Embassy of Canada in Japan host talk on Indo Pacific maritime security
The Embassy of Canada in Japan conducted a talk titled ‘Maritime Challenges in the Indo Pacific - A New Normal or Status Quo?’ on 10 June 2020. GAIA’s Co-Founder Dr. Asyura Salleh was invited to speak and share her opinions on maritime developments in the Indo-Pacific region. Also present at the talk were Darshana M. Barauah, Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and John Bradford, Council of Foreign Affairs - Hitachi International Affairs Fellow. The session was moderated by Stephen R. Nagy, Senior Associate Professor at the International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo.
The talk sought to address the maritime challenges in the Indo-Pacific vis-a-vis China’s activities in the South and East China Seas. In her speech, Dr. Asyura stressed the need for a broader scope in examining the maritime domain. Illicit maritime crimes such as illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, piracy and armed robbery, and maritime drug trafficking deserve as much attention as state competition and freedom of navigation at sea.
She explained that the prolonging of these maritime crimes can have enormous impacts on regional economies through illegal catch, on the safety of the transit of vessels along sea lanes of communication, and even to public health systems. These consequences illustrate that maritime security has direct relations to factors that occur on land.
Dr. Asyura said that the current pandemic has outstretched the capability of regional governments as defence budgets are being readjusted to fight the spread of the coronavirus. In turn, the preoccupation with the global health crisis has provided a fertile environment for non-state actors to heighten maritime insecurity in the Asia-Pacific. Incidents in piracy and armed robbery cases, for instance, increased three-fold across the region from January 2020 to March 2020 compared to the year before.
Such incidents are also accompanied by increased fishing nationalism — an irregular tactic aimed at exploiting fishery stock to secure territorial dominion over thriving fishing grounds. For example, China has recently announced a fishing ban over areas that include the Scarborough Shoal and Paracel Islands — to the protest of Vietnam and the Philippines. If left unaddressed, fisheries competition can transform into a proxy for territorial disputes. But more worrisome is the fact that continued escalation of these competitions, coupled with the rate of our overfishing, will lead to a depletion of all global fishing stock by 2050.
Desecuritising these challenges is the key to ensure the sustainability of our undersea resources, according to Dr. Asyura, and this can be done by examining IUU fishing from an approach not rooted in sovereignty. She further explained that regional coordination in the protection of our waters and its resources is paramount; to illustrate, the Trilateral Cooperative Agreement (TCA) — the impact of which has yet to be ascertained — coincided with a decline in recorded incidents of transnational crimes months after its inception. In cooperating on non-conventional threats facing the maritime space, strategic trust can be built and a shared threat perception of maritime challenges can be developed, thereby allowing better information and intelligence sharing among maritime law enforcement agencies in the region. And finally, Dr. Asyura suggested that confronting IUU fishing can be achieved through more initiative on Marine Protected Areas (MPA) as well as through considering the formation of a regional fishery management organization (RMFO). An RMFO can then become a platform for regional countries to create policies that are research-based — free from political or strategic agendas.