Taiwan’s diplomatic ally Palau, fighting a rising tide of illegal fishing in its waters, has set fire to four Vietnamese fishing boats allegedly caught poaching sea cucumbers and other marine life in its waters.
Palauan President Tommy Remengesau Jr said that the boats were burned yesterday morning.
He said he hopes to turn most of the nation’s territorial waters into a national marine sanctuary, banning commercial fishing and exports apart from limited areas to be used by domestic fishermen and tourists.
Photo: AP
“We wanted to send a very strong message. We will not tolerate any more these pirates who come and steal our resources,” Remengesau said from Washington — where he was on a visit — in a telephone interview with reporters.
The country created the world’s first shark sanctuary in 2009, but until recently had only one patrol boat to help protect its great hammerheads, leopard sharks and more than 130 other species of sharks and rays.
The four boats that were destroyed were among 15 that Palauan authorities claim to have caught fishing illegally in their waters since last year with loads of sharks and shark fins, lobsters, sea cucumbers and reef fish.
Several of the vessels that it seized, stripped of their fishing equipment, are due to carry 77 crew members of the boats back to Vietnam.
Remengesau said that the stream of poachers showed that just stripping the rogue boats of their nets and confiscating their catches was not enough.
“I think it’s necessary to burn the boats,” he said.
Palau, which is about 970km east of the Philippines, is one of the world’s smallest countries, its 20,000 people scattered across a tropical archipelago of 250 islands that are considered part of a biodiversity hotspot. In 2012, its Rock Islands Southern Lagoon was named a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Driven by rising demand from China and elsewhere in Asia, overfishing threatens many aquatic species. With 621,600 square kilometers of territorial waters, including its exclusive economic zone extending 320km from its coastline, Palau is battling to prevent poaching of its sea life by fishermen from across southeast Asia.
Despite progress in tracing sources of fish sold to consumers, about one-fifth of the global market for marine products caught and sold, or about US$23.5 billion, is caught illegally.
Advances in telecommunications and technology to track ocean-going vessels have improved surveillance, but enforcing restrictions on unauthorized fishing is costly and difficult, especially given the many “pockets” of high seas in the area.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for illegal fishing and other transnational crime. It’s a challenge,” said Seth Horstmeyer, campaigns director for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Global Ocean Legacy program.
High-seas pockets, beyond the jurisdiction of any government, account for nearly two-thirds of all ocean areas.
Between Palau to Japan is a vast expanse of seas that nobody controls and nobody owns, areas that serve as refuges for illegal fishing vessels.
The Vietnamese fishermen tend to prowl shallows seas and reefs in search of sea cucumbers and reef fish and then flee back into those deeper waters to evade capture, Horstmeyer said.
One way to counter that tactic is to create a “geofence” using vessel identification systems that could trigger alerts when vessels cross into national waters.
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