{"id":41658,"date":"2014-07-17T04:00:10","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T18:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=41658"},"modified":"2014-07-17T04:00:10","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T18:00:10","slug":"aft-holdings-voices-concern-waning-us-interest-pacific-fisheries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/aft-holdings-voices-concern-waning-us-interest-pacific-fisheries\/","title":{"rendered":"AFT Holdings voices concern for waning US interest in Pacific fisheries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>SAN DIEGO and AUCKLAND, New Zealand<\/strong>\u2014American treaty negotiations with the Pacific Island Nations concluded Saturday in Auckland, New Zealand, with a \u201cNo Deal\u201d conclusion, leaving the United States Tuna Fleet without fishing access to the Pacific Ocean in 2015.<\/p>\n<p>Proposed closure in U.S. territories in the Pacific currently under review by the Obama administration to revise the status to \u201cProtected Monument Marine Parks,\u201d without consultation with industry or science, has created an environment of increased pressure to secure fishing access within the remaining ocean.<\/p>\n<p>AFT Holdings, Inc. is a shareholder of Ocean Global and Sea Global, the largest US Tuna Fleet, which operates 12 purse seine vessels navigating the Pacific. The vessels provide more than 100,000 tons of fish per year serving the U.S. canned market. Representatives of Ocean Global and Sea Global participated in the recent treaty negotiations, along with other tuna Industry members, U.S. State and National Marine Fisheries representatives, and noted their extreme disappointment in the outcome.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe value offered for 2015 access represented a 38-percent increase over 2014 with 100 percent of the proposed increase coming from Industry,\u201d said J. Douglas Hines, chairman and general partner of AFT Holdings, Inc. \u201cWith an unprecedented 57 percent increase alone from the U.S. Fleet over 2014 levels, the value for access considering the price of tuna collapsed from 2013 to 2014 makes economics difficult to bare.<\/p>\n<p>\u201dAlthough we do hope and expect to have an agreement in the next couple weeks it will not be without extreme apprehension and real cost.\u201d<em><strong> (PR)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SAN DIEGO and AUCKLAND, New Zealand\u2014American treaty negotiations with the Pacific Island Nations concluded Saturday&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[165,312,892,320],"class_list":["post-41658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-new-zealand","tag-obama","tag-pacific-ocean","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41658","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\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}