Saving Seafood

Nations Will Start Talks to Protect Fish of the High Seas

August 2, 2017 — UNITED NATIONS — More than half of the world’s oceans belong to no one, which often makes their riches ripe for plunder.

Now, countries around the world have taken the first step to protect the precious resources of the high seas. In late July, after two years of talks, diplomats at the United Nations recommended starting treaty negotiations to create marine protected areas in waters beyond national jurisdiction — and in turn, begin the high-stakes diplomatic jostling over how much to protect and how to enforce rules.

“The high seas are the biggest reserve of biodiversity on the planet,” Peter Thomson, the ambassador of Fiji and current president of the United Nations General Assembly, said in an interview after the negotiations. “We can’t continue in an ungoverned way if we are concerned about protecting biodiversity and protecting marine life.”

Without a new international system to regulate all human activity on the high seas, those international waters remain “a pirate zone,” Mr. Thomson said.

Lofty ambitions, though, are likely to collide with hard-knuckled diplomatic bargaining. Some countries resist the creation of a new governing body to regulate the high seas, arguing that existing regional organizations and rules are sufficient. The commercial interests are powerful. Russian and Norwegian vessels go to the high seas for krill fishing; Japanese and Chinese vessels go there for tuna. India and China are exploring the seabed in international waters for valuable minerals. Many countries are loath to adopt new rules that would constrain them.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Weapons on the Water, Violence at Sea

July 20, 2015 — “Brace yourself.” This was the subject line of an email I received from a source at Interpol.

Attached was a video showing the gruesome killing of at least four unarmed men floating in the ocean. The video was the beginning of a story I wrote about violence on the high seas, part of a series called The Outlaw Ocean.

The video, which had been discovered on a cellphone left in the back of a taxi in Fiji, shows four large fishing ships circling the men in the water, clinging to what looked like the wreckage of a wooden boat. One by one, the four men are shot in view of dozens of witnesses. At the end of the video the men who filmed the incident pose for selfies.

It seemed amazing to me that in an era of drones and GPS, of big data and crowdsourcing, virtually nothing was known about these killings — not the perpetrators nor the victims, much less the location, timing or motives.

Maritime security experts I spoke to about the video had the same basic response: Violence at sea is far more prevalent than most people realize, and most of it looks nothing like the movie “Captain Phillips.”

Small cargo and fishing vessels (not huge Western-owned container ships) are the usual targets of violent attack. Assaults are most common along the border between national and international waters, where poachers roam and fishing competition is fiercest. Coastal Nigeria, the Bay of Bengal and the waters near Indonesia are said to be especially perilous.

Read the full story at the New York Times