A Global Fish War is Coming, Warns US Coast Guard (usni.org)

schwit1 shares an article from the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine. It includes this warning from the Coast Guard's chief of fisheries law enforcement: Nearly two decades into the 21st Century, it has become clear the world has limited resources and the last area of expansion is the oceans. Battles over politics and ideologies may be supplanted by fights over resources as nations struggle for economic and food security. These new conflicts already have begun -- over fish... In 1996, Canada and Spain almost went to war over the Greenland turbot. Canada seized Spanish vessels it felt were fishing illegally, but Spain did not have the same interpretation of the law and sent gunboats to escort its ships. In 1999, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter intercepted a Russian trawler fishing in the U.S. exclusive economic zone. The lone cutter was promptly surrounded by 19 Russian trawlers. Fortunately, the Russian Border Guard and the Coast Guard drew on an existing relationship and were able to defuse the situation...

Japan protested 230 fishing vessels escorted by seven China Coast Guard ships entering the waters of the disputed Senkaku Islands. Incidents in the South China Sea between the Indonesian Navy and Chinese fishing vessels and China Coast Guard have escalated to arrests, ramming, and warning shots leading experts to suggest only navies and use of force can stop the IUU fishing... The United States needs to show it is serious about protecting sustainable fisheries and international rule of law. It needs a fleet that not only will provide a multilateral cooperation platform, but also take action against vessels and fleets that are unwilling to cooperate... If cooperation cannot be achieved, the United States should prepare for a global fish war.
When I read "fish war," I was imagining it more like this.

Comments

Protecting its own interests

[Anonymous Coward]

"The United States needs to show it is serious about protecting sustainable fisheries and international rule of law." Right. Change that to protecting its own interests, and international rule of law where it benefits self. As history has shown time and again.

So, please, don't try to play just and rightful, it has not worked for America for many decades.

Re:Protecting its own interests

[Wycliffe]

The idea that you can beat the differential equations describing large population dynamics with trying to convince individuals is preposterous to begin with.

No, but conservation efforts do work. Deer and Turkey in the USA are a perfect example. At one point they were practically extinct but regulating seasons has helped them come back in record numbers. On the extreme side, outlawing fish consumption in the USA would certainly reduce the global fish demand. Much more moderate options like outlawing wild caught fish, certain species, certain species from certain countries, etc... would also likely work to some extent.

But I agree that trusting consumers to always do the right thing is likely not going to work. Although everyone thinks they want to save the environment, it's much harder for an individual to pay $10/pound for sustainable fish each week when they can get unsustainable fish for $5/pound.

Re:Protecting its own interests

[chill]

No, it isn't. It is sensationalist headline bullshit.

The article -- which is very good -- is referring to enforcing international agreements about fishing in U.S. exclusive economic zones (EEZ). According to the various international agreements on the seas, fishing, etc. -- it is up to the boundary nation to take care of these things.

It points out the China not only frequently fishes near U.S. borders (among other locations), they haven't ratified key U.N. agreements on international fishing. They are also aggressively using their military to protect illegal fishing in other nation's territorial waters (Indonesia & the Philippines comes to mind). Let's not forget manufacturing artificial islands so they can use them as a basis for territorial claims. (South China Sea)

Re:Protecting its own interests

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution: Don't eat fish.

There are plenty of fish species that are harvested responsibly. Learn which they are. As a general rule, eating small fish is better than eating big fish.

Good choices:
Catfish
Tilapia
Wild Pacific salmon
Pacific cod
Trout

Bad choices:
Atlantic cod
Bluefin Tuna
Rockfish
Atlantic halibut
Swordfish
Shark

Many of the big bad fish also have a lot of mercury, and should be avoided even if you don't care about overfishing.

Seafood Watch Consumer Guide

Re:Protecting its own interests

[Wycliffe]

The free market may create a self-rectifying problem. The more expensive it becomes to fish (because there are less fish) the quicker people will develop sustainable fish repositories to raise fish.

This does work to a certain extent. When commercial fishing becomes unprofitable or more expensive than farmed fishing then it will stop. The problem with this approach is that it requires a depletion of fish to a level where they may go extinct. It's not enough to stop when there are no more fish. You need to stop *BEFORE* there are no more fish unless you really think that having an ocean devoid of fish is a good thing. Passenger pigeons were once so plentiful that they darkened the sky. Humans didn't kill every last one of them but they killed enough that the numbers couldn't recover. Another example would be corn. A single stalk of corn can't survive on its own. It needs enough other corn stalks around so that it overpowers its predators. Every species has a minimal viable number that is required for the species to survive. If you cross below that level, even if you stop killing them, they will still die out.

Re:Protecting its own interests

[jandersen]

The free market may create a self-rectifying problem. The more expensive it becomes to fish (because there are less fish) the quicker people will develop sustainable fish repositories to raise fish.

This does work to a certain extent.

One of the reasons why market self-regulation doesn't work in real life, at least when it comes to fisheries, is that as each species is fished out, they just move to a new one with little regard for the consequences. They are now heavily exploiting krill: the main prey of baleen whales like the blue whale, who are too specialised to exploit something else - the consequence may well be that they go extinct despite all the regulations and efforts the world community has put in to save them. Or take another consequence that most people are likely to feel the consequences of, if ever they venture to the beach or out to sea: we have depleted the stocks of species that prey on the larvae of jelly fish, which is why we now get reports of fishermen catching enormous loads of them. Fancy taking a dip in that?

As far as I can see, the market won't regulate itself - as long as at least some of the players are too stupid or selfish to actually hold back from making a short term profit, self-regulation isn't going to happen. We need global regulations strictly enforced by all major nations in cooperation. We do in fact have sufficient technology - such as supervising fishing vessels from satelites: they follow easily recognisable patterns when they are fishing, so it is relatively simple to follow them around until they reach harbour.

Everything old is new again

[mi]

Nearly two decades into the 21st Century, it has become clear the world has limited resources and the last area of expansion is the oceans.

Ah, the exclusivity of our times — surely, nothing like this has ever happened before. Except around Newfoundland:

After the War of American Independence the new United States demanded, as part of the peace settlement, continuation of the fishing rights they had enjoyed in North Atlantic waters as British colonies. Great Britain at the end of the War was not in a position to resist American demands and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 accorded United States inhabitants equal rights with British subjects to fish in the waters of British North America, including Newfoundland.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people pull something out of the past and just say, "See it happened before so we have nothing to worry about."

Things are different now. The World's fisheries are teetering on the brink of collapse. As one species gets fished out, another one is fished. There are fish in my super market's case that I've never seen before.

And the prices of what is still being fished is obscene. $30/lb for wild caught CoHo Salmon.

And farmed fish - they feed farmed salmon with wild caught fish. There is no such thing as sustainable fish farming in reality - just in the industry's PR.

And with government subsidies around the industrialized World for fisherman to haul more in, it's just accelerating the problem.

Also, show us where in the past there was over 7.2 BILLION people on Earth? And you're gonna point and say this happened before?

It's not Doom and Gloom yet, but we're getting there real fast. And people get hungry and thirsty, they go where the food is and fight for it.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Brett Buck]

Look up "demographic transition" in the social science sense, then get back to me.

The situation you describe is no different from many others, and other species - population expands to the limit of the resources as a rule. The human race is the first to lift a significant fraction of the population of the species above survival level, first, a tiny fraction as the result of the agricultural revolution, and now a significant fraction as the result of the industrial revolution.

      Living on the edge of starvation is the norm, and we are the exception.

Re:Everything old is new again

[idji]

What';s different now is that we are depleting the seas of fish, hence reducing notrogen, phosphorus and iron, not to mention the biological impact. I hope we don't see in the next century life in the sea consisting of low energy jellyfish, because there is not enough bio-energy in the system to sustain more energetic creatures.
What we are seeing is real, unprecedented and will cause many human catastrophes.

Tragedy of the Commons

[Geoffrey.landis]

This is a literal example of the case example known in economics as "tragedy of the commons."

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[blindseer]

Right, and there are two ways I see to fix this.

The first possible solution requires a government entity to enforce limits on individuals. This enforcement must mean punishment harsh enough that people cannot simply pay a fine and still come out ahead.

A second possible solution is to divide up the commons into places that an individual has near complete control. That way if they overuse then they are just putting themselves out of business.

My dad would rent out land to neighboring farmers but never for less than three years. The reason he said was because if they rented for just a year or two then they'd tend to not care for the property. They'd plant a crop, and not bother with weed control or fertilizer. If they had "ownership" of the land for three years then they'd have to take care of it the first year if they expected a crop that third year.

Giving people ownership, of anything really, doesn't seem popular though. It seems people would rather live in the mess that a commons inevitably becomes than see some individual actually own something.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[drinkypoo]

Giving people ownership, of anything really, doesn't seem popular though. It seems people would rather live in the mess that a commons inevitably becomes than see some individual actually own something.

The problem is that the economic systems tend towards runaway effects. Whether they're climatological, or just money helping already-wealthy people get more of the money, it almost doesn't matter. The fact is that ownership begets ownership. In and of itself, it is not enough. There's always someone who can afford to accrue property with the intention of crapping it up.

I don't know what the answer is, but I know that more people have to become more involved. I don't think that letting a few people ultimately own everything is going to foster that.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[sjames]

The enclosure worked out really well for a few wealthy people. Not so much for everyone else.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Attila Dimedici]

Exactly what housing developer is going to buy land outside of Hill City, KS?
AS for your claim that there is nothing corporations do that co-ops couldn't accomplish is true...except that history shows that co-ops rarely do so.

More importantly, I was responding to someone who asked the difference between large government-owned plots and large corporate-owned plots. The fact of the matter is that history teaches us that government-owned farming leads to starvation and depletion of the land (the same result you claim for corporate owned farming). That same history teaches us that corporate-owned farming (which is not my preferred arrangement) results in the land being kept productive. Corporations consider the land an asset and work to keep it productive. Your example of ethanol mandates exactly shows how government intervention actually encourages the rise of large corporations. Yes, those corporations lobby the government for mandates and subsidies (and many private farmers do as well), but it is those mandates, and other government subsidies, which make corporate farming ever more viable. Those mandates and subsidies make monoculture farming more profitable than traditional multi-crop farming. I grew up with multiple relatives who were farmers and I remember them discussing the relative profitability of various crop mixes and how government subsidies encouraged farmers to grow less than optimal crops on their land.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[drinkypoo]

My point was that if you're going to try to use ownership to solve the problem, that you're going to have to solve the problem of ownership tending to concentrate in the hands of a few who don't actually give a damn about the land. Remember, farmers created the dust bowl, and it was government organizations that educated them on such subjects as crop rotation. It's actually government intervention that made America an agricultural powerhouse.

Probably worse than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Either we all cut down on the fishing now, or pretty soon nobody'll fish anything at all, forever.

Fish Wars

[PopeRatzo]

My money is on the sharks. I don't think there's any question they're going to win the fish wars.

Re: You fish your bit, I'll fish mine

[ranton]

You do understand the oceans are all connected right?

Re:Notaproblem.

[thinkwaitfast]

It's too late. This is already going to happen even if we went to zero today. That would lead to big wars and even more release of carbon. It's so inevitable (as I have been told numerous times) that I gave up caring and never felt better about my own personal future.

We can't allow this!

[HangingChad]

Mr. President, we must not allow a fish gap!

Good time for a proxy war

[Presence Eternal]

The US could give a fire and forget torpedo to every one person fishing rowboat in Malaysia and similar places. Something they can just point towards any Chinese trawler and dump overboard. That'll win via attrition and help solve China's habit of randomly scrawling lines all over the map and saying it's theirs.

Something fishy going on

[sinij]

Something fishy going on here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Re:And the human cancer continues to spread....

[alvinrod]

It isn't. Humans are the only species on this planet that have even bothered to stop and think about their own ecological impact. Any other species whether predator, prey, or somewhere in between will just multiply endlessly with the only thing limiting their growth being the ability for the environment to support the population.

Equating humanity to a disease is just going to lead to bad thinking, because your solution is that humanity should be wiped out. That's what any person would tell you they'd want to do if they had cancer. So if you think humanity is a cancer, why haven't you taken the first logical step towards fixing the problem and ended your own existence? If you won't even do that, then what makes you think you get to demand that the lives' of others is ended?

I was thinking more like this

[mnemotronic]

I was thinking more like this. (https://youtu.be/lefP0_ZM-Lw)

Re:Fuck the US

[SvnLyrBrto]

Well, it's a good thing that "forcing their laws on the rest of the world" has never been something that Europeans were into. Oh... Wait...

Look. The species hasn't evolved. That simply cannot happen in such short a time span. There's nothing particularly special about people, in Europe or anywhere else, that prevents imperialism. It's just not en vogue, politically or socially, in Europe these days. But Europe has, in fact, been rediscovering a taste for exporting their laws beyond their own borders of late. See, for example, the notion that the concept of a "right to be forgotten" includes censoring what Americans are allowed to see on google.com vs. just what the Spanish, for instance, are allowed to see on google.es.

It's really just what's socially acceptable. And humans, on the whole, can regress into utter bastardry fairly quickly; especially if they can be persuaded that an: "If it's us against them, I vote us." situation exists. "President" 45, and the Charlottesville types are the obvious evidence of the backslide here. But you people aren't immune. The UK has taken massive steps back into darkness with Brexit. And even though she was defeated, the fact that Le Pen did as well as she did in the recent election says very bad things about France as well. And don't forget that the important bits of Russia are also in Europe.

America needs to stop buying from Chinese boats

[WindBourne]

Seriously, what is going on, is that Chinese boats come across the pacific filling up, and then sells in America. This is what allows them to then sell fish DIRT CHEAP at home. The worst part is, that not only do they do their legal limits on the way over, but then fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for.

The only way to stop this is to prohibit their selling in America, or importing from Canada/Mexico if China sells there. Then no more licenses for CHinese boats to be in American economic zone.
As it is, they are fishing our waters and destroying these faster than their own.

Re:America needs to stop buying from Chinese boats

[quantaman]

Seriously, what is going on, is that Chinese boats come across the pacific filling up, and then sells in America. This is what allows them to then sell fish DIRT CHEAP at home. The worst part is, that not only do they do their legal limits on the way over, but then fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for.

The only way to stop this is to prohibit their selling in America, or importing from Canada/Mexico if China sells there. Then no more licenses for CHinese boats to be in American economic zone.

As it is, they are fishing our waters and destroying these faster than their own.

Do you have sources for this? I have no doubt that China is doing a poor job of managing its fishery, but I'm really skeptical that they "fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for".

The one thing the US is really good at is military, and foreign vessels illegally fishing in US waters is something the US Coast Guard would care about.

Re:America needs to stop buying from Chinese boats

[John.Banister]

Yes & no. The USCG doesn't have the budget to patrol the entire edge of the EEZ. Any additional budget they got when they moved from department of transportation to department of homeland security was directed more towards improving other than economic aspects of security. Whether they care is moot when they don't have the vessels or the fuel to be on the spot every place there's a violation. You'll notice blobs of USA EEZ that are closer to mainland China than they are to mainland USA. Those are the ones where you're more likely to find Chinese fishing vessels.

I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that NMFS and the Chinese government have different ideas about resource conservation, considering that even as our fertile soil exceeds theirs by 3:1, our fishing EEZ exceeds theirs in area by more than 12:1. Whereas, their population exceeds ours by 4:1 leading to a per capita fishing EEZ disparity between USA and China of more than 48:1.

Which Faction to Support?

[Scarletdown]

If there is a fish war coming, who will be the belligerents, and which faction should I support?

There are two that will most likely be involved, but I am torn between backing the sea bass and the sharks.

Re:Which Faction to Support?

[blindseer]

And, do the sharks have lasers on their heads?

Re:Which Faction to Support?

[DMJC]

Simple, support the sides that are lowering their population. This is really a problem with overpopulation. If you're having more than two kids, you better be living in a country with an overall birthrate below 2.0, otherwise you're just destroying the environment and making things worse for everyone.

Re: Hey - fuck you, buddy.

[Opportunist]

If we go back far enough we can surely blame it all on the Mongols, but let's stay in the here and now if you don't mind.

Re: America needs to stop buying from Chinese boat

[WindBourne]

I have heard about this from 2 of my friends that work on fishing boats in our EEZ (2 ppl normally; 1 checks sanitary conditions, the other is supposed to check catch and keep legal ; they tell some horrible stories ). Google will produce a lot for you
But this is pretty good, but talks about China's action all around rather just American water. And yes, China deploys driftnets in our waters on way out.
our real issue is that coast guard is severely undermanned since we send too many to the middle East. Now, trump wants to gut coast guard even more to give money to ice , which is just plain stupid. Illegal aliens can be solved just by phasing in e-verify. In the mean time, America's waters are being gutted by China.