Asia Is Trawling for a Deadly Fishing War
By Jenny Gustafsson, Foreign Policy, June 16, 2017
THALVUPADU, Sri Lanka--Stanley Cruz, a fisher in this beachside village on the island of Mannar off Sri Lanka’s northwestern coast, stands with his bare feet in the sand, holding up a green net between his hands.
“This is the kind of net, you see. Last week, we lost many hundreds of these. Twelve of us fishers, when we went out to get them in the morning they were gone,” he says.
He points toward the waters behind him: the Palk Strait, a narrow body of water separating Sri Lanka from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Cruz was out the night before, laying his nets in the sea, just like thousands of other fishers from both sides of the strait. But when he went to get them in the morning, they were gone.
“It keeps happening over and over,” says Mary Subramali, an elderly woman who cleans and sorts the incoming fish. “The trawlers come to take our fish and cut our nets, destroying them with their propellers. My son just lost his for the second time.”
She picks up a cold, slippery fish from a basket and severs its head and fins with ease. For her and others on the northern coast of Sri Lanka, losing nets has become a familiar story. Over 30,000 people from the minority Tamil community in Thalvupadu work as fishers, mainly on a small-scale, mostly earning less than $2,500 per year, about two-thirds of the islands’ average. Nets in these coastal societies are precious investments--even a small one costs $23, and the village has lost nearly 1,000 of them.
Their Indian counterparts on the other side are also ethnically Tamil, but a shared heritage has come to mean little on an increasingly cutthroat ocean. The severed nets are at the center of a fierce dispute over the intrusion of Tamil Nadu bottom trawlers, which regularly come to catch their fish in Sri Lankan waters. It’s one of many conflicts playing out across the Indian and Pacific oceans over increasingly thin fishing grounds--clashes that are destroying the livelihoods of the poor and threatening to escalate into an even wider and more destructive form.
In the past, the calm and shallow Palk Strait waters had more than enough fish to sustain communities on both sides. Its maritime landscape, with numerous lagoons and small islets, make for excellent breeding waters; over 600 marine species can be found near its coasts. But excessive trawling on the Indian side, starting in the 1960s, severely depleted its waters and pushed boats to navigate deeper into Sri Lankan waters.
Trawlers began crossing in the 1980s, at the same time that Sri Lanka descended into a destructive civil war between the government and the militant Tamil Tigers, who fought for independence in the country’s north. But the fisheries conflict only heated up in 2009, after the Sri Lankan civil war was brought to a painful end--with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, but also the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. Fishers, who during the war had faced army restrictions, long periods of displacement, losses of family members, and the destruction of their homes and boats, were finally able to return to the sea.
“But the waters were not like before,” says A.S. Soosai, professor of geography at the University of Jaffna. “Fishers were trying to recover, but catches and earnings were nowhere near what they used to be. The main reason for that is the trawlers.”
When scientists describe the destructiveness of bottom trawling, the practice is often likened to “bulldozing the sea.” The nets, so finely meshed that they bring in by-catches several times the fish they strive to haul in, severely damage marine life and cause irreparable to the bottom of the sea. Ironically, this technique was introduced in India as a way to improve life for coastal fishers, through a Norwegian government aid program in the 1960s.
“Fishermen were told that trawling was a new and modern technology and those resisting it were resisting change,” says Johny Stephen, a fisheries researcher with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Hyderabad.
But the “blue revolution” promised by trawling soon turned out to marginalize small-scale fishers, who use traditional methods like gillnetting, where fish are caught in nets laid out vertically in the water. Soon after trawling was brought to India, small-scale fishers decreased by 50 to 75 percent in areas where the method had been introduced.
The coming of trawlers, combined with other intensive fishing methods, has left stocks depleted worldwide. Far from the Palk Strait, similar scenarios are played out in many of the world’s other waters, with 85 percent of global fisheries in full or near depletion. Amid growing global demand for food, access to the remaining marine resources has become increasingly contested, with small-scale fishers increasingly unable to compete against foreign, often illegal, boats in their waters.
The South China Sea, one of the most important fishing zones in the world, accounting for 12 percent of global catch, has been a particularly volatile region. China’s fishing fleet--the largest in the world--is navigating far beyond its heavily overfished maritime territory. Desperate to make a living, fishers are pushing into the most dangerous waters, including North Korea, where Chinese fishers are regularly seized by the authorities and held for ransom.
In 2015, the country began constructing artificial islands, effectively extending its control in the surrounding waters. Indonesia, which has the largest archipelago in the region but until recently considered itself a nonparty to its maritime disputes, started a strategy of “shock therapy,” dynamiting foreign vessels in their waters. Vietnam and the Philippines have seized Chinese boats and arrested fishers. China, for its part, stopped a fishing boat crossing over from the Philippines last year. A 2013 clash between Taiwanese fishers and the Philippine coast guard left one man dead and diplomatic relations frozen. In 2014, Australia destroyed Vietnamese clam fishing boats after Palau did the same in 2013.
Conflicts over fisheries are a new global phenomenon, and the result of a radical reorganization of the world’s oceans. In the mid-20th century, a number of countries moved to extend their territories into the sea, effectively putting an end to mare liberum, the prevailing idea that seas are free and open to all. U.N. legislation established Exclusive Economic Zones in 1982, granting preferential rights to waters within 200 nautical miles from each country’s shores. Since then, access to fishing waters has become a matter of national interest and, increasingly, a potential source of conflict.
The Palk Strait neighbors share many common cultural ties, but also a recent history of strained relations. The small-scale disputes over nets and waters are threatening to build into a dispute that could wreck relations between India and the island.
