Hilary Clinton Talks With Pacific Leaders About Tuna Treatyff

Source: Islands Business

The security agents of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were instructed to leave their guns behind at Rarotonga Airport in the Cook Islands.

Her advance party scrutinized the arrival of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the Cooks, approved the dancers, the drummers and the flowery leis, but asked if “the guy with the spear” was really necessary.

The answer: Yes he is.

In recent years, the Pacific Islands Forum summits have seen informal Pacific ways overwhelmed by over-zealous security measures and preening acronymically prodigious officials.

But in the Cooks, in the centre of the ocean, the islanders struck back.

The opening ceremony to which the leaders were carried on massive wooden thrones by eight warriors, surrounded by schoolchildren, dancers and drummers, was spectacularly colorful, and open to all.

The Cooks government insisted that the public—including many schoolchildren—were let in freely, and the new Forum chairperson Prime Minister Henry Puna began his formal speech by performing, with professional polish, a local hit country style song.

Even the conference shirts—blue, naturally, to match the skies and the sea – were freakishly non-embarrassing. They may well even be worn again.

The 15 leaders met on One Footprint Island in Aitutaki Lagoon, a heartbreakingly beautiful piece of Pacific.

“It’s hard to concentrate on work here,” half-complained Papua New Guinea’s highly focused Prime Minister Peter O’Neill. He wasn’t wrong.

But the Forum still contrived to conduct some handy business, even though these summits have typically proven more valuable for networking between leaders who live scattered so far apart, then for concrete outcomes.

Sometimes instead, the Forum has in the past merely accentuated the obvious—like the signs prominently displayed around the 32km road that rings Rarotonga island, which point away from the reef and towards the mountains at its centre: “Tsunami Evacuation Route.”

The subject that occupied most time of the leaders this year was the region’s biggest resource—its fisheries, chiefly its tuna, of which the Pacific supplies 60 percent, worth more than USD 4.3 billion.

The leaders expressed concern over “illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing” that loses their countries hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, the outgoing chairman, said this summit had seen “by far the lowest level of intensity” of any that he had attended, on the Fiji issue.

The countries agreed that Fiji would remain suspended from the Forum until it had conducted elections, due by September 2014, following the introduction of a new constitution.

Puna said that reflecting on the recent return to normal diplomatic relations between Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, as Fiji’s constitutional consultations had got under way, the leaders wished to encourage greater engagement with Fiji beyond the Forum.

Key said a key issue in terms of a continued warming of relations with Fiji would be the role envisaged for the military after an election.

O’Neill has invited Fiji to participate in negotiations in PNG in October towards the conclusion of a free trade agreement between the islands states and the European Union, for which talks have dragged on since 2004. Free access for tuna from PNG and sugar from Fiji are among the issues at stake.

In the sidelines of the Forum, the most momentous event—apart from the visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—was the announcement by China, New Zealand and the Cook islands of China’s first ever first joint aid project—for improving water supply in Rarotonga.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully told me: “We were the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China (in 2008), so it makes sense for us also to be the first to agree to a joint aid project.”

China was represented at the post-Forum dialogue by Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, participating for the third time.

The Forum leaders also backed the principle of the right to self-determination by French Polynesia.

And they urged member countries to introduce legislation and regulations that have been developed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) to control the burgeoning new resource industry frontier of deep-sea mining.

Director-General of SPC, Dr Jimmie Rodgers, said that this was needed to ensure the Pacific countries reap the greatest benefits from harnessing these resources.

Key applauded the Cooks for the theme it chose for the coming year in the Pacific: “Large Ocean Islands States.”

He said that instead of focusing on the small land size of the Pacific islands—Rarotonga is just 32 km around—“the obvious potential of the Pacific is often overlooked” for transport connecting the countries, for its fisheries as a source of livelihood and its beauty to attract tourists.