There’s a statistic that doesn’t get quoted enough when people talk about Pacific island economies. In Kiribati, a country of 33 islands and around 130,000 people, fishing license revenues accounted for close to three-quarters of all government income between 2018 and 2022. Not tourism. Not aid. Licenses, paid by foreign fleets for the right to take tuna from Kiribati’s territorial waters.
The country generated $137 million from those licenses in 2024 alone. By the IMF’s reckoning, that income represents roughly two-fifths of the entire national economy. For context, Japan, China, the United States and EU member states are the main buyers. They’re fishing waters that stretch across 3.4 million square kilometers of the central Pacific, an area larger than India, divided between Kiribati’s three island groups: Gilbert, Phoenix and Line.
The land itself is almost beside the point. All of Kiribati’s islands combined cover about the same area as New York City. The highest ground sits at two meters above sea level. As Diffey, a fisheries specialist who has worked in the region for over 30 years, puts it: “No water, no land, no resources other than fish.”
The tuna are skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye, and they move. Tuna respond to temperature changes of a tenth of a degree Celsius. As Pacific surface waters warm, the fish travel east, toward cooler conditions that sit outside Kiribati’s Exclusive Economic Zone and beyond the reach of its license revenues.
Research consistently points in the same direction. The Pacific Community identified Kiribati as one of the countries most exposed to tuna migration last November. Kiribati’s own Ministry of Fisheries has modeled the numbers: under a high-emissions trajectory, the country could shed more than $10 million in annual fishing access fees by 2050. Under a lower-emissions path, tuna biomass in the EEZ holds, but local catch volumes still fall regardless of which scenario plays out.
The Line Islands carry the heaviest burden. Even under the more optimistic emissions projection, catches there could drop by two-thirds. That matters beyond revenue. Kiribati’s per-capita fish consumption runs to about 100 kilograms a year. The US figure is 9 kilograms. Japan’s is 22. Fish isn’t a dietary preference in Kiribati; it’s the foundation of food security, particularly on outer islands where imported alternatives are expensive and nutritionally inferior.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has already flagged the trend: households are shifting toward imported food as local stocks thin. Kiribati’s population is also growing, with rapid urbanization in the capital Tarawa adding pressure to resources that were never plentiful.
The responses taking shape are varied. The government is building out domestic processing and canning capacity rather than exporting raw license access. It’s developing ocean farming, milkfish, snapper, sea cucumbers, to shore up both export revenue and local food supply. A sovereign wealth fund and a push toward tourism are meant to reduce the economy’s exposure to a single income stream. The UN’s Green Climate Fund is running a $156.8 million program across 14 Pacific nations, part of which will go toward better forecasting of stock movements and protecting food security as reef fisheries decline. The Ministry of Fisheries estimates the fund’s measures will deliver around four million nutritious fish meals a year to communities in Kiribati.
Riibeta Abeta, the Ministry’s permanent secretary, says the country retains grounds for optimism. He may be right about the strategy. Whether it outpaces the timeline is a different question, and one that Kiribati doesn’t get to answer on its own.