Fishing pirates slice through seas of toothless treaties

By COLIN JAMES

Piracy on the high seas is no storybook lark: it is real and costs hard cash. Fishing piracy, that is.

General piracy is on the rise. Five years ago the International Maritime Bureau reported 106 attacks on ships. In 2002 that was up to 370 and in the first nine months of 2003 alone totalled 344.

The problem: a lack of policing and a lack of international urgency, despite a huge and rapidly rising cost in lost cargo - and lives.

But mostly that does not directly affect New Zealand. What does make an impact is a less violent version: fishing illegally on the high seas outside the exclusive economic zone and/or not reporting the catch.

Sanford managing director Eric Barratt says this "affects the market, particularly for [Patagonian] toothfish, which is high value". It also depletes stocks.

Some ships involved in the piracy are impounded if they turn up in the port of a country that outlaws piracy. But Barratt says some companies regard the loss of an occasional ship as the "cost of doing business" and even budget for it.

Sanford is a member of the Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators, an international organisation which publicises illegal fishers and lobbies for more concerted action.

Slowly, the international community is responding. For instance, in December Prime Minister Helen Clark trumpeted a Pacific fisheries convention she had just ratified to ensure "effective management" of the tuna fishery in the region.

But the convention was first agreed in 1994 and developed into a text in 2000 - and will not come into effect until June. Yet on November 30 the then Fisheries Minister Pete Hodgson said fishing piracy was "an urgent problem".

He was speaking after signing up with four other fisheries ministers to combat fishing pirates who are over-exploiting the world's fish stocks, particularly on the high seas outside territorial waters.

The OECD-inspired, British-led task force, which also includes fisheries ministers of Australia, Chile and Namibia, is to develop recommendations to prevent and eliminate illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.

The aim is to develop "sound, politically realistic and financially viable" ideas and "ensure their implementation at national, regional and international levels". As a country with a huge territorial zone and heavily dependent on fishing, New Zealand has a special interest.

Why is a task force needed if countries are signing up to "effective management" conventions such as the western and central Pacific convention Clark enthused about?

A background paper from the OECD - prepared by former Environment Minister Simon Upton, now chair of the OECD's roundtable on sustainable development - cast doubt on the effectiveness of measures taken so far.

Upton said no one knew how big the piracy problem is, partly because "our understanding of overall fish stocks and their dynamics is by no means complete". But, he said, the Food and Agricultural Organisation had described 27 per cent of global fish stocks as over-exploited or depleted.

And the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which maintains a register of pirate ships, estimated that 39 per cent of the total catch was pirated in 2000-2001.

In response to the over-fishing there had been "an almost frenzied level of treaty-writing" to combat piracy and other over-fishing, producing more than 20 regional conventions, Upton said.

"Few areas of multilateral activity have seen so many closely related and sometimes overlapping initiative pursued in quick succession. Negotiators have not been sitting on their hands." (Though 10 years from agreement to implementation of the western and central Pacific convention does not seem frenetic to the lay observer.)

One problem is rogue flag states - states that do not police the activities of ships registered in their states. Conventions work through flag states but "it is not states but fishing boats that go fishing".

Nevertheless, Upton said, there would be no piracy problem if states forced ships registered in their states to observe rules or be "deflagged".

Could honest states take action against pirates who turn up in their ports? The position in international law is "contentious", Upton said. And in any case, boats can simply go to other states' ports. "As long as there are states that are not prepared to sign up to stringent port measures, vessels will be able to get their products to the marketplace."

Catch and trade documentation schemes have been tried to deny entry to fish which cannot be documented as caught in accordance with management regimes. But "their effectiveness is entirely dependent on members being prepared to enforce and monitor implementation" and some states are lax.

Eco-labels and "green consumerism" helps but mainly in Europe. "Penetration in the high-value markets of Japan and the United States has been limited." And in any case, Upton said, it doesn't affect piracy on the high seas.

There are also questions whether fish conservation measures might contravene World Trade Organisation rules, though no case has been brought against any measure intended to conserve global fisheries.

And there are difficulties with states charging citizens of other countries because it involves extraterritorial application of the law.

Upton urged getting more states to sign up as a first priority and then strengthening regional management regimes.

But what then? "In the absence of a high level of accession to the international treaties and regional agreements we have only a very partial and patchy level of enforcement," Upton said.

How to fix that is the task of new Fisheries Minister David Benson-Pope.