Dear Editor, I see RNZ swooping like vultures on your local opinion piece(s) to continue beating up this story, so I’ll try again to explain for your readers, who in my view might be being misled (‘Low’ low season for fishermen, July 24, 2023)

First off, the local fisherman quoted in the RNZ story when he talks about conditions not being good for fishing - this is quite correct; sea conditions are not good, which was what I was attempting to say in my last letter.

Second, the fortunes of fishermen down here in Raro, over a thousand kilometres due south from fishing grounds in the north, are not greatly affected by commercial operators up there targeting primarily albacore tuna (longline) or skipjack (purse seine) – and certainly no more or less than vessels operating due west of us, or south of us, or due east of us at similar distances. 

Third, MMRs (Ministry of Marine Resources) licensing numbers have remained relatively static over the last two decades or more, and I’d note that just because an operator purchases a licence to fish here, it doesn’t mean they actually are all the time. The same operator will have a licence to fish in Kiribati, and/or in Tuvalu, Samoa and/or in Tokelau. For those interested, it will be a simple matter of requesting from MMR to see average fishing days per boat per year to understand what I am talking about. This is not top secret information and in any case is normally accessible online from SPC or WCPFC for those who are sufficiently interested.

Following on from this, the Cook Islands commercial fishing activity (i.e. its footprint) is average to low compared to other Pacific Island countries fishing the same tuna stocks. I am sorry to say, but foregoing fisheries revenue and pushing all the commercial boats outside the Cook Islands EEZ is not going to make much of a difference, if any, to the catch rates down here in Rarotonga, period. These same boats will simply carry on fishing on the high seas or in our next door neighbours zones targeting the same stocks, no problem.

Please don’t miss the point here. Tuna are highly migratory, swimming across multiple zones. This means the only effective way to manage them across their entire range is via coordinated regional management actions to control the (largely unconstrained) fishing on the high seas, and overall regional fishing catch/effort via the Forum Fisheries Committee, and/or the Tuna Commission (WCPFC). There is little the Cook Islands can do unilaterally that will greatly impact the status of these stocks, and it doesn’t matter what lawyers or real estate agents have to say about it because it doesn’t change this essential fact. The context of the Cook Islands fishery in relation to those of our other Pacific islands brothers and sisters is important, and it’s something that is either wilfully or out of ignorance, continually being overlooked whenever we talk about this.

Finally, with respect to the comment in the opinion piece about residential tuna stocks – this is largely unproven and unsupported by science (with the exception of, with certain caveats attached, a single small scale acoustic survey done in Hawaii). Tuna and associated species are known to go where there is forage (food). Their forage is associated with sea conditions. If conditions are not good here, they will swim on, and fishermen here know this. Inshore FADs (fish aggregating devices) do a good job of holding them for a time, since they work to bring in bait fish and act as little oases in a blue desert. As attractive as this island may be, the fish don’t come here for a holiday, to hang out and get a sun tan. I don’t mean to be facetious but the quote, ‘alternate theories’ being put forward by some in your paper don’t make a lot of sense. In any case, Marae Moana legislation guarantees 50 miles of protected sea for each of our islands, free from any commercial activity whatsoever. And using that skewed logic, at what point would somebody be satisfied that they could have in their minds an uninterrupted fishing bonanza – a 100-mile exclusion zone? 250 miles? The commercial guys don’t operate down here anyway, so it’s a moot point.

I am truly sorry that fishing is not good right now here, but this is not because of the fishing activity in the northern part of our zone, and it would be a mistake in my view to completely forgo important fisheries revenue in the misguided hope that it will somehow improve the artisanal fishing catch down here in Rarotonga. 

Editor, since my own credibility was questioned by another writer, let me be clear. I retired from the Cook Islands Government in March this year after 30 years working in both Fisheries and Foreign Affairs. I am not beholden to this Government or any other. I have had over three decades of involvement in fisheries management, at local, regional and international levels – including years of data analysis at a fine scale resolution; bilateral and multilateral fisheries negotiations; illegal (IUU) fisheries enforcement (arrest, seizure and forfeiture); and not to mention all the lengthy discussions into the night with skippers and crews of large, medium and small scale operations both here and abroad that are too numerous to mention. I am more than happy to stack this experience up against anyone here on the island or even in this region, but I’ll restrain myself from any further correspondence on this issue since ‘there’s none so blind as those who will not see’.

Kind regards,

Josh Mitchell