Exiled Chagossian islanders complain that a marine reserve gives fish more rights than them. They have a point
ADVICE to the UK's foreign secretary David Miliband was clear. For 48 hours, memos flew from his officials, all advising him to hold back, take his time, consult and consider alternatives.
He ignored them. The next day, five weeks before the 2010 election that would remove him from office, Miliband set up a giant marine protected area (MPA) covering 640,000 square kilometres of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), an area roughly the size of France. It meant a ban on fishing around the tiny islands of the Chagos archipelago, a leftover from the British Empire. Only Diego Garcia, an atoll with a massive US military base, was excepted.
While the MPA suited the US, it angered former Chagossians, who 40 years before had been shipped to Mauritius and Seychelles to make way for the US. They say the ban is meant to stymie demands to return to some islands and set up fishing businesses. They could be right. Certainly, it lacks scientific credibility and diplomatic integrity.
Miliband's rushed decision was always curious. And now the plot thickens. Official memos released to a judicial review of the MPA to appear in Advances in Marine Biology, vol 69, in a paper by Richard Dunne, British barrister and coral reef scientist, show that Miliband snubbed his civil servants and fisheries advisors, who said the scientific case for the MPA did not stack up.
Miliband is not saying why. He did not respond to requests for a comment. Was it crude geopolitics – a "blue grab" of strategically valuable ocean? Or was it environmental zeal from a man who later became co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission?
The memos suggest a potent but confused mix of both.
The MPA idea came from the Pew Environment Group, a US-based non-profit organisation. Miliband adopted it in May 2009, becoming "really fired up", as one official memo put it. He held a quick public consultation, during which one of the 5000 exiled Chagossians complained: "The fish will have more rights than us." On 30 March 2010, he said he wanted to go ahead before the general election on 6 May. His officials, the memos reveal, were horrified – especially by the haste.
"This approach risks deciding (and being seen to decide) policy on the hoof for political timetabling reasons rather than on the basis of expert advice and public consultation," wrote Andrew Allen, head of Southern Oceans at the Foreign Office. Joanne Yeadon, head of the BIOT section, feared a legal challenge, where the government would need to show "a conscientious and careful decision-making process. A rapid decision now would undermine that."
When Miliband established the MPA on 1 April, perhaps he was consciously aping George W. Bush. In virtually his last act as US president in 2009, Bush set up a giant MPA in the Pacific, despite warnings that it extended beyond US territorial waters and was opposed by island leaders.
At any rate, Miliband was joining a trend for combining conservation with geopolitics. Ten mega-MPAs have been established in the past decade. But the conservation case is sketchy, says Pierre Leenhardt of the University of Perpignan, France. He argued that "we still lack scientific studies showing their benefit or effectiveness", while in most cases they conflict with the rights of indigenous communities.
And so with Chagos, where Miliband's officials considered the MPA bad science, bad economics, politically duplicitous and, most surprisingly, bad for the environment. Miliband argued that banning fishing was vital to protect ecosystems. But, as Dunne shows in his paper, much advice said otherwise. For one thing, fishing was minimal. The territory's fisheries consultant, the Marine Resources Assessment Group, said the ban "will provide no conservation benefit for tuna", the main fish stock. That advice should have been heard at the heart of government, as MRAG founder John Beddington was then chief scientific adviser.
What an MPA would do was undermine resettlement plans. We know from US Embassy messages unearthed by Wikileaks that Miliband's officials told the Americans that "establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims". Now we know that is the case.
"Creating a reserve," the director of overseas territories Colin Roberts wrote in a memo in May 2009, "could create a context for a raft of measures designed to weaken the [resettlement] movement." Top of his list were "presenting new evidence about the precariousness of any settlement" amid a fishing ban, and "activating the environmental lobby", which he thought would out-campaign the Chagossians.
Most conservationists predictably backed the MPA. But David Snoxell, a former British high commissioner to Mauritius, says they were pawns in a game. And what did the greens get? The truth is that the civil servants believed all along that the marine environment could be worse off.
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