Rep from American Samoa calls for opening protected Pacific waters to tuna fishing

U.S. Congresswoman Amata Radewagen, who represents American Samoa, has urged the Trump administration to reopen most of an enormous marine protected area in the Central Pacific Ocean to industrial fishing while also recommending the reopening of other Pacific MPAs.

In a Jan. 23 letter to President Donald Trump, Radewagen called for his administration to open the vast majority of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument (PIH) to commercial tuna fishing. PIH, which is larger than the U.S. state of Texas, is an area of exceptional biodiversity. Radewagen’s letter called reopening it an “immediate need” that would benefit the country’s economy and challenge “Chinese fishing dominance.” She also sent Trump a background document that, among other requests, called for an executive order to open all Pacific marine national monuments and national marine sanctuaries to tuna fishing and to withdraw the U.S. from efforts to develop large marine protected areas in international waters.

Some details of the letter and background document, which Radewagen’s office shared with Mongabay, have not previously been publicly reported.

Members of the PIH Coalition, an advocacy group based in Hawai‘i that includes scientists, fishers and Indigenous leaders, criticized Radewagen’s move.

“I think it’s foolish,” Rick Gaffney, a PIH Coalition member and fisheries expert, told Mongabay.

Gaffney said conservationists have been fighting to ensure a future for fisheries in the Pacific, which is why MPAs like PIH were created: “to be sure that these extremely remote and unique island areas are protected so that they continue to be productive.”

A monumental fight

PIH, until recently called the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, was established by President George W. Bush in January 2009, just before he left office, and was expanded significantly under President Barack Obama in 2014. It covers about 1.27 million square kilometers (490,000 square miles) in five separate areas that surround seven mainly uninhabited U.S.-controlled islands and atolls. All commercial resource extraction, including fishing, is banned. None of the areas is near American Samoa — the closest is roughly 1,000 nautical miles (1,850 kilometers) away. However, there are other nationally protected waters around American Samoa, a U.S. territory roughly midway between Hawai‘i and New Zealand.

Radewagen’s proposal calls for allowing fishing in PIH between 50 and 200 nmi (93-370 km) from the shorelines of the islands and atolls. This would affect the three largest PIH zones — around Jarvis Island, Wake Atoll and Johnston Atoll — each of which currently extends to 200 nmi from shore. The other two PIH zones extend only 50 nmi from shore and presumably wouldn’t be affected. Radewagen’s office didn’t reply to requests to clarify the zone-by-zone specifics of her proposal.

It appears Radewagen’s proposal would effectively undo the 2014 expansion, at least in terms of fishing access, reducing PIH’s no-take zone by more than 80%. The reduction could be accomplished by reducing PIH’s official borders or by reducing the no-take zone within them.

“I don’t think this is a sound decision based on available data,” Robert Richmond, a marine conservation biologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, told Mongabay. Richmond said he’d worked with Pacific island communities including in American Samoa for decades and respected Congresswoman Radewagen’s duty to consider the territory’s economic needs. But he said reopening PIH was “not scientifically supported.”

PIH is “ideally located” for the conservation of migratory fish, especially given that warming waters caused by climate change are pushing populations from the Western Pacific toward the area, Richmond said. He said PIH is ecologically important because it contains many diverse features, such as mesophotic reefs; it provides good “import and export” of sea life through the movement of eggs and larvae; and it’s large enough to support the development of “big fat females” that can produce orders of magnitude more eggs than smaller fish.

Richmond said he looks at the issue not only as a scientist but as a parent, and that PIH is, like a bank account, “a tremendous investment for the future.”

Solomon Kaho’ohalahala, a native Hawai‘ian elder and longtime oceans campaigner, also said the proposal was misguided. Kaho’ohalahala, who is a descendant of the Hui Panalāʻau Hawai‘ians who served on a World War II-era U.S. government mission to some of the PIH islands, told Mongabay that PIH’s existence was being politicized in an unfortunate way. He said there’s a rush to want to control and have dominion over marine resources and that some actors simply assume that the marine national monument is a disadvantage, rather than seeing its benefits.

Radewagen, a Republican who’s held her office since 2015, argues that the fishing ban is hurting the economy of American Samoa and the entire U.S. (As the “delegate” of American Samoa, which doesn’t have the same status as a U.S. state, Radewagen doesn’t have voting power in the U.S. Congress.)

The tuna canning industry is American Samoa’s primary economic lifeline. Its main island is home to 10 of the 12 U.S. purse seiner fishing vessels registered to fish in the Western and Central Pacific. Purse seiners cinch their catch in huge nets and account for most of the world’s tuna catch, especially that destined for canning. American Samoa has one tuna cannery but used to have four; the last closure was in 2016, eliminating hundreds of jobs. The remaining cannery is owned by the South Korean firm StarKist. The cannery benefits from being on U.S. soil — no tariffs are applied to products brought to other U.S. markets — but is nonetheless in financial trouble.

Radewagen contends the decline is due to the closure of U.S. fishing grounds. In her letter, she cites the Obama expansion of PIH as an example of “gross ‘environmental justice’ overreach.” Advocates for PIH counter that the decline in the American Samoa tuna canning industry has little to do with such closures and results instead from broader trends, including increased international competition.

Radewagen’s proposal to reopen PIH to fishing is supported by the American Tunaboat Association (ATA), a trade group that represents the interests of U.S.-flagged purse seiners in the Pacific. William Gibbons-Fly, ATA’s executive director, told Mongabay that U.S. fisheries are the best-managed in the world, with a science-based and participatory process that runs through eight regional councils, and that a large-scale closure such as PIH “undermines and bypasses” that system as well as international tuna management systems. The tuna stocks targeted by Pacific purse seiners are healthy, Gibbons-Fly said. He also argued that key coastal habitats would still be protected under Radewagen’s proposal, as fishing would remain banned out to 50 nmi around each island or atoll.

Radewagen and Gibbons-Fly both argued that the PIH closure simply allows countries like China to take advantage. A portion of the zone around Jarvis Island, for example, abuts the waters of the island nation of Kiribati, where up to 20 purse seiners are licensed to fish, some of them Chinese-owned. Gibbons-Fly said they’re fishing “immediately across an imaginary line in the water from where U.S. vessels are prohibited from fishing” and that “the [U.S.’s] loss is China’s gain.” (A different section of Kiribati waters contains a large-scale MPA that was reopened to tuna fishing in 2023 after being closed for eight years.)

The critics of PIH’s current no-take borders also questioned the scientific rationale for them. Radewagen, in her letter, went so far as to say that there is “no science behind these extended closures.” Gibbons-Fly, meanwhile, drew attention to research showing that large-scale MPAs that ban fishing provide little benefit to tuna populations. This is in fact a matter of fierce scientific debate, with other research showing signs of increased tuna abundance outside such MPAs, including at PIH — a phenomenon called “spillover.” Advocates for PIH argue that its existence improves the fishing industry’s prospects, and moreover that no-take MPAs provide a wide range of conservation benefits beyond just supporting tuna stocks, such as the protection of threatened species.

In the case of PIH, these include green (Chelonia mydas) and hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) turtles, reef sharks (mostly genus Carcharhinus), Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi) and bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum), as well as a variety of seabirds, such as red-footed boobies (Sula sula). Richmond, the biologist, said PIH protects organisms up and down the food chain, including top predators that are essential to ecosystem structure and function, and that much of the fishing in the region is not selective and would threaten PIH’s biodiversity if it was allowed to resume there.

A larger battle in the Pacific

PIH is one of a number of U.S. marine national monuments and national marine sanctuaries in the Pacific. One of the other marine national monuments, Papahānaumokuākea, near Hawai‘i, is the largest MPA in the world, its total area about 18% greater than PIH’s.

PIH is not the only one subject to appeals for deregulation. Gibbons-Fly testified before a U.S. House subcommittee in 2023, calling for reducing barriers to fisheries access caused by the marine monument and sanctuary system.

Radewagen’s call to reopen tuna fishing in all Pacific monuments and sanctuaries in the background document attached to her letter to Trump fits with that agenda.

Such a reopening would “likely result in the decline of the fishery that is currently so essential to the economy of American Samoa,” Gaffney, the PIH Coalition member, said via email when told of the request. “Eliminate the refuge created by marine national monuments and national marine sanctuaries, and you eliminate reproductive areas essential to the future of tuna fisheries in the rest of the Pacific,” he said, citing spillover research.

In addition to conservation impact, changes to the status of Pacific MPAs could have social implications.

Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a U.S.-based think tank, who has worked on marine conservation efforts in the Pacific for two decades and was in the audience when Bush signed PIH into law, said that while the monuments are working on a conservation level, their implementation at the local level has been imperfect.

“It’s fair to say that not all of the promises of the marine monuments have made their way to the U.S. territories,” he said. “A lot of the jobs and a lot of the research funding stays in Hawai‘i. I’d like to see more of those research dollars and more of those federal dollars making their way out to the U.S. territories.”

Villagomez, who is from the island of Saipan in the Western Pacific, said there was some improvement on this front under the Biden administration, which held office from 2021 until January this year, but he worried that the Trump administration could “pull the rug” on island communities that depend on federal funds for climate change mitigation and conservation initiatives.

What President Trump has the authority to do will likely be up to the courts. Marine national monuments are created under the authority of the Antiquities Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1906, which doesn’t necessarily grant the president the right to reverse established protections.

“In the Antiquities Act, Congress gave the President the authority to create national monuments, not to dismantle them,” David Henkin, a Hawai‘i-based attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group headquartered in San Francisco, told Mongabay in an email.

However, interpretations of the act vary, and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement in 2021 signaling a wariness about the legality of large national monuments.

In any case, the fight over large MPAs in the Pacific could extend beyond nationally controlled waters. Radewagen’s background document also asks Trump to withdraw the U.S. from a 2023 international agreement known as the High Seas Treaty that could, once it takes effect, lead to the development of large marine protected areas in international waters; the U.S. signed the treaty but, like most signatories, has not yet ratified it.

Radewagen’s letter was copied to the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior, which house the two agencies that co-manage PIH: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Spokespeople from both departments declined to comment for this story.

Banner image: Tuna school. Image by NOAA Fisheries West Coast via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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Citations:

Hampton, J., Lehodey, P., Senina, I., Nicol, S., Scutt Phillips, J., & Tiamere, K. (2023). Limited conservation efficacy of large-scale marine protected areas for Pacific skipjack and bigeye tunas. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9. doi:10.3389/fmars.2022.1060943

Lynham, J., Nikolaev, A., Raynor, J., Vilela, T., & Villaseñor-Derbez, J. C. (2020). Impact of two of the world’s largest protected areas on longline fishery catch rates. Nature Communications, 11(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-020-14588-3

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