The Richest Fishery on Earth, and the Smallest Slice

In March 2025, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Papua New Guinea signed on to the East New Britain Initiative — a work plan born at the Honiara Summit with a deceptively simple ambition: move Pacific islands up the tuna value chain, from the docks where the fish are unloaded to the processing plants, the brands, and the markets where the real money lives.

The numbers behind it, reported by RNZ Pacific, make the case for why it matters. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement’s vessel day scheme — the licensing system that lets distant fishing fleets buy access to Pacific waters — now generates close to $500 million a year. In 2010 it was $60 million. The rise is real, and it is not nearly enough.

Custodians of the largest share

The Marshall Islands’ natural resources minister put the whole argument in one sentence: “How is it that we, the custodians of the largest and most valuable tuna stocks on Earth, receive the smallest share of the economic benefits?”

That sentence should be framed in every fisheries office in the region. The western and central Pacific is the richest tuna fishery on the planet, and the nations whose waters contain it keep a fraction of the value their resource creates. The foreign fleets that buy licenses take the fish; the canneries, the brands, the shelves, and the profits happen elsewhere. For countries like the FSM and the Marshall Islands, where license revenue props up national budgets, the deal has always been easier than it should have been.

The hard part is the second half

The initiative’s ambition — dockside processing, regional branding, direct market access — is exactly right. Catching more fish was never the problem; capturing more value was. But moving up a value chain is not a speech and a signature. It requires capital, cold chains, skilled workers, port infrastructure, and the patience to build a market relationship from nothing. Small states cannot do that alone, and the foreign partners they will need are the same players who currently take the biggest share. Every negotiation to build the chain is also a negotiation about ownership: whose fish, whose factory, whose profit.

That is not an argument against partnership. It is an argument for the region to enter the room with its eyes open, insisting on equity that is real — in shares, in jobs, in training, in the long-term rights that outlast any single plant or contract.

Setting the price

The tuna is the Pacific’s single most valuable natural asset — worth more to the region’s future than any mine or any runway. Treating it as something to sell access to was the first chapter, and it bought a generation of revenue. The next chapter is the region finally setting its own price: for the catch, and for everything that happens to it after the boat comes home.

The East New Britain Initiative is a start. The region should watch it closely — and hold it to its own promises.