The Cook Islands government began widening and deepening Aitutaki’s harbor in 2021, several months before awarding three companies licenses to explore the country’s territorial waters for polymetallic nodules. Both can call into Aitutaki, a nearby island with a population of about 1,800, when Rarotonga’s port is occupied. One came from Galveston, Texas, in February another is returning this year from a fit-out in Wellington, New Zealand. There isn’t room on Rarotonga to permanently accommodate the ships that have come to scope the potential of the deep sea for commercial mining. These are the largest vessels that enter the harbor cruise ships that feed the islands’ primary industry-tourism-have to anchor at sea and transfer passengers ashore in tenders. Visitors to the harbor include fuel tankers and a cargo ship that arrives twice a month from New Zealand to deliver almost all of the country’s groceries. Mark Brown, prime minister of the Cook Islands, calls the seabed mineral nodules “golden apples.” There are also vessels that transport building materials and basic food such as flour and rice to outer islands, some of them around 750 miles away, where more than one-quarter of the Cook Islands’ 14,600 residents live, fish, forage, and harvest. The harbor has a few long-term residents and a lone police boat that monitors an area roughly the size of Mexico for illegal fishing by vessels from Europe, North America, and Asia. The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango trees and neighbors, not house numbers and street names.
This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Tourism currently drives the country’s economy, but deep-sea mining is being touted as a way to diversify the economy and provide much-needed services and amenities. Rarotonga is the largest of the Cook Islands’ 15 islands.
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