Latest news with #AmericanSamoa
RNZ News
3 days ago
- Health
- RNZ News
Pacific news in brief for 28 July
Test for leptospirosis in laboratory, conceptual image. Photo: DIGICOMPHOTO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRA/FCA/Science Photo Libraray via AFP American Samoa's Department of Health is warning about the risk of leptospirosis after rainfall in the territory. Leptospirosis is spread through the urine of infected animals and can be found in contaminated water or soil. People are advised to avoid playing in dirty water, wear protective shoes and and keep drinking water clean and covered. Bougainville's top police officer has issued a scathing indictment of the region's Correctional Service for the illegal release of convicts from Bekut prison on Buka. Deputy Police Commissioner Francis Tokura said the illegal releases are creating a "major logistical nightmare and financial burden" for police, and show a total breakdown in prison command and discipline. The Post-Courier reported Tokura saying it leaves a vacuum in the justice system in the autonomous Papua New Guinea region. He said convicted felons are meant to serve full sentences behind bars, not roam the streets of Bougainville communities. Former Cook Islands prime minister Henry Puna is the new president of the Cook Islands Party. The announcement was made during the party's conference in Rarotonga. Puna, the sole nominee for the position, replaces Tiki Matapo, who now assumes the role of patron of the party, alongside fellow former president Nga Jessie. During the congress, the party reaffirmed its full confidence in Mark Brown, who continues to serve as party leader and prime minister. This week is the inaugural Vanuatu Bislama Language Week in New Zealand. The 2025 theme for Bislama week is: 'Talk about climate change - it is real, and we must look after life.' Events will be held across New Zealand to celebrate the week. A French-Israeli company wants to develop a luxury eco-resort on Woodlark Island, in an archipelago off Milne Bay. Woodlark or Muyua Island is the largest of the island group. NBC reported the local MP, Henry Leonard, saying it will be an economic opportunity for the district and the country. He said from this resort PNG can create a new standard of tourism. He said the project has the potential to generate employment, boost economic growth, promote environmental stewardship, and enhance international connectivity. Officials have reached consensus on South Pacific albacore tuna allocation, within the Exclusive Economic Zones of the Pacific Island Forum Fisheries Agency members, south of the equator. The fisheries agency said this agreement comes after nearly two decades of negotiations. The agreed allocations will form the basis of a binding agreement under the agency's Allocation Framework for South Pacific albacore. The Cook Islands has successfully completed a crop pest survey, part of a push to protect local agriculture and strengthen trade opportunities. Staff from the Cook Islands' Ministry of Agriculture and the PACER Plus Implementation Unit, as well as agencies from Australia and New Zealand, undertook the work on Aitutaki and Rarotonga. The survey is a Cook Islands' commitment under the PACER Plus deal to improve plant health systems and support safe, sustainable trade. The head of the Ministry of Agriculture Temarama Anguna-Kamana said keeping the country's borders strong for potential export opportunities requires good data.
E&E News
16-07-2025
- Business
- E&E News
Interior delays offshore mineral lease amid brewing concerns
The Trump administration is taking more time to mull the first mineral lease sale in decades in U.S. waters off American Samoa at the request of the U.S. territory's governor, who opposes the effort. The Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on Tuesday said it's extending a public comment period on its proposal to advance deep-sea mining off the territory's shores by a month. The comment period will now go through Aug. 15. Last month, BOEM began collecting feedback on a plan to conduct leases in waters off the U.S. territory and said the comment period would end Wednesday. The move is notable given a California company, Impossible Metals, is seeking permission to explore the seas there for minerals like cobalt, lithium and nickel. Advertisement 'As we extend the comment period, we emphasize our commitment to an open process that ensures the voices of the people of American Samoa are heard and respected,' BOEM Pacific Regional Director Doug Boren said in a statement. 'We look forward to our continued engagement with the Government of American Samoa.'
Associated Press
09-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Pacific tuna fleets pushed to lift ban in waters they barely fished
President Donald Trump's order to re-open distant, protected Pacific waters to U.S. fishing fleets followed years of dire warnings by the region's commercial seafood interests. Without that access, they said, American Samoa's tuna industry could collapse. 'This is not just a policy issue,' Taotasi Archie Soliai, a senior policy director for American Samoa's governor, said in May of the re-opening. 'It's a matter of economic survival for our people.' Soliai was among those in the Oval Office to celebrate as Trump signed the order. However, data from the U.S. Pacific Marine Fisheries Service shows that neither the purse seine fleet based in American Samoa nor the longline fleet based in Hawaiʻi spent any real time fishing for tuna in those waters during the five-year runup to their closure. Still, Soliai and other American Samoa leaders, along with key fishing officials based in Hawaiʻi, repeatedly sought for the federal government to re-open more than 400,000 square miles of deep ocean around Jarvis and Wake islands, plus Johnston Atoll. That area was added in 2014 to the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, a protected area created five years earlier to better safeguard the ocean ecosystem — including imperiled sharks, seabirds, sea turtles and other marine creatures — against invasive species, pollution and climate change. Conservationists say those protections across vast swaths of the central Pacific have helped keep the ocean's tuna stocks more sustainable. The purse seine fleet from 2009 to 2014 spent just 0.15% to 0.65% of its annual days fishing in the Pacific around Jarvis, according to figures provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are among the closest waters in the monument to American Samoa. During the same period, the NOAA data showed, the Hawaiʻi longline fleet deployed no more than 1.88% of its annual sets in the waters around Jarvis and Johnston, which lies closer to Hawaiʻi. Neither U.S. tuna fleet, according to the fisheries data, fished in the waters around the more-distant Wake. 'The bottom line to why they hadn't been there previous to the expansion,' said Rick Gaffney, a member of the Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition, 'is because they didn't need to go there.' 'No longliner or purse seine is going to travel any further than they need to in order to fill their fish hold,' said Gaffney, whose group of scientists, fishers, cultural practitioners, traditional navigators and others, aim to support the monument's conservation goals. 'They were able to catch enough fish closer to the cannery or closer to Hawaiʻi for the long liners, so they didn't go there.' The purse seiners land most of their tuna catch in American Samoa to be canned, while the longliners land the tuna they catch in Hawaiʻi to be sold fresh. The regional fishery leaders who've pressed for re-entry into those waters agreed with Gaffney. 'If you can find (tuna) closer, you save money on fuel, right?' said William Sword, the American Samoa-based chair of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, or Wespac. Sword added, however, that 'things have changed nowadays.' A Steep Entry Fee Sword and other regional fishery officials point to the rising costs for U.S. tuna vessels to fish in waters controlled by Western Pacific nations — a trend that coincided with the monument's expansion. Eight Pacific nations have banded together to form the world's largest sustainable tuna purse seine fishery under what's known as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, and that coalition charges both purse seiners and long liners a daily rate to fish in the 200-mile zone surrounding their shores. The rate varies from vessel to vessel, said agreement CEO Sangaalofa Clark. Overall, though, the revenues those nations collect from purse seiners alone have grown from around $100 million in fiscal year 2007-2008, Clark said in an email, to $450 million based on the same level of fishing. Those fees, along with caps on the total days foreign purse seiners and longliners can fish in the member nations' waters, helps better regulate and sustain the tuna fishery, Clark said. That the tuna vessels are still willing to pay the rising costs, Clark added in her email, 'indicates foreign fleets got away with taking billions of dollars of tuna from Pacific Island countries over several decades for far less than the real value of that catch.' Nonetheless, Eric Kingma, president of the Honolulu-based Hawaiʻi Longline Association, said those increased daily costs 'changed the whole landscape for purse seine operations.' 'It's very expensive to fish in national waters of the PNA members, and so then the high seas become more attractive,' said Kingma, who also supports access to the expansion area for the fleet he leads. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese fishing vessels in the Pacific has grown exponentially since the marine monument's expansion, Sword said, leading to increased competition among tuna vessels on the high seas. 'We need our boats fishing there,' Sword said of the expanded monument waters controlled by the U.S., where fishing by foreign fleets remains prohibited. Hawaiʻi Sanctuary Next? Historically, the U.S. purse seiner and longliner fleets did in certain years spend more time fishing in the waters that would later become part of the marine monument, NOAA fishing data going back to 1988 shows. Overall, however, their presence there remained limited. The most active year for the purse seine fleet in future monument waters was 1997, according to the data, when it spent 21% of its total fishing time there and drew more than a quarter of its catch from there. Most years, however, the two fleets only spent a fraction of their time in those waters — or no time at all. Still, Soliai said the pre-2009 data shows the monument waters have historically been important to U.S. tuna fishing and could be important going forward. A report from the National Marine Fisheries Service further states that 85% of the tuna caught between 1988 and 2008 in monument waters was landed in American Samoa to be canned in Pago Pago. 'I think that's an important data set to consider,' Soliai said. Regardless of historical fishing activity, the boom in Chinese fishing vessels or the increased costs to fish in other nations' waters, U.S. commercial fishing interests along with Wespac have consistently opposed establishing marine protected areas across the Pacific. Under Wespac Executive Director Kitty Simonds, Gaffney said, the fishery management group's 'agenda has long been to do everything you can to prevent the creation of marine protected area … Anytime anything comes up that even smacks of a protected area, (Simonds) has stood against it.' Last month, emboldened by the lifting of the restrictions at the Pacific Islands Heritage monument, Wespac's members voted to urge Trump to similarly lift the U.S. commercial fishing bans at the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary, which covers the length of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. 'This executive order gives us a real opportunity to reform outdated policies,' Simonds said in a release, 'and support our fisheries more effectively.' Local researchers, however, say that the ecosystem-based management used at Papahānaumokuākea and, until recently, the deep waters of Pacific Islands Heritage, are the best way to keep tuna stocks sustainable. 'The way you look at these protected areas — and that was really the basis for the expansion — was to recognize that these are bank accounts,' University of Hawaiʻi Kewalo Marine Laboratory Director Robert Richmond said. Closing those areas off to commercial fishing doesn't just preserve the fish stocks but allows them to produce even more fish, Richmond said, kind of like the interest generated by a savings account. 'These are bank accounts not only for present day fisheries, but for future fisheries as well,' Richmond said. 'The Pacific is, in fact, all connected.' ___ This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
RNZ News
09-07-2025
- RNZ News
Pacific Waves for 10 July 2025
Journalist recalls last voyage on the fateful Rainbow Warrior; American Samoa declares dengue fever outbreak; Ratu Tevita predicted to stand in Fiji elections - professor; Kiribati youth embrace language through performances. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
09-07-2025
- Health
- RNZ News
American Samoa declares dengue outbreak
Photo: 123RF American Samoa's Department of Health has declared a dengue fever outbreak, with six confirmed cases. This follows the discovery of the disease last week in travelers returning to the territory. Territorial epidemiologist Adam Konrote told a press conference on Wednesday - streamed on the government-owned KVZK TV - that four of the confirmed cases were imported, but the two newest ones were locally acquired. "The two most recent cases had no travel history, confirming that dengue virus transmission is now happening within the community," he said. "This is a serious development and requires immediate coordinated action from both health authorities and the public." Dengue is not spread from person to person but through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Travellers returning from Fiji, Samoa or Tonga, which have previously declared outbreaks , are advised to monitor their health for up to 14 days for any symptoms of dengue. ASCC entomologist Dr Mark Schmaedick said there are 12 species of mosquito in American Samoa, but only two of them are known to carry dengue fever. "These are the black-and-white patterned mosquitoes that you see coming around to bite you in the day time. "Generally these species don't feed at night." Schmaedick said dengue-carrying mosquitoes tend to develop in habitats of water-holding containers, such as buckets, tyres and ice cream containers. He said they are not strong flyers and tend to stay close to where they hatched.
