Angry Planet - The Fish Wars Are Coming

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Billions of people eat fish every day and as the global population has exploded, so too have human efforts to catch more and more fish. As more people take to the high seas looking for protein, very human problems have followed them. We’re fighting over fish.Here to walk us through this is someone actively working on the problem in Washington D.C. Captain Kate Higgins-Bloom is the Strategic Foresight Director for the U.S. Coast Guard.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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people. Freedom has never state-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Every planet, I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Billions of people eat fish every day

and as the global population has exploded, so too have human efforts to catch more and more fish. As more people take to the high seas of looking for protein, very human problems have followed them. We are fighting over those fish. Here to walk us through this is someone actively working on the problem in Washington, D.C., Captain Kate Higgins-Bloom.

She is the Strategic Forsyte Director for the U.S. Coast Guard. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Glad to be here. First of all, can you tell us what the Strategic Forsight Director for the U.S. Coast Guard does? It's a good question. So I run a program that's been running at the Coast Guard for about 24 years. It's called Project Evergreen.

and it's really an effort to infuse the service with strategic intent. We came to the realization in the 90s that even though we are a response organization, that our operational environment was going to be changing. And it was really our job as leaders to try to look over the horizon, which culturally isn't the norm for us. So to institutionalize that practice. And so we use a bunch of different tools and practices to support our senior leaders as they try to get their head off the chart table

and sort of looking out over the horizon. So turning it from a reactive organization to a forward thinking one, basically. Yes. Yeah. With that in mind, when you're looking at the ocean, how big a problem do you think that this is going to be? Meaning, how many people does the ocean feed? Do we have good numbers on that? Oh, my goodness.

That's an excellent question. So I think, so the short answer to your question about how important is this problem and how pressing is it is, is, I would say, very important. And I think even in the Coast Guard's own language, it describes what we call IUUUF, illegal unreported or underreported fishing as one of the most significant threats to regional stability and human security. And without some real interventions, it's going to drive some serious conflict in the future. I'd actually have to go back to the UN report to find out the exact number of people that get their primary sources of protein. But I can tell you that there are many countries, some of which are the most vulnerable, where the sea is their primary source,

not only of protein, but of their livelihood. So it's not only an economic issue, but a food issue simultaneously. All right. Can you tell us, when did you first become aware of the overfishing problem? And what is it that you see as the Coast Guard steak? What is their ownership over it? So I'm a little bit of a late entry into the illegal fishing party. I really came to it in 2017, 2018, as I was researching competition in the South China Sea. And it was looking at it really through that security lens of sovereignty. And particularly China's effort work through its distant water fishing fleet to not only exercise control over the South China Sea, but to, you know, harvest enough protein to make good on its commitments to its population.

And often that meant going to places like the western coast of Africa or the coast of Ecuador to reap, you know, to really harvest what the sea has to offer. To be fair to the really good work that's being done by a lot of nonprofits and environmentalists, they've been singing this song and sounding the alarm for almost decades, I would say, at this point. So that's, I came through that sort of security lens. I was looking, propping for this. I was looking back. I wrote an article in 2018 saying that the next fight would be for fish. It's 2021. And now when I see articles, I'm like, oh, you guys are late to the party when really folks like Global Fish Watch and CSIS have been tracking this for 15, 20 years.

All right. Something I want to paint a picture for the audience a little bit, because I think that this is one of those areas where we have like romantic notions about what fishing in the fishing industry looks like. We think deadliest catches as bad and as big as it gets. But this is, the operations that are being built and carried out on the ocean and the levels of fish that are being taken in is massive. Can you explain what that looks like and then what specifically fleet fishing is? So I think I need to first finish answering your previous question. So apologies for the incomplete answer, which is really what is the Coast Guard's role or the United States Coast Guard's role in global fisheries management.

And why are we doing this? Why are we worried about fish in the Gulf of Guinea? And it's really, it's a two-part issue. So domestically, the U.S. fisheries, it's over $4 trillion a year in economic activity for us and livelihood. And so there's a domestic mission, which is, you know, protecting our own fisheries and maintaining economic competitiveness. And that's actually where we built this foundation of competence.

and become role models that we work to export globally under what are called regional fishery management organizations, which were set up under the agents of the UN. And so our work globally is really on capacity building and ensuring other nations, particularly vulnerable nations, have at least a fighting chance at exerting sovereignty in their own territorial waters to protect their own resources, which enables them to just build a more resilient population in general. So we are not the fish cops of the world. We are the fish cops of the United States EEV, which is still a couple hundred miles offshore. But really what we're talking about globally is upholding that network of responsible stakeholder, the rules-based order, to use everybody's

favorite phrase in the fishwold. So I have a question about how, the United States actually operates just to go along with what you were saying. That we, the Coast Guard is responsible for our economic zone, right? Which is a couple hundred miles off the shore. Is that right? It depends. There's always a million exceptions to every rule, but it's approximately 200 miles from the baseline.

Okay. So my question is, are people actually coming into our waters and trying to take our fish? I know that sounds silly. Nobody has the fish until they've been, you know, caught. But is that a problem that we have is here? It's not a huge problem. Our own problems is oftentimes protecting our own fish from ourselves. It might be a fair way to describe it.

There is some illegal fishing. We have interdicted and continued to interdict large numbers of vessels from, particularly from Mexico from the south that are illegally entering U.S. waters and poaching fish, essentially. but that's really our domestic mission that we do there, domestic LMR, what we call living marine resource. We can't just call them fish. They're living marine resources that we protect. And fleet fishing.

What does fleet fishing look like? What is it? Big fishing is really when large fleets, the name almost describes it, large fleets of vessels travel long distances. Many countries have distant water fishing fleets, Taiwan, China, but also a lot of European nations as well

that target fish that migrate, and move. So fish do not have passports. They go where the thermal client takes them and where their food sources take them, which is why those global and regional fisheries management organizations are so important. Because like you said, really the fish in our EEZ are our fish. But so many of the resources lie outside of any one state's EEZ or exclusive economic zone and are on the high seas. And so those are regulated under these international agreements. The most successful being the UN's ban on high seas drift nets, which is probably a role model in the future for actually successful interdiction measures that get over that collective action go on. Can you dig into that a little bit,

actually, why it's successful? Because that's one of the things we talked about with our previous guest is how hard enforcement of any regulation or law is at the high seas. So fisheries enforcement is a very, I say this, somebody who started out in the much faster moving counter-narcotics world can be very unsatisfying at first because it is a slow process. It is not going to be the same thing where we unload 200 tons of cocaine on the dock in Miami.

It's almost an administrative procedure is the best way to describe it, where essentially you have to set these standards and norms and uphold them. And over time, if you catch a violator, it's really about getting the flagged state to take action. And we've really been pleased to see some progress. States like Panama, which historically had been considered flags of convenience

for some of these fishing vessels, have actually taken action against Chinese-owned vessels in the past two years or so, where we have been able to find violations. We don't get to jump on board and take the fish, or do any of that cool stuff. So we notify the flag state, and then the flag state deflags them. And they are rendered stateless, which is a very nerdy maritime way of talking about. Essentially, you don't belong to anybody.

And then you become subject to the laws of anybody who feels like boarding me. Sorry, just to clarify one thing. When you say, you have these fleets, are they state sponsored? Does China have a national fishing fleet that's going out there? They are not state-sponsored the way NOAA is with a United States state-sponsored oceanographic agency. They are flag. They have a nationality, just U.S. merchant mariner, U.S. flag vessel. It's not owned by the United States, but essentially crude by American sailors.

But in the context of fisheries, and this is an area that I think really does deserve some more attention are, you know, subsidies. The Chinese distant water fleet in particular is heavily subsidized by their government, whereas the American fishing fleet is not. So that's a very interesting differentiator. And this is where you enter into some of that gray zone conflict, conversation or competition, which is each nation has a different model. So China, they're not official Chinese fishing boats, but they are subsidized patriotic fishermen. So let me describe this situation. can tell me if it's accurate. So you've got Chinese fishing vessels that are subsidized by the Chinese government in some way that are acquiring flags of convenience and are going out and straying

into territory perhaps that they should not be and gathering mass amounts of fish off of the shores of other countries. Yes, that's what we're talking about. I think the most, the clear illustration would be Ecuador, where Chinese distant water fleet has, I think, has been more than 70,000, I think 73,000 hours fishing off the coast of Ecuador. That feels like that's so far away from that. Yeah, that's why it's distant water fishing fleet. The west coast of Africa is pretty far too, but that's another place where the Chinese fishing fleet has gone.

And it's driven by a couple of different things. One is just the demand for protein from the sea in particular is incredibly high in China. And there is a lot of investment in aquaculture. but to date that has just not been able to keep up the demand. And then the second order, particularly off the coast of Africa, it's less about coaching and more about exploiting weak governance. So they'll be able to say there are licenses, which are, we'll say, not very well enforced.

So if there are fishing limits, there's really no way for those host nations to enforce those limits. there's no observation regime to go with it. So while they may have a license, they're still overfishing those waters. And then often selling the fish back to the local population. Does that mean that the seas closer to China are depleted already? Oh, they're very heavily depleted. Very heavily overfished.

So what does that look like then? It's like, how do we get to this place where a country has depleted? leaded all of its domestic stock and is going out and getting it from other people. I guess I'm trying to put numbers on how bad this problem is. Numbers are always a good thing. So let me try to put it in context as far as the actual numbers. I can tell you that they think roughly a third of all the seafood that you buy in the grocery store was illegally caught.

Really? Yeah. Because there's a big at sea transfer. problem where essentially illegal fish will be caught transferred from ship to ship because there's just not enough maritime domain awareness to really track that kind of thing. I also have heard many times that what you think you're buying in the store is actually misbranded too. You think you're getting some kind of salmon, but it's actually some other kind or maybe it doesn't salmon at all. Absolutely. And I think what's really interesting is the yeah, like the cod versus the haddock

sort of thing where it's just the average consumer doesn't really know the difference. So they're just, okay, I'm going to give you some statistics here. That'll help out with some context. So globally, 3.3 billion people, which is roughly half of the population, rely on fish for about 20% of their animal protein, which is a pretty significant number. That number is even higher. The poorer the country is, the more likely it is that their population, if they're a maritime state relies almost entirely on the sea for their protein. And then of the world's fisheries,

93% are classified by the UN as fully exploited, overly exploited, or depleted. So really only 7% of the world's fisheries are considered healthy by the UN. The U.S. fisheries is one of those, because we have definitely been very forward-leaning on our regulatory frameworks. And NOAA and Nymphis, in particular have done a lot of work on that. As somebody who worked in Boston with fishermen from Gloucester, they did not always think these regulations were a great idea. But in the long run, it's been able to ensure that the fish stocks remain robust. But globally, that is not the cave.

We've been, humans have been fishing for thousands of years. What has changed in the last 50 to 100 years that has made this a problem? Is our population just gotten that much bigger? There's a couple different drivers. So first of all, fishing has always been an incredibly competitive activity. And the sea has always been an incredibly competitive space. So there were the cod wars, like Canada, the United States. There have always been skirmishes over fish for hundreds of years.

But there have been certain things that have driven this. One is the growth in population in the poorest countries in the world. And then the movement from poverty to the middle class by unprecedented numbers of human beings in the last 50 years. And as people move up the value chain, their demand for protein increases. And not only does demand for edible human protein shrimp or the fish that you buy in the grocery store, but fish meal, which is generally essentially, they grind up fish and feed it to livestock is an important part of the beef and pork industry. in particular, which is another sort of as the middle class rises, the demand will continue to rise. And simultaneously, industrial fishing with factory ships that are able to catch and process

large numbers of ship of fish has really enabled this whole cycle to accelerate over the last 50 years. Can we start getting into then how this drives conflict? You touched on the fish wars between America and Canada, which was something I learned about like a couple days ago. never heard of it. What other, what are the other hotspots right now? Who is fighting over fish? So the most significant hotspot that I'm sure all of you have seen in the news is in the South China Sea. And this is where IUAP is an interesting lens for just competition generally. So there are a couple of different ways in which the competition for fish can play out and then lead to some level of conflict. So the first is just it's about the fit.

There is a need for protein and there's not enough of it. And in those cases, state-sponsored, we'll say fishing fleets will violate another country to eat easy to go for some fish. That is probably one of the less likely ways for it to just immediately flare up into conflict. But recent legal decisions, particularly by the China Coast Guard and the Japan Coast Guard, they're going to fire on civilian vessels that they find to be violating their. E.EZ or fishing illegally really creates the opportunity for escalation. So that is the first case scenario, which is actual competition over the fish themselves. The second is really the use of distant water fishing fleets to systemically violate and erode the sovereignty of another state,

essentially sending hundreds of ships to fish in the Caribbean or off the coast of Ecuador, over time just normalizes the presence of Chinese vessels in the Western Hemisphere. And is part of that competition below the level of armed conflict? Try not to say Gray's own if I don't have to. And it's really a challenge to sovereignty. And it's less about the fish than it is just about that gradual wearing down of the rules-based order. When it also leads to for the people who have been overfished, it can then be a driver of conflict when they no longer have their source of protein. 10 years ago, we were constantly talking about the Somali pirates, but I didn't see a lot of people talking about why Somali took to piracy.

Can you explain what happened there? And that is the third way, which is once that the fish are gone, the Somali pirates is an excellent example. But essentially, you have not only eliminated a food source, but their source of income, which drives instability and is a contributor to failed states or failing states. So in addition to the Somali pirate example, when you look at counter-narcotics operations and you interdict vessels that are smuggling cocaine or engaged in human trafficking, one of the most common sort of stories that you hear is that they used to be fishermen and the fish stocks have collapsed. And this is really their only alternative. And it feeds a cycle of criminal activity and violence, which again, creates vulnerabilities. in the great power competition sense, but it's also just a driver for threats in the Department of Homeland Security threats to the homeland, whether that's human trafficking or drugs. And it's also fueling the migrant crisis too, because people pick up and they don't have, they can't get food where they are, so they attempt to migrate. And that's also caused this big,

another big problem for Europe. Absolutely. So in addition to human trafficking, just general migration trends. And I won't, we won't go too far onto the where does illegal fishing and where does, general climate change drive those trends. But the illegal fishing and the theft of fish are definitely drivers for that. How big a factor is climate change in what's going on? It's a pretty significant factor. It's already pushing, particularly in the Arctic, fisheries patterns have started to change. And that's going to pose pretty significant challenges to populations that rely they were subsistence fishers. And it's unclear. when those changes are going to happen,

but we're already seeing some of them taking place in the Arctic. There's currently a ban on fishing in the high Arctic, and agreed upon by all the Arctic nations, but there's really no enforcement regime for that because it's been frozen up until now. Trying to understand and conceptualize how we're going to enforce those kinds of bands

is very difficult. And I cannot, yeah, that's the limit of my climate fish knowledge right now. All right, angry, plate of listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We will be back in just a moment. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are talking about Fish Wars.

I read that England and France are fighting over scallops. What's your, I can't suss out the face you're making. I'm thinking about it as I don't know if I'm really qualified to answer that other than just say those, there are constant disagreements with our neighbors about. food. We essentially set Mexico a note saying, stop stealing our fish, or we're going to sanction all your fish products. And I think for the UK and France, it's a long-running disagreement over scallops. I kind of love that Brexit got hunk. Brexit got stuck on this. They almost couldn't figure out any kind of trade deal because of fish. And one thing that I have heard is that actually the fish, the British were fighting over are fish that the British don't eat.

eat. But they sell them. It's not their type of fish. It's like only the EU eats that kind of fish, but the British are going to fight to the death over something they don't eat. What kind of fish is it? Scallops are great. They should be eating more scallops. So they're in trade disagreements about a fish that one person's to, okay. All right. Got it. I don't want to go too far. This is why I was a little bit hesitant to engage on this because it seems to me so closely tied to the Brexit issue. And now there are fishermen in the UK who actually can't sell their product fast enough and we'll be going out of business because so much of their business had been based on the EU having speedy access. Nobody wants old fish. You have to be able to move them through pretty quickly.

And so that's, but that's very Brexit specific. So you say that you wrote the article in 2018 that predicted that we were going to fight. How is this going to heat up? Are we, going to fight a world war over fish? I don't think we'll fight a world war over fish. I think with all due respect to your editors, I think not your editors, but to editors in general, conflict. I think it's a conflict and they're like, you can't have conflict. It's got to be war, right?

So that the competition for resources is going to lead to conflict. And fish are a resource that used to be oil. Energy is always going to be important. But that in some part because of climate change, but also in population, growth and where populations in particular are growing and moving into the middle class, the competition for fish is going to heat up. And in the course of that competition, it's going to create those three stressors. One is direct conflict over the fish themselves, which could lead to some minor skirmishes and where you could see that escalating into actual armed conflict would be if

Coast Guard, so if the China Coast Guard starts escorting its distant water fishing fleet, off the coast of Ecuador, that creates an opportunity for conflict. Fishing vessels have been sunk. Fishing vessels have been rammed, fishermen have been killed by the China Coast Guard. And if any state decided to really take that to the next level, it could lead to escalation. The second part is just in the context of competition from state to state, using the distant water fishing fleets as a tool to just encroach on sovereignty, at some point could trigger maybe more through miscalculation than anything else, an escalatory response.

And then lastly, just an instability, you're creating instability that drives migration and crime. And all of those things that just make states more vulnerable and more prone to conflict. When you talk about China's Coast Guard, what kind of force is it? Is it like our Coast Guard? Is it more militarized? It is not like the United States Coast Guard, even though their paint job is shockingly similar. I will point out that they've faded their boats white and put stripes on them just like us. They have.

So the China Coast Guard has undergone something of a transformation and was recently moved into the armed forces. So it historically had been in a different part of the government and has now essentially been officially moved to become part of the military. it is much larger than the United States Coast Guard and has significantly larger ships. And a lot of it, the difference lies in our perception of our role. So the Coast Guard, the United States Coast Guard, doesn't ram people and sink them at sea, where the China Coast Guard does. So that's a pretty big difference right there. And whereas we are both a law enforcement and a military component,

they are strictly a military component. So those would be the biggest differences. To date, though, that China Coast Guard has stayed pretty close to home, whereas the United States Coast Guard is a global force and has been a global force for hundreds, almost since our creation. Who is going into China's sovereign territory in aggravating their Coast Guard?

We would argue nobody is going into their sovereign territory. We would say that they make specious claims over what constitutes their territory and sea. So this is all, when we talk about the ramming boats and killing fishermen, this is stuff that's playing out in disputed waters in the South China Sea, mostly. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay.

So who's getting sunk? Are there particular nations that have been victimized more than others? Maybe victimizes a terrible word. To my knowledge, most Vietnamese fishing vessels and I think one in Japanese, but, yeah, there's not a lot of U.S. over there, so they don't have to worry about ramming one of ours by accident. Yeah, I was just thinking about the various territorial disputes that China has, the Sinkaku Islands that Japan, which China has another name for it, that I,

daimyo. I can't remember whose is who, but it's the same island. Same things are happening in the Philippines. So the Philippines actually won a case at the IMO. I mean, in their favor, the short answer is China was saying, under our historical rights, we think that this is our water and these are our facts. and the Philippines argued the opposite and won the case at the IMO. The thing about that ruling, though, is that nobody then backed up that ruling. It was as if it never happened.

And there's a variety of reasons for that. A lot of it having to do with essentially the political imaginations going on inside the Philippine government at the time. And sort of their alignments made it just not feasible for them. And I think that's a point that I would want to drive home with your listeners, is that the United States Post Guard isn't going to go into the Philippine or Vietnamese territorial waters and just start enforcing fisheries laws on our own. We have to do that on the behalf of and in partnership with these other nations. We have over 36 bilateral agreements having to do with everything from

counter-narcotics to fisheries enforcement to oil spill regulation that we use to do this kind of work around the world. And it's really on the strength of those agreements and the understanding that we are working in true partnership, either with shipwriters or following some pretty deliberate processes to support these nations as they uphold their laws. And often some of the most powerful work we do is information sharing and providing them with maritime domain awareness and partnering with the nonprofits who provide them with that sort of MDA. And it's an area where there's still so much room for growth and where we can help and provide real value without necessarily having to put a Coast Guard cutter, a crew or a ship in the waters of another nation. But to actually empower them with information, actionable information in a timely way, could be just as useful. I was wondering about the role of aquaculture going forward. You had mentioned that it's not enough at this point to take over what.

is happening in the oceans. But do you see that as something that's going to develop and change the equation at all? I certainly hope so. I think that's an unknown. It's an unknown. So aquaculture is currently not really close to being a perfect solution because aquaculture stocks are incredibly vulnerable to disease and collapse. So it's and they are environmentally costly in other ways. So they can cause a great deal of pollution. So I think there's a lot of kinks to work out. referring to some of the climate change conversations we had, there are the wizards and the profits in the climate change world and the wizards think we can innovate our way out. And this is a place where I would like to think that the market forces will encourage people to innovate and find

solutions to this. Because the natural fish population is just simply not going to be enough to keep up with demand. There is no fisheries management plan that's really going to bring back all the fish stocks and meat market demand. I'm hoping that there's entrepreneurs out there. There's a fish version of Elon Musk who's going to come up with some sort of aquaculture solution. I just know there's a bad Elon Musk as a fish pun that we're leaving on the table right now. The mental image of him is a fish. So game this out for us then for five or ten years. How do you see all of this going? Accelerating and getting worse until collapse or It's a good question. I see things getting better. And part of this might just be my optimistic nature. But I think there has been a sea change, which is pardon the pun. On the idea that illegal fish or illegal fishing and overfishing is just a victimless crime, that the ocean is so big that there'll always be more fish. I think the realization that is not true has.

has just hit home with national security thinkers and diplomats in a way that it just did not before. And I don't know what the tipping point was exactly. Unfortunately, I think some of it has to do placing it in the context of competition with China and that we had to securitize it. And just like securitizing climate change, it is true. It's a security issue. but I wish we had not had to come to this point for it to become an important issue. There are other things that can be important without being security.

But now that it's here and now that all the Johnny come lately, it's like me, believe it's important. I think it's getting a lot more attention. And I think as we look at, to bring it to the security conversation, understanding that countering malign behavior requires you to share information, it's going to really force us to develop real tools to share information with small vulnerable nations that are never going to be the combat credible allies that the Pentagon would prefer to invest in or that many members of the Pentagon community would prefer to invest in,

that this is the forcing function to create the networks that we need to share the information with these states. in a timely manner so they can actually protect their fish and their fisheries. And hopefully that we've also created enough transparency that local communities will demand that from their leaders. I'm optimistic. Captain, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, that's it for this week. As always, Angry Planet is a creation of me, Matthew Gulp, and Jason Fields.

It is run by me, Jason Fields and Kevin Nodell. If you like the show, we are on Substack, where we are putting out two premium episodes every month. Just $9 a month. Go to angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.