Pacific nations have warned foreign fishing countries, including the United States, to expect more price hikes to the cost of fishing in their territorial waters.

The nations that make up the Parties to the Nauru Agreement have told disgruntled nations that they will raise the daily fishing rate from $US6000 to $US8000 per boat from next January.

It will raise their total income to around $370 million.

After a meeting in Marshall Islands, their fisheries ministers issued a strongly-worded communique warning the US industry that the $63 million a year it pays to fish in the Pacific isn’t enough and there may be more price hikes to follow.

The next negotiating session with the US is in Auckland in July.

The US fleet has 40 flagged purse seiners which fish almost exclusively in the waters controlled by the eight PNA nations.

The eight nations that makeup the PNA control more than half the global supply of skipjack tuna.

Dr Transform Aqorau, PNA’s chief executive officer, said the communique focused on the continuing abuse of Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission measures by some fishing states.

He said if foreign companies want to fish in Pacific waters they must pay what is asked of them.

“As resource owners, we would like to be able to get a fair share of the value of the fishery. It’s ours and I don’t see any reason why we should be getting the poor end of the deal.”

Dr Aqorau says rising fees is not an unreasonable demand as the major beneficiaries of the fishery continue to be those companies who catch the fish and process it.

“What we’re seeing is that there is a lot of boats that are coming into the fishery and they’re competing for days and therefore the price of days has just gone up because there are just not enough days available,” he said.

“So those that are going to want to be able to fish in the region have to compete against each other to be able to stay in the fishery.

“Plus the fact that I think for this year Kiribati actually closed off the zone to some of the vessels that have fish-free days and so the result of that is that the price of tuna has gone up as a consequence of the actions that Kiribati took.

“Having said that, I should point out that even though the price of the days has gone up, relative to the value of the fisheries, it’s still only around 10 per cent – so you are not getting what I would regard as an equitable share of the value of the fishery – we’re still not quite there yet.”

Aqorau says another key outcome from the Marshall Island meeting was the decision to distribute funds that have been held in trust for the past two years.

The nations agreed on a formula to divide up $94 million from the United States Treaty that has been held by the Forum Fisheries Agency.

“Finally, PNA ministers made an agreement that would have enormous implications for the treaty and that was the internal distribution plus the minimum benchmark,” he said.

“What they’ve said is a message that they’re not going to agree to an arrangement that pays less than the minimum benchmark.”

The New Zealand Foreign Minister, Murray McCully, says distant water fishing nations operating in the Pacific need to confront their entrenched interests.

McCully was speaking at the Our Oceans Conference in Washington DC.

He says the Pacific stocks of tuna are increasingly under pressure as tuna stocks elsewhere become harder to access.

McCully says in 2013 up to five billion US dollars worth of tuna was harvested in Pacific waters but less than 10 per cent of that came back to the Pacific nations.

The foreign minister says some of the wealthiest countries on the planet are profiting at the expense of some of the poorest.

He says Pacific countries need to strengthen fisheries management regimes, but the distant water fishing nations need to confront the entrenched interests that allow subsidies that promote overcapacity, overfishing and illegal and unreported fishing.