If World War III Comes, Blame Fish
Naval gunfire over underage turbot
The conventional wisdom has it that democracies don't start wars. Putting the usual worries about Greece and Turkey aside, that's a soothing thought. But perhaps in the post-cold-war world the conventional wisdom should stop preoccupying itself with traditional notions of war and conflict and start thinking about fish.
Because fish are the reason that Russians are shooting at Japanese, Tunisians are shooting at Italians and a lot of people are shooting at Spaniards. That's just a partial list of the heated conflicts that are occurring on the high seas between aggressive fishing fleets and well-armed navy and coast guard vessels that are jealously protecting a lucrative and declining resource.
Last week three Thai trawlermen were reportedly shot dead by Vietnamese maritime authorities. In another recent clash, two Spanish fishermen were injured last month when a Portuguese patrol boat used gunfire to force their vessel to ditch its nets and flee into Spanish waters. Portuguese officials were unmoved by the charge of excessive force. "Perhaps it was a ricochet," deadpanned a Portuguese naval commander.
At their simplest, the fish wars are about too many boats and too few fish. Fisheries are a classic example of the economic dilemma of a commonly held resource. Nations have no incentive to conserve on their own, because their competitors will simply swoop in and plunder the excess. The 1982 Law of the Sea treaty tried to address this problem by giving coastal nations jurisdiction over exclusive economic zones (EEZs) that extend up to 200 miles offshore. But some gaps between EEZs coincide precisely with some of the world's most productive fishing grounds (map, Page 60). The multinational fishing derbies that result from these anomalies--known by such whimsical names as the Sea of Okhotsk "Peanut Hole," the Bering Sea "Doughnut Hole" and the Barents Sea "Loophole"--have led to heated clashes between fishing fleets and local navies determined to prevent overfishing. The zones around disputed territories, such as the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, also are a magnet for conflict.
Factory fishing. As global fisheries continue to decline, the range and aggressiveness of the global fishing fleet grows. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), almost 70 percent of the world's marine fish stocks are fully fished, overfished, depleted or recovering. Since an explosion from 3 million tons at the turn of the century, the annual marine catch appears to have stagnated at around 80 million tons in recent years.
That leaves too many boats competing for the same fish. Between 1970 and 1990, the world's fishing fleet nearly doubled, to more than 1 million large vessels and 3 million total. Modern fishing boats are loaded with an array of sophisticated fish-finding sonars and trawl nets that can pull in tens of tons of fish in a single haul. Most analysts agree with the FAO that half the number of vessels would be sufficient to catch the same number of fish. Throw in the fact that declining stocks have sent fish prices soaring--a single tuna sold for $67,500 in 1992--and that fishing is a $70 billion-a-year business ($10 billion in exports for the developing world), and you begin to understand why fishermen are shot at with surprising regularity. Last year, disputes with Thailand over illegal fishing practices in the Andaman Sea led to the murder of at least three Burmese fishermen. In response, Burma closed the only open border checkpoint between the countries and demanded millions in compensation.
Conservation, shmonservation. Agreements to limit harvests have repeatedly been circumvented or delayed. A breakthrough international accord concluded last year to help regulate overfishing of migrating stocks, such as tuna, probably won't come into force for years. Many of the same governments that negotiated the deal now are using studies of the potential economic consequences to put off ratification of the treaty. To date, only three countries out of a required 30 have completed the process--the United States, Tonga and St. Lucia.
Evading limits--not to mention outright poaching--has become a major-league sport. When a crew from a Canadian patrol boat last year fired on and boarded a Spanish vessel overfishing turbot just outside Canada's Atlantic EEZ, two sets of logbooks were discovered. One documented the truth about the size of an immature catch caught with illegally small netting. The other was a sham, intended to convince prying authorities that the vessel was fishing within the limits. Using such ruses and the fact that no patrols can adequately cover the vast areas involved, foreign fishing fleets managed to remove 16 times the agreed quota for that part of the Atlantic between 1986 and 1992.
Taking a page from the glory days of piracy and smuggling, some fishing-boat owners run up false flags--or flags of convenience--to dodge fishing patrols altogether. By registering their vessels with nations such as Panama and Honduras that are not party to international fishing conventions, the owners can legally evade agreed limits. The FAO estimates that in 1994 about 1,600 large fishing vessels were playing this shell game on the high seas, almost double the number for 1985.
Nor has much progress been made to reduce the capacity of the world's fishing fleets. Direct and indirect global subsidies for fishing totaled about $54 billion in 1989, the latest data available. In the occasional year of a good catch, more enter the business; in a bad year, fishermen who have poured tens of thousands of dollars into their boats cry for government disaster assistance to tide them over--rather than simply getting out of the business. Between 1970 and 1990, the resulting ratchet effect jacked up the size of the world's industrial fishing fleet at twice the rate the fish catch grew. Emergency efforts to scale back fleets are politically explosive. A European Union program to reduce fleets by about 20 percent is well behind schedule; similar efforts around the world are not faring much better.
The net result is that governments of coastal nations are stuck in a running battle with foreign fleets that can descend en masse on the very edge of their EEZ--when they aren't poaching within the EEZ itself. If, in the post-cold-war calculus, fishing is war conducted by other means, then Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain and Taiwan--which account for 90 percent of the world's fishing on the high seas--are superpowers. But all wars have a price. "Countries are fighting over shares of a declining resource," says Michael Sutton of the World Wildlife Fund. "What gets lost is the fact that the resource is disappearing." Perhaps competing fishermen and fishing states would do well to examine another cold-war concept: It's called Mutually Assured Destruction.
[Map is not available.] The war of the "peanuts" The Law of the Sea granted nations exclusive economic zones 200 miles offshore. But that left "doughnut"- and "peanut"- shaped gaps of no man's water in some of the world's most productive fishing grounds. Those gaps, along with too many boats and too few fish, have sparked conflicts at sea between rival fleets and navies.
1 Gulf of Thailand. October 1996: Vietnamese maritime authorities shoot dead three Thai fishermen and detain two Thai trawlers accused of fishing in Vietnamese waters. 2 Off Portugal. September 1996: Two Spanish fishermen are injured in Portuguese waters when a Portuguese naval patrol boat fires on them. 3 Russia, Sea of Okhotsk. August 1996: Russian Coast Guard fires on two small Japanese fishing craft near the disputed Kuril Islands. 4 The Philippines. August 1996: Philippine Navy arrests 91 Chinese fishermen. 5 Coast of Ireland. August 1996: Ireland arrests Japanese tuna-boat captain. 6 Northeast Atlantic. Summer 1996: Iceland authorizes the use of force to exclude Danish trawlers from disputed waters. 7 Between Australia and Indonesia. December 1995: Australian forces seize eight Indonesian boats near Ashmore Reef. 8 Malaysian coast. November 1995: Malaysian naval vessel fires on a Thai trawler, killing the boat's captain and his 14-year-old son. 9 The Grand Banks. March 1995: Canada chases down and seizes a Spanish trawler.
USN&WR--Basic data: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, CIA, WorldWatch
This story appears in the October 21, 1996 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.