As the United Nations General Assembly opened yesterday in New York, most attention focused on speeches by Presidents Obama and Putin and the meeting later in the day between the leaders of the United States and Russia. But New Zealand caused a stir as well, when Prime Minster John Key announced an enormous new maritime ocean sanctuary. Details from Neal Conan in the Pacific News Minute.
Mining, prospecting and fishing are all now banned in a sanctuary of just about 240-thousand square miles around the sub-tropicalKermadec islandsnorth of New Zealand. To give you an idea of scale, that's 35 times larger than he combined area of New Zealand's current marine reserves and more than twice the size of New Zealand's land mass.
Once populated by Polynesians, the Kermadecs are now uninhabited, except for a government station on Raoul Island, New Zealand's northernmost outpost. The area is among the most geologically diverse on earth - with the world's longest chain of submerged volcanos and the second deepest ocean trench. It's also a breeding or feeding ground for whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, tuna, sunfish and marlin - some of them threatened or endangered species. World Wildlife Fund New Zealand Chief executive Chris Howe cheered: "This puts New Zealand back at the forefront of marine protection on the global stage”.
But Charles Hufflet, one of the pioneers of New Zealand's tuna industry denounced the decision as short sighted, arrogant, and a massive removal of a property right. Hufflet, now head of the Solander Group based in Port Nelson - told the website, Stuff, that while Prime Minister Key may have enjoyed a warm fuzzy feeling at the UN, he had just shut out three months of the fishing calendar - the fall months when there are few if any tuna along the coast of New Zealand.
