Peter Thiel speaking at Hy! Summit in Berlin, Germany, March 19, 2014. Photograph by Dan Taylor, www.heisenbergmedia.com

By Christopher Pala
WELLINGTON, Jun 8 2017 (IPS)

In January, the revelation that Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump adviser, secretly got a New Zealand citizenship six years ago caused an uproar, mostly because he was the first to get one without pledging to live there.

It didn’t help that he wasn’t even required to fly to New Zealand to get his papers: the government allowed him to pick up his passport at its consulate in Santa Monica. The outrage was compounded by the government’s release in February of his 145-page naturalization file, which revealed a cascade of broken promises.Purchases by absentee foreign billionaires have been blamed for helping push up real estate prices and boosting homelessness, which at 1 percent is twice the US rate and three times the British one.

In his application dated June 2011, he described New Zealand as a utopia that “aligns more with my view of the future” than any other country. Thiel has said the maximum tax rates in the U.S. (now 39.6 percent) should be lowered to 20 percent or less and the shortfall in national income should be recovered by “disentangling some of those middle-class entitlements that people have gotten used to.”

In New Zealand, the top tax rate is 33 percent. It is the only OECD country without a capital gains or inheritance tax; it is run by the world’s most business-friendly bureaucracy and has a vibrant and under-capitalized tech sector.

Though it was the first country to give women the vote, in 1893, and has offered free dental care to schoolchildren since 1921, it swung from one of the most managed economies to one of the least regulated in the 1980s. As a result, 60 percent of its rivers are too polluted to swim in and its fisheries have been found to rest on a foundation of waste and official lies.

In 2015, Thiel bought a 193-hectare estate on Lake Wanaka, in the South Island. He also owns a mansion on Lake Wakatipu, an hour away. These and other purchases by absentee foreign billionaires have been blamed for helping push up real estate prices and boosting homelessness, which at 1 percent is twice the US rate and three times the British one. The cost of housing is the hottest issue in elections due this year.

In his citizenship application, Thiel wrote, “It would give me great pride to let it be known that I am citizen and an enthusiastic supporter of the country and its emerging high-tech industry.” He said he intended “to devote a significant amount of my time and resources to the people and businesses of NZ” and become “an active player in NZ’s venture capital industry.”

He explained that the year before, he had created an investment fund called Valar Ventures “dedicated exclusively to funding and aiding New Zealand technology companies.” Through it, he could “act in an advisory role in a way that (others) cannot because I have encountered and solved many of the problems that will confront entrepreneurs as they build their companies.”

At the government’s suggestion, according to the file, Thiel even donated NZ$1 million (830,000 U.S. dollars at the time) to an earthquake relief fund.

On July 8, 2011, three days after his application was accepted, he was the headline speaker at a conference at the Icehouse, a business development center in Auckland, the economic capital. But Thiel made no mention of his new citizenship, nor did he speak of becoming an active player on the local tech scene. Likewise, he made no mention of New Zealand to a New Yorker writer who interviewed him for a long profile headlined “No Death, no Taxes,” published that November.

“The last thing we want to do is give people the impression that our citizenship is up for sale, and this affair has certainly created that,” said Iain Lees-Galloway, the spokesman on immigration issues of the opposition Labour Party, in an interview. As for Thiel’s promises in his application, Lees-Galloway added, “He couldn’t have been all that proud (of becoming a Kiwi) because he didn’t tell anybody for six years.”

The government of the right-wing National Party glossed over the broken promises. Prime Minister Bill English, who was deputy PM in 2011, told local reporters, “If people come here and invest and get into philanthropy and are supportive of New Zealand, for us as a small country at the end of the world, that’s not a bad thing.” Thiel had been to New Zealand four times, his file showed, starting in 1993.

On February 4 came another disclosure: The Herald reported that nine months after Thiel was granted the citizenship, his Valar Ventures fund had accepted what the paper called a “sweetheart deal” from the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, created in 2002 to encourage investments in local tech start-ups.

Valar and the fund would jointly invest in four local companies: Xero, with the largest share, as well as Vend, Booktrack and Pacific Fibre. Two years earlier, Thiel had separately invested three million dollars in Xero, a cloud-based accounting software that was already listed.

At the time, NZVIF’s standard contract had a clause that allowed the outside investor to buy, after five years, the government’s share at its initial cost, plus the yield of a five-year government bond. If the company shares went up, the investor pocketed the profits from the government’s share, too. If the shares fell, both lost equally.

In October 2016, after the shares of Xero soared, Valar Ventures exercised the clause. The exact size of its investment is not known, but the profits have been estimated at 23.5 million dollars for an investment of 6.8 million. Valar still owns 4.8 percent of Xero, down from a peak of 7 percent. Today, of the 13 companies in its portfolio, only two are from New Zealand: Xero and Vend.

Opposition politicians suggested that naïve government officials had made yet another transaction with Thiel that failed to benefit New Zealanders. “Thiel had already invested in Xero, it was hardly a risky venture,” pointed out Lees-Galloway, the Labour MP.

But while politicians denounced the deal as having essentially privatized the profits from a taxpayer-funded investment, the tech world saw things very differently.

Andrew Hamilton, the CEO of the Icehouse business center where Thiel gave his speech, declined to specify what else Thiel had done for startups, saying only: “Peter was and is awesome, and we are always grateful to people who contribute and help!”

Lance Wiggs, the founding director of the Punakaiki Fund, which invests in companies in the development and fast-growth phases, said Valar was “exactly the kind of fund New Zealand wanted to attract.” He said Thiel’s investment in Xero “was absolutely crucial at the time, he really helped them lift their game from being a local player to an international one.” Xero is now worth two billion dollars and has 1,400 employees around the world.

As for the government, Wiggs added, “I can see why they blinked and gave him a passport, though I can’t see why he needed it,” given that Thiel has a residency permit since 2006.

But unlike the permit, citizenship is “irrevocable,” as his lawyer pointed out in the application.

Adam Hunt, a tax administration specialist, offered one possible explanation: “It’s an attractive place for a rich person,” he said. Thiel could renounce his American citizenship and move to New Zealand. “If you’re rich and you move here, you can live off your capital gains,” which are not taxed. “You may have virtually no income here, and pay almost no taxes.”

Forbes estimates Thiel’s net worth at 2.7 billion dollars. He is 49 years old.

As for Thiel himself, who was born German and naturalized American, he declined to publicly defend the officials who did him the favor, or to make any new investments in New Zealand start-ups. His spokesman, Jeremiah Hall of Torch Communications in San Francisco, did not respond to three e-mails seeking comment.

A still image from the film that cost the owners of the Marshalls 203 fishing boat three million dollars.

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Sep 15 2016 (IPS)

In a giant step for transparency at sea, environmentalists on Thursday unveiled a website that allows anyone with an Internet connection to see for free exactly where and when most of the world’s industrial fishing boats actually fish.

Called Global Fishing Watch, the satellite-based program is being described by scientists who have tested it as the strongest single tool so far to curb illegal fishing, which mostly affects poor countries.

In some areas, like marine reserves or near-shore areas reserved for artisanal fisheries, the mere fact that an industrial vessel is fishing there is an indication of illegality.After SkyTruth sent to Kiribati the precise tracks that showed the ship had appeared to have fished several times inside the reserve, the captain confessed and the ship’s owners were fined two million dollars and donated an extra one million to Kiribati as a grant.

“But most of the time, we can’t tell if a vessel is fishing legally or not,” says John Amos, president of SkyTruth (motto: “If you can see it, you can change it”), a non-profit based near Washington, D.C. which developed the program. “What I am sure of is that someone, somewhere will know whether that particular ship has the permit to fish in that place at that time.”

That someone could be Josephus Mamie, head of Sierra Leone’s Fisheries Research Unit and a former head of its Fisheries Protection Unit. He says there are two to three times more ships fishing in the country’s near-shore waters than have licenses to do so. “Being able to see which vessels are fishing where would be a tremendous help in reducing illegal fishing,” he says.

SkyTruth, with help from Google and from Oceana, a global non-profit headquartered in Washington, pioneered a computer algorhythm that shows, with over 80 percent accuracy, at what point in a ship’s tracks over the ocean is it engaged in fishing, and whether it’s purse-seining, long-lining or trawling, the three main methods.

As previously reported, intensive and often illegal fishing of West Africa’s exceptionally rich waters by Asian and European fleets (which sell most of their take to Europe, Japan and North America) has drastically reduced the catch of the artisanal fishermen who sell their catch locally, depriving coastal populations of access to affordable animal protein and vital micronutrients.

In another locus of industrial fishing, the Pacific Ocean, long-liners and purse seiners that go after tuna, billfish and sharks get most of their take from the waters of island nations for whom income from fishing licenses is a major part of the budget. Often, these legal vessels fish more than they are allowed. “This further reduces already depleted stocks and robs these states of much-needed revenue,” says Bubba Cook, the Western Central Pacific tuna program manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Kiribati is one such nation. Last year, it sent its lone patrol boat to chase down a Taiwanese purse-seiner registered in the Marshall Islands, the Marshalls 203, after a mandatory but imprecise tracking system, VMS, showed it spending time inside the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, the most fish-rich of the world’s giant marine reserves.

The captain denied he was fishing, and the VMS track was inconclusive. John Mote, head of the country’s maritime police, contacted SkyTruth, which pulled up the ship’s tracks on the much more precise Automatic Identification System (AIS). Introduced in the 1990s as a short-range collision-avoidance tool used by ships to broadcast by VHF radio their position, speed and identity every few seconds, its signals are now captured by satellites and resold to governments, companies and non-profits like SkyTruth.

According to Amos, after SkyTruth sent to Kiribati the precise tracks that showed the ship had appeared to have fished several times inside the reserve, the captain confessed and the ship’s owners were fined two million dollars and donated an extra one million to Kiribati as a grant.

Starting Thursday, when it goes live, GlobalFishingWatch.com will allow Third-World governments, NGOs and even citizens to zoom in on their patch of ocean and see at a glance which ships are fishing where. The tracks will have a three-day delay but will stretch back to 2012.

“This is going to revolutionize fisheries management,” predicts Jaqueline Savitz, Oceana’s vice president for the United States and Global Fishing Watch.

“It does look like the thing that’s going to end illegal fishing,” agrees Douglas McCauley of the University of California in Santa Barbara, who has been testing it for months.

The system has determined that 35,000 vessels exhibit fishing behavior and transmit their position on AIS. Of these, SkyTruth fully identified 10,000. Amos estimates that perhaps another 30,000 vessels do not use AIS, which the United Nations mandates is mandatory only in ships over 300 tons.

McCauley expects the creation of Global Fishing Watch will build pressure on the United Nations to reduce the threshold for requiring AIS to vessels above 100 tons, which would include most of the world’s industrial fleet, compared to about 60 percent of it today.

Amos of SkyTruth says his team discovered that some vessels had become quite creative in what he called “spoofing” – programming their AIS to transmit false information. This includes turning off their AIS in order to fish illegally or broadcasting a false identity or false position. “We once had a small Chinse fleet that gave its position as central Antarctica,” he recalls.

So the team is teaching the computer to recognize these practices and set off alarms. For instance, a ship broadcasting it is not where it really is will be found out because its signal will be caught by the satellite over its true position.

Amos said one of his analysts posted on a blog that he was puzzled by one small Chinese fleet’s fishing-like tracks in the Indian Ocean, which didn’t fit with either long-lining, purse-seining or trawling. A vessel of the non-profit Sea Shepherd happened to be in the area and went to investigate. “They found that the fleet were fishing with drifting oceanic gillnets, which are banned globally,” Amos said. “And they had left their AIS on!”

While most illegal fishing involves legally registered ships catching more than they are allowed, or fishing out of season or in areas for which they have no license, some companies opt for fishing completely illegally, changing names and flags and owners – usually shell companies – as fast as the authorities fine them. The so-called Bandit 6, illegally and lucratively catching toothfish off Antarctica despite being blacklisted everywhere, made headlines last year when they were chased away by a pair of Sea Shepherd ships.

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd skipper who pursued some of the ships, says they rarely use AIS.

But Amos has found that only less than one percent of the 35,000 vessels whose whereabouts GFW tracks indulge in suspicious activity.

As a case in point, SkyTruth closely monitored the Phoenix Islands reserve, which was created in 2008 but was left open to almost unrestricted fishing until January 1, 2015. “One day there were dozens and the next day they were all gone, and only two of them had stopped transmitting on AIS,” Amos said. The Marshalls 203 was caught there in June, 2015.

Marine scientist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, recalls being dazzled by the program’s potential when he was offered to test it. “I immediately felt it was an unprecedented opportunity to understand what really was going on with the oceans,” he says. “It’s a very secretive world. We can now tell where the fishing is taking place for the first time.” He compared it to the effect of radar on cars: “If you know it’s there, you slow down.”

Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the hoped-for crackdown in illegal fishing comes none too soon.

While the United States has reduced fishing enough so that some of its fish stocks are growing again and Europe is taking steps to do likewise, in the rest of the world, “It’s catch what you can because if you don’t, someone else will.” Pauly says that making fishing a more public activity will not only make it harder to fish illegally, but will address the main problem confronting fisheries managers and scientists everywhere: lack of data.

“Until now, we’ve known roughly how much seafood is consumed, but we only had an imprecise idea of how many vessels are fishing,” he says. “With GFW, we will know with much more detail which fleets from which countries fish what and where.” And that, he adds, “should allow people to pressure their governments to slow the fishing down.”

Artisanal fisheries are being hit by subsidised, foreign vessels. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Jun 23 2016 (IPS)

In 2011, Dyhia Belhabib was a volunteer in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver when she was asked to participate in the Sea Around Us’s project to determine how much fish had been taken out of the world’s oceans since 1950 in order to better avoid depleting the remaining populations of fish.

Belhabib had studied fisheries science in her native Algeria, so she was initially asked to oversee the Algeria component. She ended up leading the research in 24 countries. And though she was an expert and an African, over the next five years, the world of African fisheries took her from surprise to surprise, many of them disquieting, just like Voltaire’s Candide. And echoing Pangloss, who repeats “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds” to a Candide dismayed at the state of the world, the Food and Agriculture Organization insisted the world catch was “practically stable.”

“The most depressing thing for me was the realization that African countries got no benefit at all from all the foreign fleets,” she said. “In fact, the fishing communities suffered a lot, and in most places, the only people who made money were the government officials who sold the fishing licenses.”

The study found that the global catch was 40 percent higher than the FAO reported and is falling at three times the agency’s rate. But under this picture of decline, Belhabib uncovered a dazzling array of cheating methods that highlighted the low priority most governments place on fisheries management – and implicitly on the health of the people who depend on the sea for most of their animal protein.

When Belhabib started with Algeria, she was puzzled to see that the government reported to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) that between 2001 and 2006, it had fished 2,000 tons of bluefin tuna on average, and yet reported to the FAO that it had caught almost none. Belhabib discovered that for once, the FAO’s zero catch was not a metaphor for “We have no data,” as the study found in many countries. In fact, undeterred by the fact the Algerian fishermen didn’t know how to fish tuna with long-line vessels, the government had simply bought some boats and sold their quotas to countries that did, notably Japan and Italy.

The next country she tackled was Morocco, which took over the Western Sahara in 1975 over the objections of its nomadic people and the international community. The territory has unusually rich waters and two-thirds of Morocco’s catch comes from there. The study estimated the local value of the catch since 1950 at 100 billion dollars, but since it was almost entirely sold in Europe at twice the price, the real value of the catch was 200 billion dollars.

Had the Moroccan government insisted that foreign fleets pay 20 percent of that value, as the EU claims it does today in Morocco (in fact, the study found it pays 5 percent), it could have received a revenue stream of one billion dollars a year, which, had it gone entirely to the Western Sahara, would have doubled the GDP per capita of 2,500 dollars a year for its 500,000 people. Under the current agreement, the EU pays 180 million dollars for access to all of Morocco’s waters, or 120 million dollars for access to the Western Sahara’s waters. How much actually goes to the territory is unclear. Other nations pay far less.

Mauritania has a fleet of locally flagged Russian and Chinese large trawlers that haul in whole schools of small blue-water fish called sardinella. The coast is studded with idle processing plants built to turn them into fish meal, which is used as animal feed. Belhabib discovered that the ships were reporting to the government only a tiny fraction of their actual haul – some of it illegally taken from neighboring countries and selling the rest for higher prices in Europe. “The authorities had no idea,” she said. “They thought their fleet were landing and reporting their whole catch.”

In Senegal, which unlike Mauritania has a strong tradition of fishing, President Macky Sall expelled the Russians in 2012 because their ships had depleted the populations of sardinella, infuriating many Senegalese. “The Russians just got licenses in Guinea Bissau and went back to Senegal and continued to fish, though not as much,” Belhabib said.

The Senegal reconstruction also documented how the European bottom-trawlers severely depleted the country’s near-shore. As population pressure increased demand for cheap fish, the number of artisanal fishermen soared, and many went to work up the coast in Mauritania, where few people fish. But a conflict in 1989 with Mauritania resulted in the expulsion of thousands of Senegalese fishermen, even as the industrial fleets were increasing their catch off both countries, most of it stolen.

Out of desperation, hundreds of Senegalese fishermen and dozens of canoes over the past decade have been boarding Korean and Portuguese converted trawlers that drop them off near the coasts of other countries. There, they illegally drop baited hooks into underwater canyons out of the reach of bottom trawlers where large, high-value fish can still be taken. These spots, marine biologists say, have served as marine reserves, places where coveted, overfished species could reproduce unhindered – and are now being depleted too, pushing the stocks closer to collapse.

Belhabib’s team also discovered to her horror that subsidized European Union fleets had flocked to the waters of countries weakened by civil war, notably Sierra Leone and Liberia, increasing their stolen catch when the people needed cheap protein most.

They found that South Africa made no attempt to control or even report the extensive fishery in the rich waters off its Namibian colony; in 1969, for example, 4.8 million tons of fish worth 6.2 million dollars were caught, but only 13 tons were reported to the FAO. Today, Namibia has the best-managed fishery in Africa after effectively banning foreign-flagged fleets

Finally, examinations of illegal fishing determined that Spain, whose seafood consumption is double the European average, steals more fish than any other nation, followed by China and Japan.

Tammy Brehio of Kihei, Hawaii, pointing from her back balcony to a Monsanto cornfield a few hundred yards from her house. The inset photo, taken by Tammy, shows a Monsanto tractor spraying pesticides. Credit: Photo by Christopher Pala. Inset photo by Tammy Brehio.

By Christopher Pala
KIHEI, Hawaii, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Tammy Brehio stood on the back balcony of her home in Kihei on the island of Maui and pointed to a brown field a few hundred yards away.

“That’s where they spray the pesticides, even when the wind is blowing directly at us,” said the 40-year-old year mother of three small children. “Ever since we moved here, we all have sore throats and we cough all the time.”

She and a neighbour, who declined to be identified because he works for an agricultural company and feared losing his job, said the spraying often takes place at night. “It wakes me up, it smells really strong and it’s hard to breathe,” Brehio said.

“We do not apply pesticides at night,” said Monica Ivey, the spokeswoman for Monsanto, which grows genetically modified corn on the field. “Monsanto complies with all federal and state laws that govern responsible pesticide use.”

Whether or not the companies respect these laws, which forbid allowing pesticides sprayed on a field to drift beyond it, has become one of the biggest controversies in Hawaii in the past few years.

Over the past decade or so, Monsanto, DuPont and Dow Chemical of the United States, Bayer and BASF of Germany and Syngenta of Switzerland have more than doubled their acreage in Hawaii. Attracted by a year-round growing season that cuts in half the time it takes to bring a new variety to market, they have turned the Aloha State into the epicentre of corn grown with genes modified in laboratories – designed mostly to tolerate the pesticides the companies produce and sell to farmers with the corn.

The kernels grown in Hawaii are sent the mainland United States, where they are planted and harvested. Those kernels are then sold to farmers, whose production ends up mostly as cattle feed and ethanol. The corn sold as food is known as sweet corn and constitutes perhaps one percent of the industrial variety, which is known as field corn.

The agro-chemical companies now own or lease about some 25,000 acres on the islands of Maui, Molokai, Kauai and Oahu – about 2 per cent of the land area. Because the islands are mountainous and farmland is scarce, the fields often abut homes, businesses and schools. Most of these fields were previously used to grow sugar cane and pineapple, and the towns grew around them in the 19th and 20th centuries.

At any given time, about 80 per cent of the fields are bare and brown. The crops are grown in small patches of a few acres and sprayed often with pesticides, which residents complain that they often are forced to inhale.

Even a mile from the nearest cornfield in downtown Waimea, on the island of Kauai, Lois Catala, 75, reports that the pesticide clouds percolate into her home with no warming. “All of a sudden, your eyes are burning and you’re itching all over, and you hear everybody complaining,” she said. A local doctor says she stopped biking to work on a road that bisects cornfields because she went through clouds of pesticides too many times. Other residents interviewed told of similar experiences.

Testing new varieties of pesticide-resistant field corn and growing seed corn from them requires 17 times more restricted-use insecticides and more frequent applications than farmers in the US use for their crops, a study by the Center for Food Safety has concluded. Court documents filed by attorneys for Waimea homeowners who successfully sued DuPont for pesticide and dust impacts to their homes show the company sprayed 10 times the mainland average, based on internal pesticide records obtained from DuPont.

The frequent, sometimes daily, sprayings have led to a spate of complaints that the companies violate with impunity federal and state laws.

The laws say that commercial applicators who spray pesticides that winds carry out of their property is liable for a $25,000 fine and/or six months in jail. The pesticides receive approval from the federal Environmental Protection Agency only after being tested for their legal use, which does not include human inhalations.

In 2006 and 2008, Howard Hurst was teaching special-education classes at Waimea Middle School, on Kauai, when clouds of what he believes were concentrated pesticides blew into the school from an adjoining field operated by Syngenta. “It feels like you have salt in your eyes, your tongue swells, your muscles ache, it’s awful,” he said in an interview at the school. Both times, the school was evacuated and several students were treated at the nearest emergency room.

But the state authorities, instead of prosecuting the Swiss company, which denied that it was spraying on those days, insisted that the evacuations were caused by mass hysteria triggered by an onion-like plant called stinkweed.
Without ever accepting responsibility, Syngenta stopped using the field adjacent to the school. The closest is now a half-kilometer away. Hurst said pesticide odors have become much less frequent.

In 2013, the Kauai county council passed a law ordering the companies to create wider buffer zones and to disclose in far more detail than they do now what they spray, where and when. A group of doctors in Waimea, which is surrounded by cornfields on three sides, testified that the number of cases of serious heart defects in local newborns was 10 times the national rate.

Meanwhile, in Honolulu, a pediatrician said in an interview that he’d noticed a statewide spike in another birth defect called gastroschisis, in which the baby is born with the abdominal organs outside.

“Data suggest that there may also be an association between parental pesticide use and adverse birth outcomes including physical birth defects,” the American Academy of Pediatrics reported this year.

“I think it’s serious,” says Bernard Riola, a pediatrician in Waimea. “We need an in-depth epidemiological study. Right now, we just don’t know” if the pesticides are causing the birth defects. Another doctor at the hospital said he tried to get the state to do just such a study, to no avail.

Bennette Misalucha, the head of the agro-chemical companies trade group, the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, dismissed the doctors’ concerns. “We have not seen any credible source of statistical health information to support the claims,” she wrote in an e-mail after declining to be interviewed.

The companies she represents strongly opposed the buffer-zones and disclosure law, which resembled others passed in 11 other states. They argued that it would drive away the companies and cause job losses, and that critics of the pesticide-drift problem were simply victims of scare-mongering by opponents of genetically modified food.

They sued and a federal judge struck the law down, arguing that only the state can regulate pesticide use. Civil Beat, a Hawaii news site, reported here that it effectively does not.

In Maui and Molokai, which form one county, a bitterly fought ballot initiative was approved by the voters in November 2014 banning genetically modified agriculture until an Environment Impact Statement is performed and proves the industry is safe.

The companies spent $8 million to fight it, reportedly the most spent on any political campaign in Hawaii history. Another federal judge struck it down on the same grounds as the Kauai ordinance: that only the state can regulate pesticide use. Both rulings are being appealed.

Back in Maui, Brehio, the mother of three who says she is dispirited by the lack of progress in curbing illegal pesticide drift, was remodeling her kitchen with her husband and preparing to sell their house. “This is a not a safe place for me and my family,” she said.

Meanwhile, construction has started on a strip of land between her house and the Monsanto field for a 660-unit affordable-housing development where the cheapest units will be right against the Monsanto fields.

“This report was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.”

President Obama's closure of waters around three remote Pacific islands will allow Honolulu's s long-line fishing vessels like this one to continue to fish the fast-dwindling bigeye tuna. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Sep 27 2014 (IPS)

President Barack Obama this week extended the no-fishing areas around three remote pacific islands, eliciting praise from some, and disappointment from those who fear the move did not go far enough towards helping depleted species of fish recover.

Last June, Obama had proposed to end all fishing in the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of five islands, effectively doubling the surface of the world’s protected waters. But on Thursday, he only closed the three where little or no fishing goes on, making the measure, according to some experts, largely symbolic: the Wake Atoll, north of the Marshall Islands; Johnson Atoll, southwest of Hawaii; and Jarvis, just south of the Kiribati Line Islands.

Fishing of fast-diminishing species like the Pacific bigeye tuna was allowed to continue around Howland and Baker, which abut Kiribati’s 408,000 square km Phoenix Islands Protected Area, and Palmyra in the U.S. Line Islands.

“If we don’t have the fortitude to protect marine biodiversity in these easy-win situations, that says a lot about our commitment to oceans." -- Doug McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara
Many press reports said Obama had created the largest marine reserve in the world. In fact, he would have done that only if he had closed the waters around Howland and Baker. Since these waters adjoin Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area, itself due to be closed to commercial fishing soon, the two together would have created a refuge of 850,000 square km, twice the size of California.

The biggest marine reserve in the world remains around the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Islands, which Britain closed in 2010, at 640,000 square km. Scientists say that to allow far-traveling species like tuna, shark and billfish, protected areas need to be in that range.

But after fishing fleets in Hawaii and American Samoa protested, Obama backtracked and allowed fishing to continue unabated in the two areas that have the most fish, Palmyra and Howland and Baker.

“We missed a unique opportunity to do something important for the oceans,” said Doug McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “I can’t think of anywhere in the world that could be protected and inconvenience fewer people than Palmyra and Howland and Baker.” According to official statistics, only 1.7 percent of the Samoa fleet’s catch and four percent of Honolulu’s comes from those areas.

“If we don’t have the fortitude to protect marine biodiversity in these easy-win situations, that says a lot about our commitment to oceans,” added McCauley.

On Thursday, Obama extended by about 90 percent the no-fishing zones in the waters around Jarvis, south of Palmyra and outside the range of the Hawaii fleet: Wake, which is not fished at all and lies west of Hawaii, and Johnston, south of Hawaii but far from the so-called equatorial tuna belt where the biggest numbers of fish live.

The three are more than 1,000 kilometers apart from each other and their newly protected waters add up to about one million square km.

“That’s a lot of water,” said Lance Morgan, president of the Marine Conservation institute in Seattle, who had campaigned for the closures. “Obama has protected more of the ocean than anyone else.”

Morgan pointed out that it was in his sixth year (as is Obama now) that President George W. Bush created the first large U.S. marine national monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and it was in the closing days of Bush’s second term that he created several others in U.S. overseas possessions, including the five in the Central Pacific.

“Podesta said Obama’s signing pen still has some ink left in it, and I hope he’ll use it,” Morgan added, referring to a remark White House Counselor John Podesta made to journalists last week.

Bush, like Obama, had also initially proposed to protect the whole EEZ of the Central Pacific islands, but after fishing companies and the U.S. Navy objected, he ended up limiting the marine national monument designation to only the areas within 90 km of the islands.

The move protected the largely pristine and unfished reefs but left the rest of the EEZ open to U.S. fishermen. This time, a source familiar with the process told IPS, the Navy had made no objections to Obama’s original proposal to close the whole EEZ of the five zones.

But Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Honolulu Western Pacific Fishery Management Advisory Board, a leading voice in Hawaii’s fishing industry, had vigorously opposed the proposed closures, telling IPS, “U.S fishermen should be able to fish in U.S. zones.”

Obama’s declaration that turns the whole EEZ (out from 90 km to 340 km) around Wake, Jarvis and Johnston into marine national monuments notes they “contain significant objects of scientific interest that are part of this highly pristine deep sea and open ocean ecosystem with unique biodiversity.”

But the declaration does not mention that overfishing in the last decades has reduced the tropical Pacific population of bigeye tuna, highly prized as sushi, to 16 percent of its original population, while the yellowfin is down to 26 percent. About 80 percent of the tuna caught by Hawaii’s long-line fleet is bigeye. The stocks of tuna are even more depleted outside the Western and Central Pacific.

“In a well-managed fishery, you would stop fishing and rebuild the stock,” said Glenn Hurry, who recently stepped down as head of the international tuna commission that manages the five-billion-dollar Pacific fishery.

The fishery’s own scientists have called for reducing the bigeye catch by 30 percent, but the catch has only grown. Honolulu’s catch of bigeye was a record last year.

“It’s too bad these areas (Palmyra and Howland and Baker) weren’t closed,” said Patrick Lehodey, a French fisheries scientist who studies Pacific tuna. Absent a reduction in catch, he said, “Our simulations showed that to help the bigeye recover, you need to close a really big area near the tuna belt.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The move would create giant havens where fish, turtles and birds could reproduce unhindered and edge back to their natural levels. Credit: ukanda/cc by 2.0

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 2014 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed to more than double the world’s no-fishing areas to protect what some call America’s underwater Serengeti, a series of California-sized swaths of Pacific Ocean where 1,000-pound marlin cruise by 30-foot-wide manta rays around underwater mountains filled with rare or unique species.

Obama announced in June that he wants to follow in the steps of his predecessor George W. Bush, who in 2010 ended fishing within 50 nautical miles of five islands or groups of islands south and west of Hawaii. Bush fully protected about 11 percent of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a total of 216,000 km2, by declaring them marine national monuments under the Antiquities Act, which does not require the approval of Congress.“This would be by far single greatest act of marine conservation in history.” -- Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly

Obama is expected to use the same tool to extend the ban to 200 nautical miles and protect the rest of the EEZs, or a whopping 1.8 million km2. Given that the only two other giant fully protected areas, the U.K.’s Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean and the U.S. Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, total about one million km2, Obama would more than double the no-take areas of the world’s oceans.

“This would be by far the single greatest act of marine conservation in history,” said Daniel Pauly, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. “It’s particularly welcome because overfishing is shrinking the populations of fish almost everywhere.”

By increasing the number of fish, the closure would boost genetic diversity, which will be increasingly valuable as marine species adapt to an ocean that is becoming warmer and more acidic at unprecedented speeds, he explained. The area is rich in sea-mounts, underwater mountains where species often evolve independently.

The move would create giant havens where fish, turtles and birds could reproduce unhindered and edge back to their natural levels. The Pacific bigeye tuna population, the most prized by sushi lovers after the vanishing bluefin, is down to a quarter of its unfished size, according to official estimates, and calls for reducing their take have been ignored.

The five roundish EEZs are called PRIAs, for Pacific Remote Island Areas. They are: Wake Atoll, north of the Marshall Islands; Johnston Atoll, southwest of Hawaii; Palmyra and Kingman Reef, in the U.S. Line Islands south of the Kiribati Line Islands; Jarvis, just below, and Howland and Baker, which abut Kiribati’s 408,000 km2-Phoenix Islands Protected Area. President Anote Tong has pledged to end all commercial fishing in the Phoenix protected area by Jan 1, 2015. The two areas together would create a single no-take zone the size of Pakistan, by far the world’s biggest.

None of the islands have resident populations. Palmyra has a scientific station with transient staff and Wake and Johnson are military, with small staffs. The others are uninhabited.

“These islands are America’s Serengeti,” said Douglas McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who once worked as an observer on a long-lining vessel based in Honolulu. “That’s where you can still find the grizzlies and the buffaloes of the sea.”

In Honolulu Monday, a public hearing recorded testimony from opponents and supporters. Though only four percent of the take of the Hawaii fleet in 2012 came from PRIAs, criticism from fishermen ran strong. A local television station headlined its story, “It’s designed to protect the environment, but could it put local fishermen out of business?”

Opposition was led by the Western Pacific Fisheries Advisory Council, known as Wespac and controlled by the local fishing industry. Wespac issued a report citing the “best available scientific information” that asserted the closure was unnecessary because, it claimed, the fisheries in the five areas, which are open only to U.S. vessels, were healthy and sustainable.

Like many academics, McCauley, the ecologist, disagreed. He pointed to official statistics that show the Pacific tuna, the world’s most valuable fishery, are becoming smaller and fewer, the result of the same kind of overfishing that pummeled populations in the other tropical oceans.

John Hampton, the Central and Western Pacific fishery’s chief scientist, analyses whole stocks – in this case Pacific populations of skipjack, bigeye, albacore and yellowfin, along with billfish like marlin and swordfish. He said closing even such large areas won’t help because the fish move around the entire ocean.

But studies have shown that varying percentages of tuna are actually quite sedentary and stay inside PRIA-sized areas; most Hawaii yellowfin, for instance, stay within a few hundred miles of the islands.

McCauley pointed to statistics collected by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service that show that the number of fish caught per 1,000 hooks by long-line vessels is higher in the PRIAs than in non-U.S. waters. For skipjack and albacore tuna, the ratio is two to one, and for yellowfin it’s six to one.

“This indicates that there’s already more fish inside the PRIAs, which illustrates that if you fish less, the population increases,” he said.

Alan Friedlander, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, said even seabirds, the category of birds undergoing the steepest decline, would benefit from a ban on fishing.

Many species depend on tuna and other predators that feed on schools of small fish by driving them to the surface, where the birds can pick them off. “If you have more tuna, there’s going to be more prey fish driven to the surface and that will help the sea birds,” Friedlander said.

McCauley agreed and noted that historically, efforts to prevent the complete collapse of overfished species had focused on the species themselves.” “But by closing giant areas like these, you allow the ecosystem to become whole again,” he said.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Eparama Kelo, a retired teacher, said a Fiji newspaper had recently reported that the plan was to bring in 18,000 to 20,000 Kiribatis to Vanua Levu. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
NAVIAVIA, Fiji, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

You can count the inhabitants of this isolated, tidy village of multi-coloured houses and flower bushes among global warming’s first victims – but not in the usual sense.

They are descendants of labourers from the Solomon Islands who came to Fiji to work on the coconut plantations in the 19^th century. In 1947, they were invited to move onto a large one called the Natoavatu Estate that the Anglican Church once inherited and were told they could stay there indefinitely as long as they practiced the Anglican faith.

In late May, the Church sold most of the 2331.3-hectare estate to the island nation of Kiribati, leaving the 270 villagers, who said they used 283 hectares to feed themselves, with only 125 hectares.

“We can’t live on just 300 acres [125 hectares],” said the village headman, Sade Marika.

Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, said he bought land in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

Kiribati’s president, Anote Tong, said he bought the land so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable.

“We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” he told the Associated Press.

For years, Tong has claimed in climate change conferences and in interviews that sea-level rise was already claiming a heavy toll on his people, eroding beaches, destroying buildings and crops, forcing the evacuation of a village and wiping out an entire island.

His views are echoed by Conservation International, a large NGO based near Washington, D.C., on whose board Tong sits. The residents of “Kiribati, where the effects of rising sea levels already are being felt, [are] on the front lines of climate change,” says its website.

In Tarawa, Kiribati’s overcrowded capital island where half the population of 103,000 lives, Tong often warns in speeches that climate change will destroy their homeland but that he is working hard to obtain compensation from the countries that caused it.

Kiribati, with a per-capita income of 1,600 dollars, receives more foreign aid per capita than any other Pacific nation.

This year, the government organised a competition for the best song on climate change. The refrain of the winning song, frequently played in English on the state radio, is “The angry sea will kill us all.”

But while Tong’s warnings of impending doom for atoll dwellers have brought him a measure of fame abroad and even a panel that nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, in Kiribati they elicit confusion in some people and derision in others. “I don’t think he did a proper valuation. And it’s clear the government doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to do with the property now.” -- former Kiribati president, Teburoro Tito

“A lot of people now worry about climate change,” said Tealoy Pupu, a 20-year-old student, as she lay pandanus leaves out to dry. “We just don’t know what to think.”

Tong’s predecessor as president, Teburoro Tito, had read the scientific studies on atoll dynamics. “The scientists tell us that our reefs are healthy and can grow and rise with the sea level, so there is absolutely no need to buy land in Fiji or anywhere else,” he said emphatically. “How can we ask for foreign aid when we spend our own money on such foolish things?”

“We know that the whole reef structure can grow at 10 to 15 mm a year, which is faster than the expected sea-level rise,” confirmed Paul Kench, an atoll geo-morphologist at the University of Auckland.

“As long as the reef is growing and you have an abundant supply of sand, there’s no reason reef growth can’t keep up with sea-level rise.”

Kench and others also say that sea-level rise has had no effect so far on any Pacific atoll. They say that common images of waves crashing into homes give a false impression of permanent flooding when in fact they are caused by inappropriate shoreline modifications like seawalls to protect land reclaimed from the sea or by building causeways between islands.

In Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, where the property Tong bought is located, an examination of the sales deeds of comparable parcels revealed that Kiribati paid four times more per acre than other buyers in the last few years.

Tito, the former president, said he believed that the 8.7-million-dollar purchase had been done solely for publicity purposes to highlight Tong’s far-sightedness and how seriously he takes climate change. “I don’t think he did a proper valuation,” he said. “And it’s clear the government doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to do with the property now.”

In his announcement of the completion of the sale, Tong said a committee would be appointed to study what should be done with the land. In a separate statement, the government said the purchase marked “a new milestone” in its “development plans, which include exploring options of commercial, industrial and agricultural undertakings such as fish canning, beef/poultry farming, fruit and vegetable farming.”

Tong, through his spokesman, Rimon Rimon, declined all comment.

Tetawa Tatai, a former health minister and a member of parliament, said he was shocked that the Church of England, which he called “one of the most trusted institutions in the world,” would “gouge one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world.”

In an interview in Suva, Bishop Winston Hanapua, Archbishop of the Polynesian Diocese of the Anglican Church, denied that the church had taken advantage of an inexperienced buyer widely believed to be representing the world’s first climate refugees.

On the contrary, he said, “I felt good about the whole thing because Kiribati is part of my jurisdiction. We were open for any offer, and there was an offer.”

Back in Naviavia, the Solomon Islander Anglican minister, Koroi Salacieli, complained that the Church had given him no clear notion of how many Kiribatis would be coming into their midst.

He, other villagers and an outside expert agreed that the property, of which two thirds is covered by densely forested steep hills, could only support a few hundred more people.

These would need housing and lengthy training to learn how to practice Fiji’s agriculture, which involves using bullocks to plough the land. In Kiribati, there is no agriculture to speak of: rice, canned meat and fresh fish form the mainstay of the diet.

Eparama Kelo, a retired teacher, said a Fiji newspaper had recently reported that the plan was to bring in 18,000 to 20,000 Kiribatis. “What are we going to do if they come?” he asked disconsolately.

Christopher Pala is a Washington-based journalist whose trip to the Pacific was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Purse-seiners have been unsustainably fishing the bigeye tuna in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, May 9 2014 (IPS)

After years of claiming untruthfully that the world’s most fished marine protected area was “off limits to fishing and other extractive uses,” President Anote Tong of the Pacific island state of Kiribati and his cabinet have voted to close it to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

The action, if implemented, would allow populations of tuna and other fish depleted by excessive fishing to return to natural levels in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), a patch of ocean the size of California studded with pristine, uninhabited atolls.The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

While no-take zones of comparative size exist in Hawaii, the Chagos Islands and the Coral Sea, none are as rich in marine life, making this potentially the most effective marine reserve in the world.

The news drew high praise from scientists and environmentalists.

“This is a big win for conservation and long overdue,” said Bill Raynor, ‎director of the Indo-Pacific Division of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation. “Now I hope that the other Pacific countries that are contemplating giant marine reserves will follow PIPA’s example.”

These include Palau, where President Tommy Remengesau has suggested closing off its entire Exclusive Economic Zone to commercial fishing, as well as the Cook Islands and New Caledonia, which are studying how much fishing to allow on protected areas even larger than the Phoenix.

“This is fantastic news,” said Lagi Toribau of Greenpeace. “The area will provide a crucial sanctuary for the region’s marine life from highly migratory tunas and turtles to reef fishes and sharks.”

The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

The international fleets of industrial purse-seiners, dominated by Spanish, Asian and U.S.companies, have converged on the Western and Central Pacific since the start of the millennium after depleting the stocks elsewhere.

The result has been a fast and unsustainable decline of the bigeye, the most prized for sushi after the fast-disappearing bluefin, and more moderate shrinking of the yellowfin and skipjack populations. The fishery’s own scientists have called for a reduction of the catch by 30 percent, but instead it has increased by that amount.

In contrast, for years, Tong’s Wikipedia page has stated, “In 2008, his government declared 150,000 square miles (390,000 km2) “of [the] Phoenix Islands marine area a fully protected marine park, making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses.”

In a speech still he gave at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit two years ago still visible on Youtube, Tong mentions “the initiative of my country in closing off 400,000 square kilometres of our [waters] from commercial fishing activities,” calling it “our contribution to global ocean conservation efforts.”

In fact, when PIPA was created, only in the three percent of the reserve that’s around the islands, where virtually no fishing was going on, was it banned. In the rest of the reserve, the catch increased, reaching 50,000 tonnes in 2012 – an unheard-of amount in any protected area.

In an interview in Tarawa, the capital island, a year ago, Tong had brushed aside objections and said he had no intention of ending fishing in the reserve entirely anytime soon. The management plan called for closing another 25 percent next year if Kiribati’s Western partner, the Washington-based Conservation International, donated 8.5 million dollars into PIPA’s trust fund.

The money would be to compensate Kiribati for losses in income from fishing licenses stemming from closure – losses many experts said were entirely imaginary, as PIPA makes up only 11 percent of Kiribati’s waters and the fishing vessels could easily catch the far-traveling tuna elsewhere, they said.

But following reports in the international media, including IPS, on the contrast between Tong’s claims and reality, he said in a press release last September that closing the reserve to all fishing, far from entailing sacrifice as he had previously insisted, would make good business sense for his people.

Ashley McCrea-Strub, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, argues that a complete closure “would create both capital and interest.” She explained that the much-reduced tuna, billfish and sharks populations would likely double inside the reserve to reach their natural, original levels within a couple of decades: that’s the capital.

“PIPA is big enough that some of the tuna will spend all their lives inside it, so they’ll be able to reproduce freely,” she said. “Once the density gets high, more fishes are going to start venturing outside the reserve in search of food and can be caught outside the border,” she said. “That’s the interest.”

Though PIPA is the signature project for Kiribati’s two foreign partners, Conservation International (on whose board Tong sits) and the New England Aquarium, neither organisation has made any announcement. The news came in a short, anonymous paragraph posted on PIPA’s website reporting that the cabinet on Jan. 29 voted to close the reserve to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

An Internet search found that One Fiji television station’s website ran a story on the vote on Feb. 27, quoting Kiribati Radio (which lacks a website). Fiji One said the measure was taken “as a commitment towards protecting and conserving its marine resources as well as a bid to attract donors to invest in the PIPA Trust Fund,” which has five million dollars.

Asked why there had been no public announcement for what marine scientists said was the most far-reaching marine closure in years if enforced, Gregory Stone, who first suggested creating the reserve and is now a vice president at both Conservation International and the New England Aquarium, did not respond to several e-mailed requests for comment.

Handling lionfish requires special care: some of their fins are tipped with venom that make even the slightest puncture extremely painful, though not fatal. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
NASSAU, The Bahamas, Feb 28 2014 (IPS)

The lionfish, with its striking russet and white stripes and huge venomous outrigger fins, wasn’t hard to spot under a coral reef in 15 feet of clear water. Nor was it a challenge to spear it.

As I approached and brought the point of my Hawaiian sling to within a foot of it, it simply looked back, utterly fearless until I pierced it and brought it back to the surface.“They’re everywhere now. It’s a doomsday scenario.” -- Pericles Maillis

Within a half-hour, we had caught four of these gorgeous one-pound fish, and the fillets made excellent eating that night.

But the arrival of a tasty, abundant and easy-to-shoot fish on the Caribbean’s much-depleted coral reefs is anything but good news. A recent scientific paper brought new detail to previous studies, showing that a year after colonising a reef, lionfish reduced the number of native fish by about half.

“They’ll eat just about anything they can swallow and almost nothing eats them,” said principal author Stephanie Green of Oregon State University. That’s why they’re so easy to catch, she explained.

However tasty they may be, only a miniscule fraction of the invaders has been removed, while their numbers continue to grow exponentially, reaching densities never seen in the Pacific, their native habitat.

This suggests the lionfish, believed to have been introduced to the Atlantic coast by aquarium lovers in the 1980s, will likely wipe out most Caribbean reef fish in a decade or two, scientists agree. As a result, many corals that depend on herbivore fish will die and eventually turn to rubble, making shorelines more vulnerable to waves just as global warming is lifting sea levels.

As he steered his boat back to shore, my host, a Bahamian lawyer of Greek descent named Pericles Maillis, balefully contemplated our catch and said, “They’re everywhere now. It’s a doomsday scenario.”

Maillis, a lifelong fisherman, conservationist and a former president of the Bahamas National Trust, has been trying to promote a commercial fishery in The Bahamas, but the fish, first spotted here in 2004, has become nearly ubiquitous since 2010. And shooting it while scuba diving is still banned.

His pessimism is not unwarranted. Scientists from the southern Caribbean are reporting seeing densities of lionfish that until a couple of years ago were only documented in The Bahamas, the fish’s jumping off point from Florida into the Caribbean.

In the Atlantic, their range now covers 3.3 million square kilometres. They can reach densities hundreds of times higher than in their native range, for reasons that remain a mystery. “Something is controlling their abundance,” says Mark Hixon of the University of Hawaii. “We’re guessing a small predator that’s absent in the Atlantic is targeting baby lions, but we have no idea what it is.”

In addition to adult little reef fish, the lionfish swallow virtually all species of bigger fish when they appear on the reef as bite-sized juveniles.

Isabelle Côté of Simon Fraser University said that today, when she surveys reefs in the Bahamas, where she does most of her research, “you can see there are a lot fewer little fish than there used to be just four years ago.”

No so for the larger predators like snappers and groupers that are the mainstay of the local fishermen’s reef catch. A stroll along Nassau’s fishing docks confirms what scientists have observed: despite the explosion in the number of lionfish, the decades-old slow decline in the numbers of large predators has not accelerated – yet.

Because they take years to mature, it will take a while for the generation of juveniles that’s being gobbled up now to fail to replace the current adults, who are too large to be lionfish prey.

At Nassau’s waterside fish market, where a “Me? Worry?” mood prevailed, fisherman Carson Colmar, 45, said he’s not seen any significant drop in his catch of reef fish and lobsters. He started spearing lionfish simply because they’re so easy and abundant. “I sell 50 a week,” he said. “I’d catch more if I could sell them.” The fillets sell for eight dollars a pound, compared to twelve dollars for grouper or snapper.

One problem is that handling lionfish requires special care: some of their fins are tipped with venom that make even the slightest puncture extremely painful, though not fatal. So local people, already taken aback by their unusual appearance, often believe that the flesh may be poisonous too, which it is not. That, fishermen complain, limits demand.

In the United States, the notion that this lethal predator could be controlled by becoming dinner for the ultimate predator, homo sapiens, has received wide coverage. Lad Akins, the founder of REEF, the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, who has been working on lionfish control for nearly a decade, noted that the commercial take of lionfish in Florida, where REEF is based, quintupled in just a year to 6.1 tonnes in 2012.

“It’s growing fast, but we don’t know yet if it’s putting a dent in the lionfish population,” says Akins, who is based in Key Largo. Scientists said the strategy of “eat them to beat them” has failed to have any overall effect and is unlikely to do so because spearing lionfish is too time-consuming to be profitable.

So far the only documented successes have come from recreational diving companies, which are literally defending their turf. Seeing how the colourful reef fish that underpin the businesses could soon be gone, they have started methodically exterminating the invaders from their regular dive sites.

In Bonaire, a diving mecca the Dutch West Indies, the first lionfish was caught in 2009, and within two years they were proliferating, according to Fadilah Ali of the University of Southampton. But some 300 volunteers were given special spears, more than 10,000 lionfish were killed and soon their density dropped in the areas favoured by divers. “Today, on a typical dive, you’ll see very few or no lionfish,” she said.

Green of Oregon State said some reefs might survive if the recreational divers go beyond the reefs favoured by their clients, which tend to have many different species but few juveniles. To protect the young fish, they would have to eliminate lionfish from shallow areas around mangroves, which serve as nurseries, she said.

Broken seawalls, like this one in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, often have no connection with sea-level rise. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
TARAWA, Kiribati, Sep 20 2013 (IPS)

Scientists say dredging, building causeways and natural climate variations are largely responsible for the flooding events that many officials here point to as evidence that climate change-induced sea-level rise is shrinking and destroying their tropical Pacific island.

At the United Nations, in multiple climate change conferences and in an interview here, President Anote Tong, the world’s unofficial spokesman for low-lying coral islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans, often says that Kiribati’s 103,000 inhabitants are fighting a rising sea on a daily basis.

He and other officials often point to widespread erosion of the island’s coastline and say that Tarawa is shrinking as the sea rises. A profile of Tong in the U.S. magazine The Nation was even headlined “Interview with a drowning president.”

“We’ve had a whole island disappear, a whole village has been evacuated, our freshwater is being contaminated and our crops are dying,” Tong told IPS in his office. He said his country was “on the front line of climate change”, adding that “time is running out” and emphasising the need for an evacuation plan.

But in fact, a scientific study showed that the southern part of Tarawa, where more than half the country’s population lives, is far from disappearing: in fact it, it is growing. A series of what the scientists called “disjointed reclamations”, involving pouring dredged coral sand over shallow reefs to create land, increased South Tarawa’s size by nearly 20 percent over 30 years.

Meanwhile, the area of the largely unpopulated north of the island remained stable (another study found similar stability in 27 other Pacific atolls).

Tetabo Nakara said that he resigned as environment minister a few years ago because Tong had forced him to focus government policy on relocation rather than on mitigation through improved coastal management, which Nakara said was more appropriate.

Climate scientists say the equatorial Central Pacific is the area in the world where the sea has risen fastest since 1950: 5.9 centimetres in just the past 20 years. That’s because an atmosphere warmed by heat-trapping gases like carbon monoxide and methane is in turn warming the ocean, and warm water takes up more volume than cold water. A second reason is that ancient glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, pouring fresh water into the sea.

Tong’s adviser on climate change, Andrew Teem, regularly shows visitors examples of what he and Tong say is damage caused by rising seas. On a recent afternoon, he pointed to a breach in a seawall in the village of Eita, one of many around the island.

“We built this wall a few years ago to keep the sea out,” he said. “It breached during a storm, and the breach has been getting bigger. We just can’t win.”

Teem pointed to another locally iconic climate-change casualty, an island in Tarawa’s lagoon called Bikeman that was once dense with coconut groves. Today, it’s a barely visible pencil line on the horizon, a sandbank that disappears at high tide.

The village of Tebunginako in the island of Abaiang, a 15-minute flight away, is also frequently mentioned as evidence that the sea is rising. Its inhabitants moved their 100 or so thatched huts and houses half a kilometre away from the shore after the sea washed away a sandbank that protected a freshwater lagoon, flooding some homes and making growing crops impossible.

Countless climate change documentaries on Kiribati posted on YouTube show footage of waves crashing into houses during storms in 2005.

But scientists who have studied Kiribati say these events have explanations that have little to do with climate change.

The seawall in Eita was built to protect a low-lying mangrove that was filled with dredged coral sand so it could be used for housing as more and more people moved into South Tarawa. But most seawalls are poorly designed and reflect the energy of the waves in such a way that these wash away the sand at the walls’ base, causing them to collapse.

Bikeman Island disappeared because a causeway was built between two parts of the atoll, blocking a pass through which sand came in from the ocean side. Without this input, wave action slowly washed the sand away from Bikeman to other lagoon-side areas that saw their beaches grow.

The village of Tebunginako asked for help to understand why erosion was so much worse there than elsewhere. Scientists reported here that a nearby pass had disappeared a century ago, again depriving the beach of fresh sand.

The dramatic flooding of 2005 happened because of El Nino, a cyclical change in currents that moves warmer water east in the Pacific and is unrelated to climate change. El Nino caused the sea level in Tarawa to rise by more than 15 centimetres, says climate scientist Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia. That level hasn’t been reached since, he pointed out in a paper published in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.

“A visit to Tarawa can provide the false impression that it’s subject to constant flooding because of climate change,” Donner told IPS. “While it’s certainly experiencing some sea-level rise, people try to attribute current events to that trend and they often make elementary mistakes.”

In an e-mail exchange, he noted that erosion and floodings “are going to happen more and more frequently as the ocean rises. President Tong is right to sound the alarm now, because it won’t be an easy problem to solve.”

Donner contrasts this with the United States, where there is little talk and less action on sea-level rise. “No one is talking about giving up on Miami,” he said. “But they should, because the long-term picture is the same there too.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment predicts a rise of anywhere between 25 cm and one metre by 2100, depending on carbon dioxide emissions.

Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, claims to have created a marine protected area, but fishing is banned in just three percent of the reserve. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
TARAWA, Kiribati, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

A growing chorus of politicians, scientists and environmentalists are urging President Anote Tong of Kiribati to actually do what he claims was already done in 2008: create the world’s most effective marine protected area in a remote archipelago in the Central Pacific Ocean.

For years, Tong has been saying that under his leadership, Kiribati created the California-sized Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), “making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses” – a quote that gets about 500 hits on Google, all Tong’s or his government’s. In speeches at climate change conferences and other venues, he has repeatedly called PIPA his country’s great gift to the world.

But what Kiribati actually did in 2008 was ban fishing in the three percent of the reserve that wasn’t being fished in the first place: the area around the islands, which are uninhabited. In the rest of the reserve, as in the rest of Kiribati’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), industrial tuna fishing has been steadily increasing as prices and profits soar.

In an interview with IPS in the capital island of Tarawa, Tong, who was first elected a decade ago, said that he had no intention of closing PIPA to fishing anytime soon. “It’s got to be done gradually,” he said, declining to set a date.

“President Tong has been misleading the world about the true status of the Phoenix Islands marine reserve,” Seni Nabou, an oceans campaigner with the environmental organisation Greenpeace, said in an e-mail from Fiji."Tong has been misleading the world about the true status of the Phoenix Islands marine reserve."
-- Seni Nabou

“While the world has hailed Kiribati for its conservation efforts, it seems the reserve has only served to bankroll the Spanish tuna fleets fishing in its waters. President Tong now needs to deliver on the talk.”

Misleading claims

For the creation of PIPA, Tong received several prestigious awards from organisations whose officials said in interviews that they had believed the entire reserve was closed to fishing. These awards include a Benchley Award for Excellence in National Stewardship of the Ocean in the United States and a Hillary Leadership Award in New Zealand.

In Tarawa, the skinny atoll home to more than half of Kiribati’s population of 100,000, most people queried, including several members of parliament, said they believed that PIPA had long ago been closed to fishing.

Teburoro Tito, Tong’s predecessor, was scathing about the current president’s descriptions of PIPA.

“The people of Kiribati will be disappointed to learn that their president had lied to the world and particularly those who were led to believe that he deserved prestigious awards” for closing PIPA, said Tito, who is still a member of parliament, now in the opposition. “He must close PIPA [to all fishing] immediately to salvage the country’s honor.”

An estimated 50,000 tons of tuna were taken out of PIPA last year at a time scientists say fishing levels should be decreasing, not increasing.

“Closing PIPA  would be the single most effective act of marine conservation in history” and a big step in preventing the world’s last major population of skipjack tuna from becoming as depleted as those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, said Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

In the interview, Tong said no progress had been made toward banning fishing in PIPA in the last five years because Kiribati requires millions of dollars in financial compensation to do so.

Kiribati earns between 30 and 50 percent of its budget from selling the right to fish in its waters to foreign fleets. Tong insisted that the doubling last year of Kiribati’s income from these licences means that the current demand for compensation – 50 million dollars for the PIPA Trust Fund – should be increased.

“Would we lose any money as a result of closing PIPA?” he asked rhetorically. “We would.” Dismissing the notion that it would be hard to ask international donors for money to protect tuna at a time when Kiribati’s tuna income is soaring, he insisted that that revenue would increase by a slimmer margin if PIPA were closed, adding, “So there is that lost opportunity cost,” which he casually estimated at “an extra two, five million dollars” a year.

But experts disagreed with Tong and raised the question of whether he ever intended to close PIPA in the first place. They said that while the closure would inconvenience foreign fleets, the mobility of both the tuna and the drifting fish-aggregating devices the fleets use meant that they could easily fish around the reserve and catch the same amount of fish.

And with profit margins for purse seiners now exceeding 100 percent, or 1,000 dollars a ton, the fleets would be unlikely to leave Kiribati’s waters, of which the reserves makes up 11 percent, if PIPA were closed, experts pointed out.

“I’m sure foreign fishing interests will use the closure as a tool when they negotiate their fishing contracts, so the loss of revenue for Kiribati will depend on how well they negotiate,” said John Hampton, the region’s chief fisheries scientist.

Overlooking the dispute

Kiribati’s senior partner in PIPA, Conservation International of Arlington, Virginia, never challenged Tong’s compensation claims. With a staff of nearly 1,000, CI is one of the largest conservation organisations in the world. Its executive committee chairman is Wal-Mart’s head, Rob Walton, and its vice chair is the film star Harrison Ford.

CI’s senior vice president and chief scientist for oceans, Gregory Stone, who dived the Phoenix in 2000, proposed the idea of a giant reserve to Tong and helped Kiribati build a legal and financial infrastructure for PIPA.

Today, PIPA is CI’s biggest project, while Tong sits on CI’s board. CI’s website says the president “has gone further than almost anyone to protect the planet’s most pristine waters for the global good” and until recently called PIPA “completely off-limits to commercial fishing”.

In a series of phone calls, Stone brushed aside any questions of dishonesty and insisted that small countries like Kiribati needed sympathy and understanding to espouse conservation, not criticism. He said the negotiations over compensation were “progressing” and added, “Creating marine reserves takes time and patience.”

The management plan on PIPA’s website calls for CI to raise 13.5 million dollars by the end of 2014, after which another 25 percent of PIPA will be closed to fishing, for a total of 28 percent. Stone said he was optimistic he could raise the money, even though nearly a decade after fundraising began, the PIPA trust fund is still empty.

Jay Nelson, who recently retired as head of Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy program and was involved in creating several giant no-take reserves, said attracting such donations in today’s economic climate is unrealistic, especially since most people think the reserve is already closed.

“CI needs to admit that they won’t be able to raise that kind of money and tell President Tong to close it immediately so it lives up to its claim as a world-class marine reserve,” he said.

Senegalese President Macky Sall, with Wendy Benchley. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

Hours after President Macky Sall of Senegal met in Washington with President Barack Obama late last month, he stepped into a brightly lit hotel meeting room to accept the Peter Benchley Award for National Stewardship of the Ocean, the only prize for ocean conservation given to heads of state.

As he had promised during his campaign, Sall, upon his election a year ago, voided a series of unpopular contracts his predecessor had signed with foreign industrial vessels that catch huge amounts of sardinella, a depleted seagoing fish that is now West Africa’s main source of animal protein, and turn it into fishmeal for foreign aquaculture."It’s very hard to tell local fishermen to stop fishing to feed their country when foreign industrial trawlers are allowed to take away a big catch" -- UBC's Daniel Pauly

“President Sall is now moving forward with plans to assure a sustainable domestic fishery free of foreign exploitation, creating a model for West Africa and the world,” said Wendy Benchley, widow of “Jaws” author Peter Benchley, before handing him the award as representatives from Greenpeace and the World Bank applauded.

But in an interview just before the ceremony, Sall said the ban was not permanent and he was planning to bring back the foreign sardinella trawlers in six months. “We’re giving the stock a year and a half to recover,” he told IPS. “Now we need to find a responsible approach to managing this fishery sustainably so that our fishermen can fish and foreign trawlers can also fish in strictly controlled conditions.”

“That would be suicide,” says Philippe Cury, who heads a fisheries research institute in Sète, France, and has studied West African fisheries. “There’s already not enough sardinella as it is.”

The foreign sardinella vessels have significantly depleted the population, which travels between Senegal and Mauritania, fishing more than twice as much as they can sustain without shrinking, according to a scientific report by the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic, he said.

The report, which came out last month, a year after the Russian trawlers left, said that even Senegal’s fleet of dugout canoes was taking too much fish and should be restrained.

“It’s very hard to tell local fishermen to stop fishing to feed their country when foreign industrial trawlers are allowed to take away a big catch,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, Canada, who studies developing world fisheries. “Now that that’s been done, Senegal can try to reduce its own take so the sardinella populations can recover.”

Didier Gascuel of the European University of Brittany in Rennes, France, who is one of the authors of the report, said that, “Even if the artisanal catch stays at that level, the sardinella have a chance to recover.”

Noting that the populations of sardinella grow and shrink naturally based on differences in currents and weather, he added, “But if they bring back the industrial trawlers, all it would take is one bad year for the stock to be wiped out.”

Northern West Africa, where nutrient-rich currents well up from the deep, boasts one of the richest fishing grounds in the world, historically affording a bountiful catch to its coastal population and providing tens of thousands of jobs. Senegal’s fishermen are among Africa’s most accomplished and the national dish, the Thiéboudienne, is based on a succulent grouper called the thiof. Other valuable fish as well as lobster and shrimp were also abundant.

But starting in the 1960s, European and Soviet trawlers moved in, scraping rakes fitted with nets along the bottom and destroying the habitat that fish and crustaceans depend on. They sold the fish abroad after paying governments a tiny percentage of its value for the right to catch it.

“Up until the 1980s, the catch was 80 percent bottom fish and 20 percent sardinella, which was known as the fish of the poor,” said Cury, the French scientist. “Now the proportions are reversed.”

“There’s no more bottom fish,” said Abdou Karim Sall, head of the main association of fishermen and no relation to the president. “The sardinella is all we have left.”

Most of the sardinella is soaked in brine and dried, which allows it to keep its nutritional value for long periods without refrigeration. It is sold throughout the arid Sahel region, where the growing season lasts only three months. It’s the main source of animal protein for tens of millions of poor Africans, according to Birane Samb, a Senegalese fisheries scientist.

In 1994, public indignation in Europe and demonstrations in Senegal led to the non-renewal of fishing permits to foreign-flagged trawler fleets. Other countries in Africa followed suit and today, Mauritania and Morocco are the last to have agreements with the EU, and these may not be renewed.

The much-reduced catch eliminated the livelihood of many fishermen, said Sall of the fishermen’s association. “Most Senegalese immigrants to Europe are fishermen,” he said.

But in a move repeated throughout Africa, the owners of many foreign vessels – more than 100 in Senegal alone – simply created joint ventures with locals, took up the local flag, continued bottom-trawling and sent their best catch to Europe. Meanwhile, prices there have increased far beyond what Senegalese can pay, so nearly all of the shrimp, grouper and octopus that the artisanal fishermen can catch is sold right on the beach to middlemen who pack them in ice and put them on planes for Europe a few hours later.

“Sardinella has become rare on our markets, and we have not had any big fish for many years,” President Sall said in his acceptance speech. “And if you can’t even get sardinella for the Thiéboudienne, that’s a problem.”

Ahmed Diame, a Senegalese Greenpeace ocean campaigner, said Sall, a geological engineer, understands science. “If the scientific community can prove to him that bringing back the foreign trawlers will deplete the stocks and the catch, I think he’ll hold off,” he said. “He’s kept his promises so far. The problem is that this is a coalition government and the fisheries minister, who is pushing for foreign permits, is from another party.”

Kazakhstan, an oil-rich ex-Soviet nation in Central Asia best known for voluntarily forsaking the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, is carrying out an unprecedented media crackdown that will leave it virtually without any opposition newspapers for the first time in its 21-year history as an independent nation.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan is closing virtually all the opposition media. Credit: Christopher Pala

Last week, agents of the KNB secret police swarmed the offices of Respublika, a weekly with a strong focus on economic analysis and investigative reporting on corruption that was founded in 2000, when the country’s economic boom began. They confiscated much of the equipment and closed the office.

A court found the paper guilty of “extremism” and banned its dissemination, even online, its managing editor, Tatyana Trubacheva, told IPS in a Skype interview Wednesday.

The paper has a Facebook page and it is unclear how the government could close that, she added.

“Some of our reporters have been publishing stories in Azzat,” a long-dormant title resuscitated as a weekly for the occasion, she said. “We don’t know how long that will last.”

Ultimately, she said, Respublika, which had survived multiple attacks from government institutions, will publish only on its web site, which the government has blocked since 2009.

“We’ve been educating our readers on how to use proxy servers to get to our site,” she said. “It works quite well.”

On the same day last week, other security agents closed the offices of Stan.kz, a video news company that posts its reports on Youtube and sells them to K-Plus, a satellite television station based in London that focuses on news about Kazakhstan and whose broadcasts are officially banned in Kazakhstan, though they are widely watched on Youtube. Stan.kz and Respublika were ordered dissolved as companies.

The video reporting teams work partly from home, in Internet cafes or in the offices of a related production company, said Elina Zhdanova, Stan.kz’s director. The ban, she said, will not deter them from conducting interviews and reporting independently on the news, even if they can’t get paid.

“The government thinks we only write about corruption because we’re paid to do it, they think that if we can’t pay our staff, they will stop,” she said in another Skype interview. “But of course, we do it because we care.”

The crackdown came shortly after both Respublika and Stan.kz devoted considerable resources to the first anniversary on Dec. 16 of an explosion of violence in the impoverished western town of Zanaozen, when police fired at unarmed demonstrators.

Both accused the government of covering up the true number of casualties and ignoring evidence of agents provocateurs, as did several human rights organisations.

Yevgeniy Zhovtis, the dean of human rights activists in Kazakhstan, attributes the crackdown to a gradual weakening of the system of personal guarantees instituted by the long-time president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is 72.

“We’re in a period of uncertainty and lack of confidence, no one feels safe any more” as different business groups manipulate the government and the courts in unpredictable ways, he said.

“The big question is, will Nazarbayev be replaced by another strongman, or will the elite produce a system of institutional guarantees like in a Western democracy, which is what the opposition has been calling for all along,” he said.

Trubacheva, of Respublika, said the crackdown might be related to the succession in another way. Nazarbayev, who single-handedly built Kazakhstan into a relatively well-managed, vibrant economy, remains broadly popular despite wide discontent over the growing corruption that puts Kazakhstan in 133rd place out of 174 countries polled in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

“The next president is probably going to be less popular, especially if he’s not elected democratically,” Trubacheva said. “They may not want to allow open criticism of that process.”

Respublika, Stan.kz, K-Plus and Vzglyad, another opposition weekly banned earlier, have one thing in common: all are widely believed to be financed by Mukhtar Ablyazov, a former energy minister turned fugitive banker who has become Nazarbayev’s bête noire.

Ablyazov built up Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, spent a year in jail for co-founding a technocratic opposition party, re-took the reins of BTA and grew it to become Kazakhstan’s biggest in assets before it defaulted in 2009 and was taken over by the government.

He fled to London, claiming the government gutted the bank for political reasons, while the government sued him over claims he stole five billion dollars from BTA before fleeing. Last month, the London court ordered him to pay 1.6 billion dollars to the bank.

Ablyazov has been in hiding, reportedly in France, since February and regularly gives interviews blasting Nazarbayev’s rule. Zhdanova and Trubacheva both deny they receive any funding from him.

“Things have suddenly become very harsh and nobody knows exactly why,” says former journalist and media analyst Yevgeniya Plakhina. “We’ve become like Turkmenistan,” whose founding leader, Sapparmurat Niyazov, built a personality cult second only to North Korea’s before dying of natural causes six years ago.

“They’ve even appropriated a slogan from Nazi Germany,” she said, referring to Kazakhstan’s new motto, “One Fatherland! One Destiny! One Leader!”, which brings to mind Hitler’s “One People, One Nation, One Leader!”

But, she added, “People here are more educated, so I don’t think closing all the opposition media is going to have any effect except to radicalise more people, especially Muslims. The corruption is stifling, it’s getting worse and worse, and people have no way to get the government to work for them.”

The reaction from the West has been muted because the United States and the other NATO countries have been using Kazakhstani roads to get war equipment out of Afghanistan, said Jeff Goldstein of the Open Society in Washington.

Also, Nazarbayev has built a reputation as a champion of denuclearisation that has muted criticism of rigged elections, assassinations of political opponents and repression of critical media.

That reputation, according to diplomats and historians, rests on the false notion that Kazakhstan had taken possession of SS-18 nuclear missiles with 1,200 warheads left behind when the Soviet Union dissolved. In fact, these were always under the control of Russian forces, which eventually withdrew them with U.S. financing. They were never Kazakhstan’s to give up.

The disappearance of the weeklies Vzglyad and Respublika means the only media independent of government censorship available to people who don’t use computers are Radio Azzatyk, a unit of America’s Radio Liberty, and the Russian service of the BBC, as well as K-Plus for those with a satellite dish.

Artisanal fisheries are being hit by subsidised, foreign vessels. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

Calls are mounting for the world’s big fishing powers to stop subsidising international fleets that use destructive methods like bottom trawling in foreign coastal waters, drastically reducing the catch of local artisanal fishers who use nets and fishing lines.

Such subsidies total 27 billion dollars a year, with nearly two-thirds coming from China, Taiwan and Korea along with Europe, Japan and the United States, according to a University of British Columbia study.

Most go to building the ever-more-efficient ships that are required to catch ever-dwindling populations of fish around the world, with yet more subsidies going to offset their growing consumption of fuel as they venture ever farther and deeper to fill their holds.

The result, says Dr. Rashid Sumaila, lead author of the UBC study, is that taxpayers are funding the depletion of the world’s fish populations and the impoverishment of coastal communities abroad.

“A lot of the fish eaten in Europe, the United States and Japan comes from other countries, mostly poor ones,” because the developed countries long ago overexploited their own waters, he told IPS in a telephone interview.

“The more their fleets fish out an area, the harder it gets to keep fishing there and the more they ask for subsidies,” he added. “It’s crazy.”

A senior United Nations official agrees, charging last week that developed countries, which eat three times as much fish per capita as poor ones, are are depleting the oceans and depriving coastal fishermen in developing countries of their livelihood and coastal populations of food.

“Without rapid action” to stop destructive practices, “fisheries will no longer be able to play a critical role in securing the right to food of millions,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, said.

Calling for an end to the subsidies, he added, “Future generations will pay the price when the oceans run dry.”

The U.N. report, entitled “Fisheries and the Right to Food“, notes that international conventions ranging from the Law of Sea to the World Trade Organisation have long called for the ban of subsidies to fleets that fish unsustainably, as most today do.

Meanwhile, the money the industrial fleets pay developing countries to fish in their waters goes to often corrupt governments, while the impact is felt by poor coastal communities.

Not only are most industrialised ships uneconomical if they aren’t subsidised, they also provide far fewer jobs: 200 for every 1,000 tonnes of fish caught, versus 2,400 jobs for 1,000 tonnes caught with artisanal methods using small boats, according to another study cited in the U.N. report.

Globally, that translates to a half-million industrial fishermen catching 30 million tonnes of edible fish, discarding at sea another 15 million tonnes, and burning 37 million tonnes of fuel.

The artisanal fisheries also catch about 30 million tonnes of seafood. But they employ 12 million people, discard almost nothing, use a seventh of the fuel and receive a fifth of the subsidies. Also, the nutrition they provide plays a much bigger role in the health of their local populations than the more expensive fish sold in developed countries.

Indeed, nearly all of the fish the small-scale fishers catch is eaten, while the industrial ships, in addition to the 30 million tonnes of edible fish they take, also haul out another 35 million tonnes of everything from other fish to plankton for transformation into oils or fish meal, which are used for fertiliser and feed.

The result: many of the non-food fish that the edible fish depend on have disappeared, along with vast amounts of plankton, the base of the food chain.

While on average 95 percent of rice and 80 percent of wheat are consumed in the country in which they were grown, only 60 percent of the world’s fish is sold in the country in which it was caught, according to the report.

The rest is exported. The industrial fleets pay governments anywhere from two percent (Guinea Bissau) to six percent (the Pacific islands in whose waters half the world’s tuna is caught) for the right to fish in their waters. In comparison, governments receive 30 to 70 percent of the value of oil extracted from their land from the foreign oil companies that extract it.

Some countries have fought back. In May, Senegal’s 50,000 artisanal fishermen, angry that their catch was reduced by destructive European trawler fleets and backed by NGOs like Greenpeace, forced a new government to cancel fishing licenses to foreign fleets granted by the previous one.

Namibia, for its part, has largely banned foreign fleets from its rich waters since it became independent in 1990 and has developed its own industrial fishery.

The Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, have closed its tuna fishery to foreign industrial fleets in favour of small-scale pole-and-line vessels, which yield better-quality fish.

The U.N. report called on coastal governments to negotiate new agreements with foreign fishing fleets that would keep those away from the coasts so the sea bottoms can heal while small-scale fisheries recover.

“These resources must be turned away from over-exploitation and toward the benefit of local communities,” de Schutter said.

Lukpan Akhmedyarov speaks at the National Press Club in Washington. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 2012 (IPS)

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, a 36-year-old reporter for an independent weekly in western Kazakhstan who was recently ambushed and nearly killed, was awarded the Peter Mackler Award for Ethical and Courageous Journalism this month – the first journalist from that country to receive international recognition in 10 years.

An examination of his articles and the lawsuits they triggered reveals an unusually detailed picture of why Kazakhstan, a nation blessed with ample natural resources and a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who covets the Nobel Peace Prize, is 154th out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index.

Over several long interviews with IPS in Washington, Akhmedyarov described the stories written for the Uralskaya Nedelya (Uralsk Weekly) paper that had generated lawsuits. They reported on police corruption, rampant nepotism, rigged tenders, how 1990s racketeers are now senior government officials, and how disqualified referees keep on refereeing.

His story illustrates claims by human rights monitors that Kazakhstan, whose official line is that it is inching toward democracy at its own pace, has in fact been doing just the opposite since its economy stared booming a decade ago.

The Kazakhstan International Bureau of Human Rights recently reported that in the area of freedom of expression, of “particular concern” were increases in libel lawsuits against newspapers and journalists and physical attacks on journalists.

“Before, (President Nursultan) Nazarbayev was stronger and he cared about his image,” Akhmedyarov said. “You could criticise anyone except him and his family. Now he’s weaker and there’s more money around, so the local bosses depend less on him and they’re getting more and more control over the courts.”

The saga starts in 2006, when a newly hired police officer with a law degree named Marat Sagitov discovered soon after taking over a staff of 16 street cops that they each had to collect 2,000 dollars in bribes each month and hand over the cash to Colonel Kuantay Uteshev, known as the “black Colonel”. Sagitov ordered the 16 policemen to write detailed, signed depositions and mailed them to the region’s governor, leaving a copy on a government website.

Directed by a tip to the internet URL, Akhmedyarov interviewed Sagitov, examined the depositions and wrote a story. A few days later, Sagitov was in jail on charges of corruption that Akhmedyarov said were obviously false. Then the police department sued the reporter for libel.

The plaintiff won on appeal but the suit that was dropped only when a new governor took office a year later.

“Everyone knows the police are corrupt, but it’s very unusual to publish so many details with names, amounts and places,” Artur Shakhnazarian, a journalist in Atyrau, the regional capital, told IPS.

After serving two years, Sagitov, the honest policemen, started gathering evidence against the “Black Colonel”, who in the Uralsk police department has the reputation of overseeing the extorting and distribution of bribes.

He passed the information to Akhmedyarov, who wrote that the colonel’s son worked in the particularly lucrative license plate department (personalized places require bribes). In an article, he quoted the son’s boss as saying he was unqualified and would never have gotten the job without his father’s influence.

Then Akhmedyarov reported that the son bought a Hummer stretch limousine for weddings and didn’t put on any plates to avoid paying taxes (there was no lawsuit, but the plates appeared after the story).

Finally, he reported that the colonel failed a literacy test and was due to be fired. But he arranged to go on sick leave retroactively (the sick cannot be fired in Kazakhstan) and continues to manage the flow of bribes from the comfort of a health spa, Akhmedyarov said.

In the summer of 2010, the new governor of oil-rich but impoverished Western Kazakhstan, Baktykozha Izmukhambetov, a former oil minister, announced that Uralsk, just 300 km from the giant and highly profitable Karachaganak gas field, would finally get gas service through a new pipeline and that tenders for its construction would go out that November.

Driving along that route one day, Akhmedyarov noticed a major construction project by a large company called TengizNefteStroy, so he stopped to ask what it was. It was the pipeline, the workmen told him proudly. The 200-million-dollar company is a major local player in Tengiz, the world’s costliest oilfield development project.

Akhmedyarov contacted the governor’s office and was told no work had begun because the tenders had not gone out. So he wrote a good-news story suggesting that Uralsk might get its gas earlier than anticipated.

“We never thought this had any anything to do with corruption,” he recalled – until he was approached by the owner of a rival construction company who told him that the governor was a childhood friend of the owner of TengizNefteStroy, Tuken Jumagulov.

“He told me that if you know you’re going to get a contract, it gives you a huge advantage in the tender competition,” Akhmedyarov said.

The company sued over the ensuing article and the paper faced closure. The publisher promised to stage a protest at an upcoming OSCE conference.

“Just before it opened, Jumagulov came to see us and told us the suit would be dropped, and it was,” Akhmedyarov said.

Akhmedyarov said that on the evening of Apr. 19, he was returning home when two men stepped out from the shadows, one of them saying, “It’s him.” They shot him three times, stabbed him multiple times and fled when a neighbour arrived. Despite a cracked skull and punctured lungs, liver and kidneys, he recovered.

“I think they wanted to kill me; they would have said something if they wanted to warn me,” he said.

The attack, which came shortly weeks before a presidential visit to Uralsk, was reported by his paper and some national ones but ignored by the seven other papers in Uralsk, all owned by government entities.

Two suspects, aged 16 and 21, were arrested in a village 200 km away. An Uralskaya Nedelya team went there and reported that both were orphans, among the poorest in a poor village. They quoted relatives as saying could not have afforded to buy the gun or pay the cab fare. One had an alibi. The two were released after Nazarbayev’s visit and no one else has been arrested.

Later came lawsuits based on articles that reported that 35 junior officials were related to 35 senior ones; that two officials refused to pay for a boozy restaurant lunch, waving government IDs; how a disqualified soccer referee was spotted refereeing a major match and how three former racketeers now have senior positions in the local government.

All the suits are pending and seek half the damages from the writer and half from the publisher. If they lose, the paper will close and he will go bankrupt.

Akhmediarov, hours before leaving Washington for Almaty, brushed away any notion that he, his pregnant wife and their six-year-old daughter would be safer here. “My place is there,” he said. “And they’d be crazy to try to kill me again.”

By Christopher Pala
CRISFIELD, Maryland, U.S., Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

Authorities in Maryland and Virginia have rescued the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab from the brink of collapse, tripling its population in five years, by using methods that emerging crabmeat-exporting countries in Asia and Central America could emulate, scientists say.

“It’s one the most successful fishery stock rebuilding programmes ever, anywhere,” said Douglas Domenech, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources.

“There are a lot of things that you can do to reduce the catch in a fishery,” said Richard Robins, the chairman of the commission that regulates crab-fishing in Virginia. “But this was the first time we used them all at once.”

The result: 2010 was the Cheseapeake’s second-biggest harvest in 60 years of the hand-sized crabs whose Latin name, Calinestes sapidus, means tasty, beautiful swimmers, and 2011 came close.

Here in Crisfield, the self-described crab capital of the world, Dan Dize, a 33-year-old crab fisherman, now catches more crabs per pot. He admitted he was worried about rising fuel costs eating up his profits, but added, “I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

After a day on the bay, he unloaded 3,500 live crabs packed tightly in 26 wooden baskets that would soon be heading for markets in Washington and New York.

For the second half of the 20th century, the crab population in the Chesapeake, the United States’ biggest bay that’s home to one of the world’s biggest crab fisheries, had oscillated around 400 million crabs, the average annual harvest was 250 million crabs. But in 1997, the population declined to about 130 million crabs and despite efforts to reduce the catch, up to 100 million crabs were still being caught each year.

“You can’t harvest 80 percent of anything year after year and expect it to last,” explained British-born Tom Miller, a fisheries ecologist who heads the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

While the population never collapsed completely, the drop of crabmeat supply led local companies that wholesaled Chesapeake crab to increase imports from Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Central America of high-quality crab meat, which is picked by hand from steamed crabs, pasteurised and shipped under refrigeration.

“Crab and crabmeat imports into Baltimore went from 10.5 million dollars in 1995, when the Chesapeake harvest was starting to decline, to over 110 million dollars in 2011,” said Douglas Lipton, a fisheries economist at the University of Maryland.

“Now we’re hearing that while these Asian crab fisheries bring good income to their communities, the crabs are being taken faster than they reproduce, so that if they don’t act soon, they could experience the declines we saw in the Chesapeake.”

In many communities around the world, particularly those that depend on fishing, leaders are sometimes able to persuade local fishermen to fish less if a particicular fish population has visibly diminished.

But in most developing countries, the sampling equipment and know-how that Western scientists use to determine how a given population is weathering being intensely fished are generally lacking, making the kind of restrictions that led to the rescue of the Chesapeake crab less precise.

“The countries that import seafood, like the United States, need to export their expertise in fishing sustainably,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, perhaps the world’s most influential fisheries expert.

“In this case, foreign aid should take the form of sending American crab specialists to the exporting countries so they can scientifically assess how fast the crab populations are responding to increased harvests. Then they can come up with ways to prevent overfishing so the fishery can keep on benefitting everyone.”

“Getting people to fish less anywhere is very hard,” said Miller, the Maryland fisheries ecologist. “Usually you keep on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and when it starts to sink, you impose a fishing moratorium, which is very disruptive to the communities.”

In the Chesapeake, the solution came after Robins, the owner of a seafood packing business, was appointed to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in 2004. He realised that piecemeal efforts to curtail the catch weren’t working and called for a blue-ribbon commission to determine why.

Miller was the senior scientist on the panel, whose report came up with what he calls the “kindergarten solution”, so easy a five-year- old could have figured it out: “If there aren’t enough babies, stop killing the mommies.”

“We needed to save at least half the number of pregnant females that were being harvested, about 30 million crabs,” says Miller. “Overall, we wanted the harvest to be no more than 46 percent of the stock.”

A broad array of measures was put in place, with the reduction of the fall harvest of females migrating to the mouth of the bay in both states the most effective. A winter dredge fishery of buried hibernating pregnant females in Virginia was closed and a spawning- season sanctuary was extended, explained Robins, who helped coordinate the measures.

The local fishermen were not happy, but the spring 2009 survey of 1,500 spots up and down the bay found that the new restrictions had raised the female population by 70 percent, while the male population barely changed.

In 2010, the yearly survey showed females were up 200 percent from the 2008 level. A survey published in late April showed that this year, the total number of Chesapeake crabs is, at 764 million, triple what it was in 2007.

Meanwhile, added Robins, the fisheries official, the average price Virginia fishermen got for their crabs remained stable at two dollars a kilo between 2008 and 2010, while the amount of crabs caught rose by more than a third. He expects prices to go up again.

“We saw that when the scallop fishery recovered,” he says. “Demand increased and now prices are at an all-time high, and there’s three times more scallops being harvested now than in the 1980s.”

If Robins is right, prices will rise to offset Dize’s expenses, demonstrating that more often than not, saving a species from commercial extinction – the point at which it costs more to catch a fish than the fish can be sold for – benefits the fishermen who traditionally fight restrictions on their work.

By Christopher Pala and - -
ALMATY, Mar 29 2012 (IPS)

As the trial began this week of 37 alleged participants in a strike-related riot, the man who did the most to help the striking oil workers and to publicise their cause, Mukhtar Ablyazov, remained far beyond the Kazakhstan government’s grasp.

Ablyazov, a wealthy banker who disappeared from view in February after he was sentenced to at least a year in jail by a London court on contempt charges, is variously seen in his native Kazakhstan as the only bulwark against the increasingly harsh rule of President Nursultan Nazarbayev; as a thief who betrayed his investors, and as the plotter of a series of terrorist attacks that were not carried out.

The diminutive 49-year-old Kazakh had fled to London, where he was granted political asylum, after the government rescued and took over BTA Bank in 2009, which he had turned into Kazakhstan’s largest. The institution faced bankruptcy after the global financial crisis dried up the flood of cheap credit that had funded the rapid expansion of Kazakhstan’s banks, revealing balance sheets choking on bad loans – none worse than BTA’s.

The current management of the bank sued Ablyazov in nine London courts, seeking to recover 5 billion dollars it claimed he illegally siphoned off as the institution collapsed.

Among those who knew him well in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s main city, there is little doubt that if he did indeed hollow out BTA’s assets, it was at least in part so he could continue funding the country’s biggest opposition party, along with two television companies and two newspapers.

“He had to choose between saving his bank and giving up opposition politics,” said Yevgeni Zhovtis, head of the Kazakhstan International Bureau of Human Rights.

“That’s no excuse for dishonesty,” said Jean-Claude Lermusiaux, head of research at Visor Capital, an investment bank in Almaty. “He betrayed the confidence of investors and he tarnished his country’s image.”

On Wednesday, the state prosecutor filed charges against two associates of Ablyazov who live outside the country, accusing them of having planned several terrorist bombings at Ablyazov’s instigation. The charges fit with earlier comments of Yermukhamet Yertisbayev, an adviser to Nazarbayev who often acts as his unofficial spokesman, who accused Ablyazov of using “information terrorism” to overthrow the regime through “revolution, mass unrest, chaos and violence.”

Zhovtis, the human rights activist, took a strikingly different view of the controversial banker. “Ablyazov is not pushing democracy out of ideology, he’s just part of a group of prominent technocrats who felt from the beginning that democracy and a fair court system would work better to develop this country,” he said in an interview.

In 2003, Ablyazov, a former industry minister, and a handful of high-level government officials, including a deputy prime minister, tried to found a party of loyal opposition that did not directly challenge Nazarbayev. Their aim was primarily to rein in one of the president’s sons-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev, who was accused of using a senior position in the successor agency of the KGB to pressure company owners to sell him their assets at cut prices and thus acquire a sizeable personal fortune.

Instead, the officials were fired and Ablyazov was jailed and lost half his assets.

As he explained to a U.S. diplomat in London in 2009, according to a Wikileaks cable, he resumed discreet funding of the opposition media and parties in 2005 while pursuing his goal of turning BTA Bank into the biggest in the former Soviet Union.

Bulat Abilov, another longtime opposition leader, quoted Ablyazov as telling him that because of those opposition activities, Ablyazov came under increasing pressure to cede control of BTA Bank to Nazarbayev and his allies.

Over the past three years, Ablyazov is widely believed to have provided financial support to two opposition newspapers, Respublika (whose editor works and lives in London for safety reasons) and Vgzlyad (whose editor was jailed, sentenced, pardoned and freed this year).

In addition, Ablyazov is believed to fund K Plus, a station on the Hotbird satellite which is run from London and Stan.kz, a web-based video production company headquartered in Almaty that covers subjects mainstream media avoid, like demonstrations protesting corruption and the oilmen’s strike in the western town of Zhanaozen.

All these organisations deny they receive any money from Ablyazov.

“The country has become like the Soviet Union, circa 1970, when dissidents were tried for anti-Sovietism,” said Zhovtis, the human rights activist. “Given the increasing repression, Ablyazov has been perceived not quite as Robin Hood, but more like (jailed former oligarch Mikhail) Khodorkovsky in Russia, using his assets to finance opposition parties and independent media. People who want more democracy and less corruption are grateful for his support, but the paradox is that there’s no proof the support exists.”

According to Dina Baididayeva, a democracy activist in a small Norwegian-funded organisation called Liberty who works in Zhanaozen, people associated with oil workers “support Ablyazov, watch K Plus and read Respublika and Vglyad, which are the only media reflecting the real situation here. And he’s the only one who has been supporting oil workers through his party Alga and the People’s Front movement.”

“Without Ablyazov, we would not have genuine democratic opposition parties and independent media,” said Murat Tungishbayev, a former staffer in Almaty for the Washington-based National Democratic Institute who trained the strikers at Zhanaozen how to use Twitter and Facebook to organise discussion groups on democracy.

“Without him, there would be very little counterpoint to police repression, corruption and election fraud,” he added. Ablyazov-funded organisations provided legal help to the strikers and now to the victims of the shootings, he said.

On Dec. 16, the 20th anniversary of independence, police tried to disperse pickets in Zhanaozen who had been standing in the main square since July, triggering a wave of unprecedented violence that left more than a dozen buildings burned. Videos posted on Youtube show police shooting handguns at unarmed demonstrators.

A journalist from Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted a witness as saying she saw 64 bodies, while an opposition party said it has a list of 73 dead. The authorities say only 14 people were killed and are said to have forbidden the relatives of victims to speak out, local journalists reported.

On Tuesday, 37 people the government accused of participating in the riots were put on trial on Aktau, a port city 150 kilometres to the west.

“The reality in Zhanaozen is terrifying,” wrote Piotr Boris, a member of the European Parliament who visited the town of 100,000 last month. “We are aware that according to the witnesses’ statements, the number of killed was much bigger. However, this data is cannot be confirmed.”

Excerpt:

President Nursultan Nazarbayev is orchestrating a media crackdown that editors and independent analysts say is the harshest since he began ruling this Central Asian republic in 1989.

Stan.kz director Elina Zhdanova briefs staff on dealing with a state crackdown. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, rates Kazakhstan 154th out of 179 countries.

The crackdown followed criticism in the country’s small opposition press of police firing on unarmed demonstrators Dec. 16 in the Western town Zhanaozen, where a bitter strike by oil workers at a state company has been under way since May. The government said 16 people were killed, but a reporter for the independent Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted a witness as saying she counted 64 bodies at one hospital morgue on that day.

Until then, Nazarbayev had been widely perceived as authoritarian but relatively benign, a champion of economic growth and of modernisation of the sprawling, minerals-rich former Soviet republic in Central Asia.

A month later, an election for the lowest house of parliament resulted in only three pro-Nazarbayev parties getting seats. The opposition Social Democratic Party, which analysts and diplomats believe polled at least 10 percent, officially was given 1.59 percent, far short of a 7 percent minimum to gain any seats.

Three other opposition parties were not allowed to run. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, noting instances of ballot-stuffing and multiple voting, said the election failed to meet minimal standards.

Following his criticism of the shootings and the elections, Igor Vinyavsky, editor of the opposition daily Vzglyad, was jailed Jan. 26 and charged with “fomenting social unrest”, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

Police said then that when they had searched his office back in April 2010, they had found a leaflet that suggested that Nazarbayev be tossed into a trash dumpster. His lawyer has said the leaflet, which is available on the Internet, was planted, and that Vinyavsky has never called for the overthrow of the president – only for honest elections and the freeing of political prisoners.

In early February, Oksana Makushina, the deputy editor of Respublika, an opposition weekly whose chief editor now works from London for safety reasons, participated in a press conference to denounce Vinyavsky’s arrest. Copies of the leaflet were distributed.

A few days later, officials from the KNB, local successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, questioned her for two days and seized much of Respublika’s equipment. They said an unnamed attendee filed a complaint alleging that extremist materials were distributed at the venue.

Reporters Without Borders said it was “extremely concerned by the growing crackdown on independent journalists in Kazakhstan. The authorities, ever more paranoid as a result of riots in Zhanaozen in December, are using the security argument as a pretext to step up their crackdown on the media.”

Elena Malygina, a coordinator of Adil Soz, an Almaty-based non-governmental organisation that has been monitoring press freedom for 13 years, noted that until the riots at Zhanaozen, opposition journalists were able to work with relative freedom.

“Now most of them have been brought in for questioning by the KNB to intimidate and silence them,” she told IPS. “It’s never been so bad.”

Both Vzglyad and Respublika are widely believed to be financed by Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive banker living in London and a longtime Nazarbayev critic.

In 2001, Ablyazov was among the founders of Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, the first modern opposition party. It was created, the founders said at the time, when Nazarbayev refused to rein in a son- in-law, Rakhat Aliyev, who was accused of using his influence to forcibly take over companies at fire-sale prices.

Afterwards, Ablyazov was jailed on fraud charges that Amnesty International and others found politically motivated.

After his release, he stayed out of politics until the bank he controlled, BTA Bank, then the largest in Kazakhstan, was taken over by the government in 2009 in as it faced bankruptcy.

In a cable released by Wikileaks and written shortly after Ablyazov fled to London, the U.S. embassy there quoted him as saying that he planned “to support all opposition movements” in Kazakhstan.

“First on his agenda,” the cable said, “is to increase the amount of opposition reporting on his satellite television station K Plus,” which broadcasts a news-oriented programme that includes interviews with Ablyazov and other critics of the regime.

“The government claims the riot in Zhanaozen was fomented by supporters of Ablyazov to destabilise Kazakhstan and overthrow the president,” said Dosym Satpayev, an influential political scientist. “So now they’re putting pressure on all the structures he supports to a degree they’ve never done before, to destroy them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stan.kz is next.”

Stan.kz is an independent, web-based television production company that reports on politically sensitive subjects, such as the strike in Zhanaozen, that the mainstream media avoid. Its footage of the riot, the first to come out, was provided to Reuters, which distributed it around the world. Two of its staff who filmed in Zhanaozen were severely beaten up there with baseball bats and shot with rubber bullets.

After the authorities confiscated all of Stan.kz’s footage of Zhanaozen, its director, Elina Zhdanova, gathered her staff of 15 and told them what to do if the authorities raid the offices and arrest her and her deputy.

“Be polite but firm, and remember that we are not violating any laws,” she said. “Insist on seeing the search warrant and make sure you watch them at all times so they don’t plant anything.”

Access to the Stan.kz website has been closed by the authorities since Feb. 6.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, re-elected last April with an improbable yet typical 93 percent, presided last weekend over parliamentary elections that maintained his iron grip on his oil-rich country’s parliament, and further stifled dissent.

A rally by opposition leaders to denounce ballot-stuffing brings barely 100 supporters. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

The opposition Azat National Social-Democratic Party was given 1.59 percent, not enough to gain a seat. Three other opposition parties were banned from participating at all. Turnout was said to be 70 percent.

The results were challenged Monday by local and international election monitors because of widespread reports of multiple voting and ballot-stuffing.

“The early parliamentary vote did not meet fundamental principles of democratic elections,” said Joao Soares, head of the 300-strong team of international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “We expected better.”

His assessment mirrored all elections in Kazakhstan that the OSCE has been monitoring since 1994: though Nazarbayev is believed to be popular enough to have won every one honestly, not one was deemed free and fair by the OSCE.

Nazarbayev, 71, who has ruled this country of 16 million five times the size of France since 1989, had portrayed the latest election as a step towards democracy because all seats in the outgoing parliament were held by the presidential party.

But political scientist Dosym Satpayev of the Risk Assessment Group says the arc of Nazarbayev’s rule went from more democracy to less democracy, not the opposite. The first post-Soviet parliaments, which dealt with economic collapse and high-speed nation-building, were “truly independent” while generally supportive of his rule, he says.

In 2001, several senior government officials left the government to form a series of opposition parties. Two of them, a former minister and a former governor, were murdered. Two others have retired from politics, including former central bank chairman Oraz Jandosov.

In an interview with IPS, Jandosov points out that as late as 2004, there were seven televised debates for parliamentary elections. This year, there was one, and the two most prominent Social Democrats, Bulat Abilov and Guljan Yergaliyeva, were struck from the candidates list – and the debate – five days before the vote.

Jandosov says the population’s general indifference to politics can be traced to the steady economic growth that the country has enjoyed since the turn of the century. “If incomes were flat, there would be a lot more angry people.”

Still, he says the growing gap between rich and poor is “very frightening.”

Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist based in Washington who tracks post-Soviet countries, says Nazarbayev deserves praise for attracting more than 130 billion dollars in foreign investment in order to tap Kazakhstan’s vast but hard to get oil reserves “while keeping the Russians out.”

But corruption and cronyism have made for “miserable corporate governance” while Kazakhstan “fares very poorly on all social indicators.”

U.N. figures show that in Kazakhstan, 29 children out of 100,000 die before turning five, compared to 10 in Bulgaria and eight Latvia, which have similar economies. Both boast life expectancies of 73 years, while Kazakhstan’s is 67.

That’s no accident, says Aslund: Kazakhstan spends 2.5 percent of its GDP on health, while Bulgaria spends 4.2 percent and Latvia 3.6 percent – “a recipe for a blow-up.”

In addition, says Satpayev, corruption is such that perhaps half of the budgeted expenditures for health and education is diverted. He says the president encourages corruption because “corrupt officials are grateful and vulnerable.”

Amangeldy Shormanbayev of the independent Republican Network of Independent Monitors notes that growing Internet use has made electoral abuses more visible. This time, a mother posted on her Facebook page a picture of her child’s grade book in which a teacher wrote in red ink: “Dear Parents: Please vote on January 15 in our school (N. 729) and vote for Nur Otan,” the presidential party.

In 2004, another teacher had told this correspondent that her principal had instructed all teachers to call the parents of their students and threaten them with expulsion if they didn’t vote for the government. Analysts say the pressure is applied to all “budgetniki,” or government employees.

This year, on the website of U.S.-funded Radio Liberty, a young woman is seen stuffing a ballot box, while other sites show “carousel” voting, in which a busload of allegedly paid people is driven from polling place to polling place.

But Shormanbayev says most people remain indifferent to politics. “People didn’t expect much good from their government in the Communist days and they still don’t,” he says. “Most feel that as long as there’s no war, they’re ok with the government, and they believe that if a new team came in, they would steal even more.”

If indignation was higher, people would volunteer to monitor elections, he says.

“There are four opposition parties, each registered with 50,000 signatures. That’s 200,000 people. If 20,000 worked as monitors for each election, you’d have two monitors per site and fraud, which depends on low turnouts, would be a lot harder.”

But opposition Social Democrats say they fielded 5,000 while Shormanbayev’s own network sends out 2,000, paid through a European Union grant.

A snapshot of the atmosphere of indifference emerged Tuesday in Almaty when visibly angry leaders of the Social Democratic party braved a snowstorm to stage a protest demonstration.

“January 15 is the day democracy died in Kazakhstan,” one shouted, while another pledged, “We’re not going to participate in these elections any more!” A third added: “They steal millions of votes so they can steal millions of dollars!”

But listening to them with rapt attention were no more than 100 supporters, slightly outnumbered by journalists and security officials. The uniformed police were nowhere to be seen.

Kazakhstan this week canceled, then re-authorised elections in a remote oil town where recent riots stemming from an oil workers strike left at least 16 dead and more than 40 buildings burned.

Bulat Abilov, right, is campaigning for fair elections. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

They reported that almost all traces of the shootings had been obliterated and that repairs were under way at the burned-out city hall on the main square and the adjacent headquarters of UzenMunaiGaz, a state- owned oil company where the strike unfolded.

Last week, President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree that extended the state of emergency, which was due to expire Jan. 5, to the end of the month, prompting the electoral commission to deny its citizens the opportunity to vote for a new parliament. The current one is entirely composed of members of a coalition led the president’s Nur Otan party.

Though the government says the town is functioning normally, the vote cannot be held during the state of emergency, according to Central Election Commission Chairman Kuandyk Turgankulov.

“There are only 50,000 voters in the city,” he said. “With high voter turnout expected across Kazakhstan, there will be no tangible effect on the outcome of the vote.” As for the possible infringement of voters rights, he said that “the Constitutional Council doesn’t think it would be the case.”

Aidos Sarym, a political commentator, said that fear of an embarrassing electoral rout was the likely reason for the cancellation. “I don’t think a lot of people would have voted for the government party,” he said, noting that the strikers’ cause had resonated with other inhabitants of the desert city plagued by water and power outages and high unemployment.

But four days later, in an unusual move, a presidential decree reversed the decision, ruling that the vote could take place in Zhanaozen after all. “The president took into account the concerns of Zhanaozen’s residents that their electoral rights were limited by the Constitutional Council’s decision,” the statement said. “His only aim is to give the residents of Zhanaozen the opportunity to exercise their constitutional right to vote and be elected to government and local councils.”

Zhanaozen’s population soared from 55,000 in 1999 to 120,000 in 2009 as work around the oilfield expanded, but social services like housing, schools and hospitals have not followed, according to local reports.

Despite spectacular growth over the past decade, Kazakhstan’s expenditures on health and education are half those of comparable post-communist countries, and institutionalised corruption means that only part of these expenditures reach their intended beneficiaries, several studies have shown.

While opinion polls show that Nazarbayev, who has ruled this oil-rich country five times the size of France since 1989, remains broadly popular, Western monitors have reported abuses in all previous elections, where results often exceed 90 percent support for government candidates.

Until now, none of these elections have triggered the kind of mass protests recently seen in neighbouring Russia or in the Arab world.

But Bulat Abilov, a leader of the opposition Social democratic Party, has pledged to organise just such protests if the vote is less than transparent. After he led a small group of protesters in observing a minute of silence for the victims of Zhanaozen at the central Republic Square in Almaty, the economic capital, he said the demonstrations would take place “right here.”

Nearly 10,000 Workers at OzenMunaiGaz and nearby KarazhambasMunaiGaz, two major units of the state exploration and production company, KMG EP, went on strike in May after they were told that a promised reinstatement of a Soviet-era cost of living allowance coefficient would only apply to a small part of their salary. Production dropped dramatically.

By July, most of the workers had returned to their jobs without raises, and production went back to normal. Some 2,000 remaining strikers were fired and replaced. During the fall, they were offered jobs with various contractors, but turned them down because they paid less than their original jobs.

The strike resulted in the loss of 1.1 million tons of oil, worth about 700 million dollars, KMG EP has said. The company reports about 1 billion dollars a year in profits.

Since July, several hundred strikers held a vigil in the Zhanaozen central square, sleeping there without tents until November, witnesses said.

On Dec. 16, government workers put up a stage and started playing loud pop music to celebrate Kazakhstan’s 20 years of independence from the Soviet Union, while police tried to clear the square of strikers. They sparked a riot that, according to the government, resulted in the burning down of 46 buildings. Several videos on Youtube show police firing thousands of round of ammunition, with one plainclothes man caught firing a handgun at unarmed, retreating demonstrators.

The government said 16 people were killed and over 100 injured, but has not released their names. A strike leader who asked not to be identified said that in addition to the 16, 30 more bodies bearing wounds from bullets or beatings were returned to their families with death certificates saying they had died of accidents or natural causes.

Meanwhile, the company has announced that after being ordered by the President to rehire the 2,000 fired workers, it was creating two subsidiaries to do so. The company did not set a timeline, but a spokeswoman said the salaries would be “around their former level.” If confirmed, this would be a significant reversal in policy for the company, which maintains that the strike was illegal and that the 2,000 workers were fired legally.

By - - and Christopher Pala
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Jan 2 2012 (IPS)

Kazakhstan, intent on diversifying its economy away from oil and mining, has extended its cereal acreage by a third in the past ten years, doubled the value of its grain harvest. It has eradicated rural poverty in the north, the country’s breadbasket.

Kazakhstan's winter wheat feeds much of Central Asia. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

According to a study for the World Bank by Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe, the government’s subsidies for modern imported agricultural equipment and an expanded use of mineral fertilisers nearly doubled the value of the grain harvest between 2001 and 2009.

“We were amazed to see that farm worker wages rose at almost double the speed of grain prices,” Martin Petrick, senior researcher for the study tells IPS.

Northern Kazakhstan, which at independence in 1991 had a majority of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Germans, saw most of them emigrate in the past two decades. The ones who stayed reaped the benefits: the study reports that the decisive factor for the broad increase in rural income was a scarcity of farm workers.

“Farm managers unanimously reported difficulties in getting and maintaining qualified employees who could operate complex machinery,” the report says. This scarcity, combined with the intensification of agricultural production, doubled the expenditures of rural households within six years, while the percentage of households with below-poverty-line incomes dropped from 40 percent ten years ago to five percent in 2010.

This year, Kazakhstan’s wheat crop, usually around 17 million tons, has reached 21 million tons, of which the country’s 16 million people will consume about seven tons – for food, seed and cattle. Usually the rest is exported, but “the higher the production, the tighter the bottlenecks,” says Petrick.

Of its exports, about a third go to its southern neighbours, the four other former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan plus Afghanistan. Kazakhstan uses railways to supply nearly all their flour needs.

But increasing exports to those countries is restricted by a lack of increased demand and a shortage of railway wagons.

A slightly larger portion goes by rail to Iran and Azerbaijan, then across the Caspian Sea and to Turkey and Georgia, on the Black Sea.

The rest goes by rail to Russian and Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, from where ships take it to Europe and Africa. But grain-loading facilities at these ports are limited and this year are largely monopolised by the equally abundant harvests in those countries, so Kazakhstan will actually export less than usual in that direction this year.

There’s plenty of demand across the Caspian Sea in Iran and Azerbaijan, but grain-loading facilities in the main Kazakh port of Aktau are limited to half a million tons a year, says Dauren Oshakbayev, a grain analyst with the Kazakhstan Association of Economists.

Because of these obstacles, he says, “Our exports won’t increase as much as our harvest did.” He predicted that most of this year’s crop will reach market late next year or the one after – as long as next year’s is not as bountiful as this year.

The result is that because of a shortage of grain silos, some of the crop will rot or go to waste. Also, many farmers will get less money for their wheat from grain companies because these will have to pay to store them for a year or more until they can get to market.

“The world market is eventually going to get this extra wheat,” says Oshakbayev. “The ones who were hurt this year were the family farmers who got lower prices.” This is because the grain companies are going to have to pay for the longer storage.

In addition to wheat, they usually grow barley, 12 percent of the total grain crop, as well as much smaller amounts of oats, rapeseed, rye, corn and sunflower. Only about 15 percent of the five million tons a year of non-wheat grain is exported.

“This harvest is a message from the market that’s telling them: diversify,” says Oshakbayev. One major agro-holding, Atameken Agro, has already reduced its wheat acreage to 39 percent from 82 percent in 2005, he said.

Anton van Engelen, a Kazakhstan-based livestock expert who wrote a report on it for the Food and Agriculture Organisation, says the government should curb its dependence on wheat and accelerate its programme to boost meat production by encouraging wheat farms to grow more forage.

“A lot of cattle goes hungry in the winter,” he says. “It would make sense to reduce wheat land 15 percent to 25 percent and grow grass instead.” That fodder, he said, could increase the calving rate of the existing stock by 10 percent and reduce the price of meat in Kazakhstan, which is double the world price.

“We have to shift to more effective agriculture realms like fodder,” President Nursultan Nazarbayev recently told a state news agency during a tour of a northern wheat farm. “Colza brings greater profits than wheat, barley and oats yields are high.” There is a need to produce feed crops for cattle, he said.

By world standards, Kazakhstan’s corporate farms, which are privatised collective farms structured during the Soviet days, are huge – 10,000 hectares is average, 20,000 hectares is not unusual. Meanwhile, a typical owner-manager farm is 700 hectares, says Petrick of the Leibniz Institute.

He explains that prospects for further expansion have been hampered by a lack of transparency in the allocation of land, most of which is still owned by the government. “The government should reward the most productive farmers by giving them more land, but in fact the whole allocation process is very opaque,” he said. “They need to make it fairer and more transparent.”

A spokeswoman from the ministry of agriculture declined to comment.

Excerpt:

High glaciers such as this one in the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan are said to be safe from global warming. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

By Christopher Pala and - -
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Dec 14 2011 (IPS)

Global warming will melt far less of the glaciers of Central Asia than of those in other mountain ranges, shielding the people who depend on them for water from the effects of climate change for several decades at least, scientists say.

High glaciers such as this one in the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan are said to be safe from global warming. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

“It doesn’t make much difference if it gets a little warmer up there because it’s still far below zero.”

Glaciers are rivers of ice fed by snowfall at the top. As they flow downhill to warmer temperatures, they eventually melt, providing water in summer, when rainfall is usually lowest.

Since the end of the two-centuries-long Little Ice Age in 1850, the terminus point of most glaciers has been slowly retreating uphill. That retreat accelerated since gases like carbon dioxide emitted by coal burning and cars have been accumulating in the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that has raised global temperatures on average by half a degree Celsius in the past 30 years.

How much water a glacier produces each year is mostly determined by how much snow falls on their upper part, not at what point they end. So far there is no evidence that less snow is falling on their higher parts or that they produce more or less melt water, according to Armstrong and other scientists.

In the first comprehensive study of a part of what is called High Asia, the scientists found that 96 percent of the water that flows down the mountains of Nepal into nine local river basins comes from snow and rain, and only 4 percent from summer glacier melt. Of that 4 percent, says Armstrong, the lead author, only a minuscule proportion comes from the melting away of the end points of the glaciers due to global warming.

Armstrong said there is a lot of misinformation in the public arena regarding glaciers, including reports that glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than anywhere else in the world and that if this rapid melting continues, rivers are on track to first flood and then dry up. “Those reports simply are not true,” says Armstrong.

“There is a lot of international interest in accurate water resource data from the High Asia region and what the water security consequences are, since water conflicts between countries can escalate rapidly,” adds Mark Williams of the same university’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Glaciers in other, lower parts of the world melt in summer over their entire course, so if temperature increases, they melt faster. If temperatures keep rising and that loss is not compensated by increased snowfall in winter – and in some of those glaciers it is – the entire glacier will eventually disappear, Armstrong explains. With it, the summer melt water prized by irrigation farmers, households and users of electricity produced by dams could also disappear.

“But High Asia is different because it’s so much higher,” he says, referring to the Himalaya, Pamir, Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Tian Shan ranges that straddle parts of China, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

“About half of the surface of the glaciers there is above 5,500 metres,” he says, the point at which glaciers never melt. These glaciers include the longest in the world outside of the polar regions, the Fedchenko, which is 77 km long (the longest, the Lambert in Antarctica, is over 400 km long).

While melting ice from glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland is responsible for about two-thirds of the recent rise in ocean levels (the last third is because water takes up more volume when it gets warmer), the runoff from the melting of the lower glaciers of High Asia should not have much effect on ocean levels because little ends up in the oceans, the scientists say.

What does affect the third of the world’s population that depends on water from High Asia is where their water comes from – how much from rain, snow and glacier melting. “At this point we simply don’t know,” says Armstrong.

This month, he traveled to Almaty to meet with other scientists and launch a four-year, 5.4 million dollar programme funded by USAID to provide answers to those questions.

The programme will use 10 years’ worth of satellite and weather data, augmented with local measurements, to determine with unprecedented exactitude across the whole region how much of the water that feeds the great irrigating rivers (the Amu and Syr Darya, the Ganga, Bramaputra and Indus) comes from snowmelt, how much from rain and how much from glaciers.

“This study should provide answers as to what is real and what is false,” says Williams.

Such knowledge is commonly available in the U.S. and Europe. It helps people to plan the allocation of water: for instance, after a winter of light snowfall, knowing a river gets 25 percent of its water from glaciers melting in summer, you can figure out how much water you’ll get that summer. Given that these rivers are major sources of irrigation, this knowledge will be very helpful.

While the retreat of the glaciers is too slow to be discernable with great precision with only ten years worth of data, Armstrong says that knowing how much water comes from summer glacier melt will allow planning for the effects of climate change, such as variations in snowfall and rain and the melting of the low-lying glaciers.

“Once we have a picture of recent and current conditions, we can go forward and run computer ‘melt models’ based on the temperatures at various elevations, giving us trends in snowmelt and glacier melt by region and time,” says Armstrong. “That’s when we start to come up with water volumes for individual rivers and streams from both melting snow and ice.”

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Dams such as this in Central Asia are not used co-operatively. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS.

By Christopher Pala and - -
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Nov 18 2011 (IPS)

Rarely have so many donor countries spent so much for so long to achieve so little. In fact, the scores of Western countries ranging from the Netherlands to the United States that have tried for 20 years to coax the Central Asian nations to use their water cooperatively and create a win-win situation for all have found that the Central Asians are cooperating less and less, not more and more.

Water-sharing problems among any neighbouring countries from the Danube to the Nile are among the most intractable, but what sets the Central Asians apart is that today’s waters managers know first-hand the advantages of cooperating – they practised it themselves only 20 years ago. “The centralised Soviet system made Central Asians use water for the mutual benefits of both sets of countries: the ones that have a lot of water but not much land, and the ones that have no water but a lot of land that needs irrigation,” said Iskandar Abdullaev during a conference in Almaty organised by the Germain aid agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), his employer. “Now the independent countries are stuck in a lose-lose situation.”

Central Asia, far from any ocean, gets little rain. Much of it falls on the Pamir mountains, from which the region’s two great rivers travel due east, the Amu Darya just a few hundred kilometres south of the larger Syr Darya. Both end up in the Aral Sea, from which no river flows out. All but the northern part of the sea has dried up because most the water from the two rivers that compensated for evaporation is now used for irrigation before it reaches the Aral.

To support this irrigation, the Soviet authorities built a series of dams on the Syr Darya so that upstream Kyrgyzstan could release the water to maximum advantage for the irrigation-based agriculture of downstream Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The dams were equipped with power-generating turbines that also furnished Kyrgyzstan with cheap electricity when the water was released downstream.

Thus for decades, part or all of the summer’s snowmelt water was held in these reservoirs until the following spring’s planting season. Uzbekistan used its abundant gas and coal to cover the winter heating needs of Kyrgyzstan.

But after independence in 1991, Uzbekistan ceased deliveries of heating materials so Kyrgyzstan started releasing the water from its dams in winter, when people use electric heaters and demand soars. Much of the winter water goes to waste in the Uzbek desert, though some is hoarded in small reservoirs. As a result, a quarter of Uzbekistan’s farmland can no longer be irrigated and is no longer productive.

Meanwhile, Tajikistan is working to complete a giant, 2-billion-dollar dam on a tributary of Uzbekistan’s other major source of water, the Amu Darya, which so far has seen little man-made regulation. The Roghun dam, in a steep gorge, would be the tallest in the world and could generate 3,600 megawatts of electricity, six times more than a typical coal-burning power station.

The dam, initially designed by Soviet engineers to regulate water for irrigation, is now seen primarily as a tool to produce electricity for export, which means the release of water would not be optimised for Uzbek agriculture.

After the project sparked strong protests from Uzbekistan, the Tajiks asked the World Bank for a low- interest loan to finance a series of feasibility studies supervised by the bank.

“We won’t make a decision until the studies are finished,” said Tajik water resources minister Rahmat Bobokalonov. “So far, it’s too early to tell what the studies will conclude,” added World Bank water specialist Daryl Fields.

Hydrologist Vadim Sokolov of the Interstate Commission of Water Coordination of Central Asia in Tashkent says that if the dam is built and used primarily for electricity, it will not only ruin much of the remaining Uzbek farmland, it will also damage wetlands at the former estuary of the Amu Darya on the dried-up southern part of the Aral Sea.

The Roghun dam is the latest of a series of costly policies by the Central Asian states based on the belief that cooperation is unlikely and that each country needs to build a system that doesn’t depend on its neighbours’ goodwill.

Sokolov says the go-alone policies have forced Uzbekistan to seek expensive ways of storing the water in winter and obliged all countries to build new roads to reach a small number of border crossings after the rest of the borders were closed. Meanwhile, he adds, Kyrgyzstan’s and Tajikistan’s already creaky energy grids have been put under great strain by surging winter demand for electric heating, increasing the frequency of blackouts.

“Even Kyrgyz farmers suffer,” Sokolov says. “In 2008, it was a dry year, they only got 60 percent of their irrigation water needs, even less than the Uzbeks, who got 70 percent.”

The situation is all the more galling because in 1998, following an initiative by the United States, the four countries signed an agreement under which they would return to the Soviet model: the Syr Darya downstream countries, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, would supply electricity, coal and gas to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in exchange for the others releasing the water in spring and summer.

But the downstream countries only held their part of the deal for three years and ever since, the upstream countries have emptied their reservoirs in winter to spin their turbines, despite multiple attempts to get the countries to cooperate again.

Meanwhile, climate change is darkening the outlook. Glaciers are melting, providing a temporary boost to be followed by a shortfall – it’s unclear how big – when they will be gone for good. What is more certain is that warmer temperatures will mean more evaporation, therefore less water available for irrigation.

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By Christopher Pala
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., May 26 2011 (IPS)

For the past quarter century, the United States’ relations with Pacific island nations were framed by the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which combines foreign aid, subsidies to the U.S. fleet of purse-seine fishing vessels and their largely unfettered access to the islands’ waters, which contain the world’s last major stocks of tuna.

Christopher Pala/IPS Credit: A purse-seiner with a load of skipjack in Pohnpei, Micronesia.

“Taking a hard line with a group of small, mostly poor, friendly states was a failed strategy,” Phil Kline of Greenpeace, virtually the only non-governmental organisation to closely track the fishery, said last week. “Now the U.S. is either going to have to make bilateral arrangements like the other fishing countries or negotiate a new treaty that meets the requirements of the islands.”

The treaty is unique in the region in that it links development aid to access to fishing grounds, though such arrangements are common between European and African states.

The aid totals 18 million dollars a year and is shared by 13 countries. For some, which receive little money from fishing license because their waters attract few tuna, it’s significant – for others, like PNG or Kiribati or Micronesia, much less.

In addition, the treaty provides six million dollars a year to pay most of the vessels’ license fees, while the vessels themselves contribute five million dollars. It caps the number of vessels at 40, but does not limit how many days each vessel can fish. It also requires Coast Guard planes to search for poachers and other law- enforcement activities.

PNG is one of four treaty super-members (the others are Kiribati, the U.S. and Micronesia) whose withdrawal from the treaty automatically abrogates it for all. Its top fisheries official, Sylvester Pokajam, is also the chairman of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), which groups the eight islands in whose Exclusive Economic Zones most of the fish is caught.

“They haven’t been listening at all,” said Pokajam, explaining why his country, with the support of the PNA, ended negotiations to renew the treaty, which as a result will expire next May.

The other treaty members are the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Samoa. New Zealand and Australia are members but do not receive aid.

The region attracted growing numbers of purse-seiners after these ships depleted tuna stocks in the Eastern Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Most tuna are found along the equator.

Over the past few years, scientists in the Central and Western Pacific have warned that catches of bigeye tuna, the most valuable to sushi lovers after the fast-disappearing bluefin, should be cut by 30percent or the species could collapse and become commercially extinct because of overfishing from purse-seiners. These are industrial ships that can haul a school of tuna weighing more than 100 tonnes at a time.

Yellowfin stocks are also significantly reduced and even skipjack, the main species used for canning, has shown signs of decline.

After the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which includes the major fishing nations (Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Spain and the U.S.), failed to significantly reduce the catch, the PNA group was created. By leveraging the contracts its members sign yearly with all nations except the U.S., whose rules are set by the treaty, PNA embarked on a series of unprecedented conservation measures.

These apply to over 200 vessels and include banning fishing in an area of international waters larger than India, reducing the use of devices that cause most of the bigeye mortality, creating a system to monitor by satellite the fishing activity of each vessel and another system to reduce the number of days fished.

But when PNA officials, noting the environment-friendly tone of the Barack Obama administration, asked U.S. officials to either adopt the measures now or at least agree to include them in the treaty after its current set of rules expire in two years, the U.S. demurred.

“The U.S. talks about conservation but behaves differently,” said Pokajam, the PNA leader.

The United States had earlier angered the island governments by allowing 25 Taiwanese vessels, owned jointly by U.S. companies and operating in the Western Pacific, to adopt the Stars and Stripes, thereby allowing them, under the treaty, to fish without the limits imposed on the fleets of other countries.

The companies promised to deliver more fish to Samoa, whose economy is tried to its two canneries, said U.S. Representative Eni Faleomavaega of Samoa. But not one ever showed up there.

“And what does the American taxpayer get in return?” wrote Faleomavaega. “A depleted tuna stock.”

Whether the U.S. ends its development aid to the region is unclear. The State Department declined all requests for comment.

However, in a testimony to Congress last year, William Gibbons-Fly, the chief State department negotiator for the treaty, said the foreign aid and law-enforcement cooperation to the region was “dependent on the extension of the treaty”.

Over the past 25 years, the aid of other nations and the access fees they pay have dwarfed the U.S. contribution. Today, New Zealand gives more aid to the region than does the United States.

According to PNA figures, the combined aid and fees the islands receive per day fished by a U.S.-flagged vessel is about 1,800 dollars, compared to 6,050 dollars for a Japanese one.

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By Christopher Pala
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

Eight Pacific island nations that are leveraging their contracts with foreign fishing fleets to save the world’s last great stocks of tuna are getting little sympathy from the countries representing those fleets.

A purse seiner (right) unloads its catch of frozen skipjack and bigeye tuna to a freezer ship (left), for canning in Asia. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

The measure applies to purse-seiners, which scoop up about three-quarters of the Pacific’s tuna in their nets – up to 200 tonnes at a time – and sell them to canneries, mostly in Asia. Long-lining vessels, which use baited hooks to catch different tuna for the fresh and sashimi market, are to be phased out of the area, called the Eastern High Seas pocket, in a few years.

The combined moves will create a no-fishing zone the size of India, by far the biggest in the world, which scientists say will become a magnet for overfished species. This will help stem the decline of the Pacific tuna, which are increasingly targeted by the international fleets that have depleted the species in the Eastern Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Earlier this month in Honolulu, at the yearly meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, the United States, already under criticism for its fisheries policies in the Pacific, declined to support the measure, reserving for itself the right to be the only nation to fish in the area, which is 3.2 million square km.

The U.S. has the right to do so, even while other fleets are forced to reduce their catch, under a treaty that expires in two and a half years.

“We will be very disappointed if the United States does not cooperate with us,” said Sylvester Pokajam of Papua New- Guinea, the spokesman for the Nauru group. Its members are the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.

Charles Karnella, the chief delegate to a fisheries meeting here, said the United States had not decided what to do because it is negotiating an extension of the South Pacific Tuna Treaty with the island nations. “How the closure is dealt with is part of the negotiations,” he said.

Two years ago, the United States had strongly backed the closure by the Nauru group of two pockets of international waters further west totaling 1.3 million square kilometres. As a result, the members of the fisheries commission, which include the Nauru eight as well as distant fishing nations like Japan, China, Taiwan, Spain and the U.S., unanimously approved the closure, along with other measures to stem the decline of the world’s last major stocks of tuna. The U.S. has abided by that closure.

But this year, according to fisheries scientists, the situation of the tuna has worsened. Not only have the 2008 measures failed to stop excessive fishing, the catch rose by over 30 percent.

The stocks of bigeye tuna, which can reach 2.5 metres and weigh 180 kg, are particularly depleted: experts estimate that there are only 17 percent left of the original stock’s breeding-age population. The bigeye is, after the fast- disappearing bluefin (which swims in colder waters), the most valuable because it is prized by sushi lovers for the fattiness of its flesh.

Young bigeyes like to swim with adult skipjack, a smaller, more abundant species preferred by canneries. In the new closure area, the proportion of bigeye caught in the nets of purse seiners is about 30 percent.

“The closure is first a measure to save the bigeye,” explains Pokajam, the spokesman for the Nauru grouping.

This year, the Nauru group reduced the number of days of purse-seiners can fish in their waters in 2011 by a third in another attempt to curb overfishing.

Scientists say that while the long-line fishery of bigeye might be sustainable alone, the 80,000 tonnes of bigeye yearly caught by the purse seiners is what’s driving the species to collapse. They have been calling since 2008 for a reduction in the total catch of bigeye of 30 percent, with no success.

It is against this backdrop that at the commission meeting, South Korea and the European Union voiced strong opposition to the fresh measure, which New Zealand supported while the United States remained silent. As a result, a decision on the measure was simply pushed to next year.

The United States now has 36 purse-seine ships in the Pacific. About a dozen are based in the Central Pacific and bring their catch to a cannery in American Samoa. The others are Taiwanese ships operating entirely near Asia that were allowed to take up the U.S. flag a few years ago, freeing them from the constraints the Nauru group imposes on its clients.

The U.S. benefits from the move have never been explained, and the U.S. representatives have declined to discuss the matter.

Under the treaty, U.S. taxpayers cover most of the license fees paid to the island nations, a subsidy unmatched by any other nation. In exchange for unfettered access of the 40 ships, the U.S. distributes $18 million in development aid to 14 pacific nations.

The treaty, signed in 1997, has been denounced as outdated and unfair by most island nations.

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By Christopher Pala
BONAIRE, Dutch Antilles , Sep 29 2010 (IPS)

Scientists are closely examining the reefs of this island just north of Venezuela to determine why it has escaped the devastation that wiped out 85 percent of the Caribbean’s corals since the 1970s.

At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. Credit: Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

Warmer, more acidic oceans predicted for the future because of climate change are expected to wreak even more devastation on the survivors. When the water gets too warm, the corals appear to beach and then usually die.

Though the Persian Gulf suffered a similar fate, mostly because of oil pollution, the Caribbean is by far the largest region to have lost most of its corals, which are colonies of tiny, individual animals that, like farmers, live off equally tiny algae.

“This means millions of people are losing an abundant supply of cheap, nutritious fish,” explains Andrew Bruckner, chief scientist of the Washington-based Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. In addition, he and other scientist say, corals are used for building materials, protection from waves and to attract tourists.

Bonaire, in contrast, enjoys exceptionally clear water, which has made it a diving Mecca since the 1970s. In a classic virtuous circle, the local government has successfully restricted fishing to keep the fish and coral reefs in good shape and the free-spending recreational divers coming.

Still, diseases prevalent all over the Caribbean have almost wiped out the elkhorn and staghorn corals that once carpeted Bonaire’s shallowest parts, just off the beach, and provided habitat for myriad edible fish and crustaceans.

A little deeper, many of the massive star corals, key building blocks of reefs, have suffered the same fate, but quite a few are still alive.

On a recent morning in Bonaire, Bruckner, a coral scientist, laden with a scuba tank, a clipboard and measuring devices, wades into the water off one of Bonaire’s deserted, unspoiled beaches, known to divers as Taylor Made.

He is leading a team of a dozen colleagues on a week-long expedition to count dead and healthy corals, along with fish populations. Under water, Bruckner points to some of the last staghorns. Then we reach some giant star corals, up to six metres high, that are between 500 and 1,000 years old and he raises his thumb: they are olive green and healthy.

A little farther, other star corals are half olive green, half brown, separated by a whitish line. It’s called white plague disease, one of a family of pathologies that have decimated Caribbean corals. Bruckner gives a thumbs-down. But on many of the dead corals, he points to little lumps of live coral on the dead parts: thumbs-up again.

Back on the pebble beach, Bruckner takes off his mask and remarks, “What we’re seeing here is a reef that’s suffered from disease and bleaching, but the new corals tell us the reef is rebounding fast.”

That’s because there are still enough algae-eating fish around to keep the surface of the dead corals clean. It helps that there’s very little rain here and that hurricanes, which damage reefs, are rare. In the rest of the Caribbean, dead coral soon are covered with algae and the coral larvae have nowhere to settle, so after a hurricane, very little grows back.

But in Bonaire, Bruckner says far that far less degradation had occurred since 2005, when he last surveyed the island’s reef, than in the rest of the Caribbean in the same period.

Fishermen and polluters are only the most tangible killers of corals. But as the Earth gets warmer, hot-water spells wipe out entire reefs. The first major temperature spike came in 1998, and most Caribbean reefs never recovered. This year promises to be the hottest since 1998 in the Caribbean, and some coral die-offs have already been observed.

And if warmer water, a lack of algae-eaters and pollution were not enough, there’s another enemy lurking in the future: ocean acidification. As the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by a third in the past two centuries, a third of that increase has been absorbed by the oceans. The result is that ocean water is now more acidic than it was, which makes it harder for corals to build their skeletons.

The effects are already being felt. “In the Great Barrier Reef, the calcification rate has slowed 15 percent since 1990,” says Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, a coral biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia.

“Very few corals will survive this century and they will be in very bad shape,” adds Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution.

But Bruckner is more optimistic. “The historical record shows corals are pretty adaptable,” he says over dinner at the divers’ hotel. “If we can restrict fishing and pollution and create more marine reserves, I think we can save some of the Caribbean’s coral reefs. But even if we don’t, in places like the remote Pacific islands, I think the more vulnerable coral species will die off and be replaced by tougher ones. I just don’t see them dying off completely.”

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by IPS, CGIAR/Biodiversity International, IFEJ and UNEP/CBD, members of Communicators for Sustainable Development (http://www.complusalliance.org).

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By Christopher Pala
YELLOWKNIFE, Canada , May 25 2010 (IPS)

It was here in Yellowknife, on an inlet of the Great Slave Lake, that Stephen Kakfwi, then a minister of wildlife and economic development who would go on to become premier of the Northwest Territories, brought together in 1996 a group that would decide which areas of the forest needed to be protected and which areas could be developed.

Bison numbers along the Mackenzie River have shot up to over 2,000 from less than 200 a few decades ago. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

The process turned into something called the Protected Area Strategy (PAS). Local tribes designated areas like calving or hunting grounds or places of spiritual significance, with input from scientists. After negotiations with miners, the provincial and then federal governments officially set aside these areas as parks.

“The PAS was the first tool to get everyone to work together,” Kakfwi, now retired from politics, said during a drive through the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary, another success story where the wood bison, the largest land mammal in North America, has gone from under 200 to over 2,000 – many of them grazing by the side of the road.

Today, under the PAS system, the Northwest Territories is in the process of more than doubling its parks area from 10 percent to 23 percent.

“The PAS opened the way,” said David De Launay, an assistant deputy minister of the environment in Ontario, in an interview in Toronto.

Last week’s agreement between tree huggers and tree cutters is the latest chapter in a process, initiated by Kakfwi 16 years ago, in which environmentalists, native governments, political leaders and Canadian logging companies work together to set aside lands for conservation on a scale never seen in human history, with existing commitments totaling 1.6 million square kilometres, an area nearly the size of Iran (or five times the size of France).

“These commitments are five times the U.S. national parks system,” says Steve Kallick, the director of the Pew Environment Group’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign, which has played a leading role in facilitating these processes. “Canada has gone from leading the pack to lapping the field.”

Much of this land is in the lightly populated northern boreal forest zone, which lies between the treeless tundra and the southern fifth of the country where most of its population lives.

“The threats to the far northern boreal forests don’t seem significant right now,” says Nigel Roulet of McGill University. “After all, we’re only developing a tiny fraction of the resources that are there.”

“But I’m convinced pressure is going to increase as northern Canada gets warmer and it gets easier to operate there. Also, I expect our resources will become more valuable as other sources get exhausted,” he added. “That’s why it’s important to lock in this legislation now.”

When the process of creating the world’s protected areas network began a decade ago, saving the woodland caribou and other wildlife was the prime goal. It received fresh vigour and legitimacy over the past few years as new studies of the remote region showed the forest will play a key role in future climate change scenarios.

In July 2008, Ontario’s premier Dalton McGuinty announced the province would turn half of its northern boreal region into nature reserves, setting aside 225,000 sq km “for ourselves, future Ontarians and for the sake of the planet”. Here again, scientists and native Canadians – known locally as First Nations – would play a central role in determine which parts would be protected from mining, logging and dam- building.

In the other half of Ontario’s boreal region, development would be encouraged in some areas and restricted in others, taking into account the carbon implications, among others, of any project, says Roulet, who is advising the Ontario government.

In 2009, Quebec’s Premier Jean Charest made a similar commitment for an area nearly three times larger, promising like Ontario to protect at least half as new parks, refuges and nature reserves and ensure that new development in the other half can only start if it fits into an approved land- use plan.

Another province, Manitoba passed a law providing for consultations with First Nations over protecting another 85,000 sq km.

Meanwhile, on the federal level, when the Conservatives took over four years ago, they pledged to double the area of national parks to 183,000 sq km by 2012.

“It’s our gift to future generations,” said Alan Latourelle, CEO of Parks Canada. “We’re the last generation that can do that.”

Even Avrim Lazar, head of the Forest Products Association of Canada, which groups loggers, paper mills and other wood- product companies, was enthusiastic.

“The boreal forest is a huge wilderness treasure and Ontario’s plan is a huge step in the right direction,” he said at the time. “We strongly believe that every improvement in environmental quality can translate into market value for our products.”

The latest step in that process came last week, when after two years of negotiations with nine environmental groups, the 21 members of the association he leads signed an agreement with nine environmental groups.

The members agreed to set aside some 300,000 sq km of the public lands for which they have leases and to harvest the rest under the eco-friendly standards of the Forest Stewardship Council. In exchange, the green groups agreed top suspend their campaigns with buyers of wood products, enabling the companies to gain market share.

In just five years, the proportion of logging done under the Council’s rules, which reduce environmental damage and ensure that the rights of natives and employees are respected, has risen eightfold to 350,000 sq km, 20 percent of the area logged.

“I expect 80 percent of the logging will be done this way within 10 years,” says Antony Marcil, the council’s CEO, noting that not all logging companies are members of the Forest Products Association of Canada.

Caribou biologist Justina Ray, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, says it’s still too early to say whether the lands to bet set aside will be the ones most needed by the woodland caribou, whose numbers have been falling recently.

“The devil’s in the details,” she said. “But at least now we have a different model for the north than we used in the south, which was develop what we want and try to salvage the best of what’s left.”

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by IPS, CGIAR/Biodiversity International, IFEJ and UNEP/CBD, members of Communicators for Sustainable Development (http://www.complusalliance.org).

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