September 10, 2014 — John Podesta, the Obama administration’s climate and energy czar, got a blunt warning this week that a plan to cut off all fishing in a huge, U.S.-controlled tract of the Pacific Ocean would have devastating economic effects in the region, and would cede geopolitical advantages to China and other Pacific powers.
“China is overwhelming the South Pacific with investment, and increasing its fishing fleet in the area,” noted Eric Kingman, a Hawaii-based fisheries enforcement official and one of those who carried the warning. For the U.S. not to recognize this potential for lost influence would be “incredibly naïve,” he added.
Kingman was part of a group representing Pacific fishermen, scientists and government-appointed conservation officials on Tuesday who told Podesta and other White House senior staff that the action would make the U.S. the only country in the vast region putting almost all of its 200-mile exclusive economic zone around a speckling of U.S. Pacific territorial islands out of reach of its own fishing fleets; severely cut into the $100 million Hawaiian-based fishing and processing industry; and adversely affect future U.S. fishing treaty negotiations.
The group represent a Pacific fishery management council under the auspices of the Administration itself, and presented their dire predication at a 70-minute meeting billed as a “listening session” hard by the Oval Office, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room.
(In an odd historical note, the Roosevelt Room was known until Richard Nixon’s time in White House parlance as the Fish Room, because Franklin Delano Roosevelt installed an aquarium and various mounted fish there. The name, and the fish, are gone now.)
The nine-person group came with letters, resolutions, pleas and public testimony from governors and legislators in American Samoa, and Guam, among other places, not to mention mayors, chambers of commerce, business leaders and representatives of fishing and native peoples’ associations — all strongly opposed to the administration’s plan, along with their own arguments against the expansion.