Tong is trying to save the fish. He was in New York to raise money for Conservation International, an environmental group that, along with the New England Aquarium, has been helping Kiribati protect its resources—abundant tuna, some humphead wrasse, groupers, snappers, mackerels, and sharks, plus sea turtles, dolphins, birds, and a hundred and twenty species of coral—and build up a trust fund of five million dollars. Next, he is scheduled to be in Washington to attend a conference on oceans hosted by the State Department on June 16th and 17th; there, he plans to announce that Kiribati will close off eleven per cent of its waters to commercial activity at the start of next year. The restriction will block off 157,626 square miles surrounding one of the country’s three main island groups, called the Phoenix Islands, part of a vast territory of ocean in the central Pacific where sixty per cent of the world’s tuna is fished. Tong has been planning the reserve, or the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, as it is known, for almost ten years. He’s had to negotiate with the Japanese, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Spanish, and the Americans, all of whom take tuna from the Kiribati’s waters—between four and five hundred million dollars of fish a year, before resale.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:25:58 +0000
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