The Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) stands to gain nothing economically from deep sea mining in federal waters. That was the blunt assessment from economist Clement "CJ" Bermudez Jr, who told a packed forum on 3 December that, unlike independent Pacific nations, such as the Cook Island, which can issue their own licenses and directly reap profits from seabed minerals, the CNMI, Guam, and American Samoa have no automatic claim to revenues because they are US territories and the proposed mining area lies within the United States' Exclusive Economic Zone.
