Trump Opens Up Pacific Islands Marine Monument for Fishing

On Thursday, President Donald Trump opened up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, allowing U.S.-flagged tuna boats to pursue their catch within an area covering more than 400,000 square miles of the U.S. exclusive economic zone. The area has been closed to fishing ever since the national monument was expanded by former President Barack Obama in 2014.

"The economic zone . . . is huge and it's exclusively ours. So why wouldn't we have our fishermen fish there?" said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at a signing ceremony. "Every country in the world, they all fish the 200 miles off the coast, and we were stopping our own fishermen."

Going forward, fishing permits and catch limits in the area will be regulated by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council and NOAA Fisheries under U.S. law. Foreign vessels will be excluded, except for foreign-flag fishing tenders (with appropriate permits.) The extent of any agency resources for enforcement in this far-flung region is unknown: NOAA Fisheries is being downsized by the administration, and may soon be folded into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, according to leaked plans from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The PIHMNM covers nearly half of the U.S. EEZ in the Pacific Islands. American Samoa is highly dependent on tuna for jobs and economic growth, and the administration says that withdrawing access to such a large swath of the fishing grounds in the U.S. EEZ was detrimental to Samoa's commercial fishermen.

"I find that a prohibition on commercial fishing is not, at this time, necessary for the proper care and management of the [PIHMNM] or the objects of historic or scientific interest therein," the president wrote in the order.