resource into the future.
