There are a number of things that motivated me to put the book together but the main one was I felt strongly that this was a story that had to be told, as it is one of the happiest stories to come out of the region and I feel it is important to share the lessons that we learnt from the process.
I wanted to show that while we have been dependent on aid, and donors and external consultants, we were still able to demonstrate that with the right business model and design of the right structure for the fisheries arrangement we can do so much more.
The huge increase in revenues, from our work in getting hard limits for the Vessel Day Scheme (VDS) and in restructuring the VDS and running it as a business, demonstrated that we can manage our resources more effectively. I wanted to share this story of success because for a long time we were really played off by the foreign fishing operators. It was quite unfair how distant water fishing nations, for the better part of 30 years, did not pay us for the true value of our tuna. Moreover, I wanted a Pacific Islander to write about our success story and not some outsider who was not a part of this story. I think that we are still fighting these inequalities, but what we have been able to demonstrate is that with the right motivation we can do it for all our shared resources.