Eni Faleomavaega: “I ask my good friend, the gentleman from New Jersey, what else can we do? As I suggested earlier, we need to put teeth…”

“I ask my good friend, the gentleman from New Jersey, what else can we do? As I suggested earlier, we need to put teeth on the substance of this convention, or else we are just going to be spinning our wheels for another 10-year period, and still with no results. Here is the problem: We now have fishing vessels from the Atlantic fishing in the Pacific. Why? Because some of these fish have been overfished. There are moratoriums placed on them. We have serious problems, even in the Pacific. Fifty-four percent of the tuna now caught in the world is from the Pacific Ocean, and this is just tuna. The fact is that if we are not taking seriously the substantial of the problems of conservation of various species of fish, we definitely are going to have some very serious problems.”