We don’t have commercial fishing on Saipan

This is the third in a series of letters about the Trump administration efforts to overturn marine monuments in the Pacific, particularly the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. In this letter I will address commercial fishing.

The monument prohibits commercial fishing in the Islands Unit, the area of federal waters around the islands of Asuncion, Maug, and Uracus. There is some fishing allowed in the monument, namely sustenance, recreational, and traditional indigenous fishing. The Friends of the Mariana Trench asked for this cultural fishing in our vision statement, which we published in this newspaper in October 2008 and posted online on numerous blogs.

In many Pacific Islands countries, commercial fishing plays an important part in the economy. Some countries rely on this activity for most of their government revenue. The Northern Mariana Islands, however, does not have any commercial fishing. Zero. We do not have any long liners or purse seiners, and we do not export any of our fish to other countries.

We do have a very active artisanal fishery that services our local markets, but the size and scale of this fishery is tiny compared to what exists in other places, including Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. And most of that fishery is centered around Saipan, not the far northern islands.

So why is there no commercial fishing on Saipan? It’s not for a lack of trying. There have been several attempts to start commercial fishing here, often heavily subsidized by the federal government. The outcome of the most recent attempt sits out in the middle of the Saipan lagoon, lying on its side since Typhoon Soudelor.

There are a number of reasons that commercial fishing has not taken off here. One is that we don’t have the high value fish in our waters that the Japanese are willing to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on. Our fuel prices are also higher than in many other places. A third thing is our immigration laws. The longline fishery in Honolulu only exists because they bend U.S. immigration laws to allow slave-like labor on their boats. This situation was exposed last year in a report from the Associated Press and caused a lot of controversy for Hawaii and damaged their reputation. We don’t need that on our islands. We already have enough problems as it is.

So just to recap, the monument prohibits commercial fishing only, but there is no commercial fishing in the Northern Mariana Islands. Therefore, while some of the economic benefits promised by White House Council on Environmental Quality chair James Connaughton and the Bush administration have not come to fruition yet, neither has there been any loss of economic activity because we do not have a fishing industry.
 
Ignacio V. Cabrera
I Agag, Saipan