Department of Lands and Natural Resources Secretary Richard Seman said yesterday that the CNMI\u2019s anti-shark harvesting laws need updating, describing his thoughts after a regional shark protection workshop held in Pohnpei last week.<\/p>\n
That workshop, as part of the Micronesian Regional Shark Sanctuary, gathered heads of island fisheries and jurisdiction attorneys from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall, the Republic of Palau, Guam, Kosrae, and the CNMI, among others, to discuss the issues affecting enforcement of shark laws in order to determine a \u201cunified way\u201d to effectively enforce shark laws, Seman said.<\/p>\n
While Seman said that every island jurisdiction has promulgated and enacted their own legislation prohibiting certain shark harvesting, he also acknowledged areas that they would like to \u201cfine tune\u201d and come to an agreement\u2014most likely through a Micronesia Chief Executive Summit meeting\u2014to \u201cuniformly enforce this anti-shark harvest.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are working toward that,\u201d Seman told reporters outside the Office of the Governor building yesterday morning.<\/p>\n
Palau, for its part, has declared its entire ocean as a sanctuary, whereas the CNMI and Guam ban the finning of sharks. <\/p>\n
Marshalls is similar to Palau that they have their entire exclusive economic zone as a shark sanctuary.<\/p>\n
Seman said the CNMI is currently under the regional sanctuary under the approval of the late governor Eloy S. Inos through an earlier Micronesia Chief Executive Summit, an official body and meeting of regional leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnybody caught with shark in these waters will be enforced upon and prosecuted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Still, when asked if the CNMI laws need updating, Seman said, \u201cDefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n
CNMI laws only prohibit the actual finning and \u201cnot the whole shark byproduct,\u201d Seman said.<\/p>\n
Finning law takes care of the \u201cshark soup,\u201d Seman said, but added that some of the concerns of citizens is there are byproduct of sharks, such as nutritional supplements, that are still coming into some of the CNMI\u2019s high-end stores.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of them felt that we should prohibit that as well. But under our current law it doesn\u2019t really focus on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
If there was such a law, it needs to be \u201cvery specific,\u201d he said, \u201cthat says exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seman acknowledged that one could kill a shark but just as long as they don\u2019t fin it.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, under personal consumption, nothing can stop you. You can bring in any shark and eat it for yourself. But you are not allowed to commercialize it, or you are not allowed to sell it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as the prohibition is concerned on the commercial activity, the current law only focuses on the fin,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Department of Lands and Natural Resources Secretary Richard Seman said yesterday that the CNMI\u2019s anti-shark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[26,346,51,319],"class_list":["post-225227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-cnmi","tag-dlnr","tag-guam","tag-palau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}