Papua New Guinea: What Price Sustainability?

Happier times: the PNG SEASMART crew and friends at MACNA, Orlando. EcoEZ leader David Vosseler, left rear; many Papuan fisheries guests; breeder Matt Pedersen, center; Ret Talbot, right.

Opinion by Ret Talbot

Comment on PNG SEASMART's Announcement of Legal Woes (Press Release)

It has been less than a year since I first visited Papua New Guinea and just a few months since I published an article in CORAL Magazine about the developing island nation’s emerging marine aquarium trade.

At the end of that article, I said I was cautiously optimistic, and while I still think there is plenty of cause for sanguinity, I couldn’t be more disappointed with the news released by SEASMART today.

From the heady days of MACNA 2010, where the PNG SEASMART Program stood front and center as a real and viable choice for sustainably-minded aquarists, to today’s press release announcing the fledging company was embroiled in legal difficulties with the government agency responsible for its funding, it has been a long, confusing and, ultimately, disquieting ride.

While this is no doubt a real blow for anybody who had put their proverbial money on SEASMART, it also raises important questions about the future of the saltwater aquarium hobby when it comes to sustainability.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The details shared in today’s press release answer some key questions for anyone who has been following SEASMART’s efforts in PNG. Most importantly, the release explains why no SEASMART animals have been available to North American aquarists since before MACNA 2010.

Simply stated, the PNG National Fisheries Authority (NFA), the government agency which subsidized the trial fishery program since 2007, began withholding funds from SEASMART as early as September 2010.

This was, according to a SEASMART spokesperson reached via email, a breach of the contractual agreement which guaranteed NFA funding through the end of 2010. Without the government money, and with waning financial reserves, SEASMART operations quickly ceased. Certified fishers no longer received orders, and, eventually, the export facility in Port Moresby was closed.

The author speaking about Papua New Guinea at MACNA.

While this very well could have been the end of the road for SEASMART, a core group of managers and employees have forged ahead, and today they announced legal action against NFA. Their goal? Certainly they hope to recover the funds they believe they are owed, but as one source close to the case told me today, they believe SEASMART has a future in PNG. When would that future begin, and what would it look like? As one might expect, the wheels of justice turn slowly in Papua New Guinea, and so we wait.

And while we wait, we wonder about all the questions that remain unanswered by today’s press release. The biggest of those questions is most certainly: Why did NFA begin withholding money from SEASMART? The answer to that question remains unclear, but most observers close to the story seem to agree it probably comes down to economics. That is, after all, what a fishery is ultimately about—the bottom line. While plenty of good can come from a well-managed, sustainable fishery in terms of ecosystem health and fish populations, if somebody isn’t making enough money at the end of the day, then the fishery’s future is probably very bleak indeed.

The type of fishery model that SEASMART created in PNG is an expensive model, but it is one SEASMART managers continue to believe can be transformative…and economically viable. Maybe NFA didn’t see it that way. Maybe it was going to cost too much for too long before it reached the point of making “enough” money. Maybe, as some have suggested, corruption, greed and scandal are to blame. The bottom line is that we simply don’t know the whole story right now, and little good can come of speculative gossip.

Over the coming weeks, I expect the full story will emerge, but in the interim, the marine aquarium trade will be well advised to do some soul searching.

SEASMART, as I detailed in my CORAL article and in many talks given since that time, set the bar very high for what a sustainable fishery ought to look like in a developing island nation. Some would say (and have said) SEASMART set the bar too high—that it was doomed to fail as a result.

Recently back from Hawaii, where I was researching the sustainability of the most important marine aquarium fishery in U.S. waters for an upcoming article in CORAL, I find myself asking one critical question: Should a sustainable fishery in the developing world have a different standard than a sustainable fishery in the developed world? In other words, are we comfortable saying that “sustainable enough” is as high as the bar needs to go when the fishery is outside U.S., E.U. or other developed nations’ boundaries?

References:
A New Frontier for Marine Livestock Collection

Lightning Strikes as PNG Collectors Land Rare Clownfish

Images courtesy Mark Schreffler.