"There is the potentially more urgent matter of keeping the marine ecosystem in the area alive until it’s too late."
"There is the potentially more urgent matter of keeping the marine ecosystem in the area alive until it’s too late."
The smoke from the sinking of a Filipino fishing boat around Reed Bank weeks ago had barely cleared when reports of another incursion, this time dozens of Chinese fishing boats around Pag-asa Island, was reported. Part of the Spratlys, Pag-asa is the seat of government for the fifth-class municipality of Kalayaan and lies just 280 nautical miles off Puerto Princesa in Palawan.
Authorities are not sure if the vessels were from the same flotilla of maritime militia ships under the People’s Liberation Army Navy, which also gathered in the area last month, reportedly as a show of force meant to intimidate Filipino contractors building a beaching ramp and safe harbor in the town.
Since the beginning of the year, as many as 600 Chinese vessels have been spotted around the area, in particular in the sandbars, to prevent Filipino fishermen access to their traditional fishing grounds. The way that the vessels have been positioned and the frequency of their patrols have been seen as a threat to Philippine control of Pag-asa.
This kind and intensity of threatening presence, of course, is consistent with Beijing’s claim to almost the entire West Philippine Sea, said Gregory Poling of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. It’s made tricky by the use of vessels that purport to be intended for fishing even if they don’t really fish.
“This is unsurprising—the purpose of employing a maritime militia to keep aggression below the level of military force and complicate the responses of other parties, in this case chiefly the other claimants (Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan) as well as the United States, by hiding behind a civilian facade,” he said.
The so-called Chinese challenge in the region has become a new normal, he added.
Beyond the obvious geopolitical dimension of this development is an ecological crisis, in particular the fisheries and marine environment in the West Philippine Sea that is under severe threat and pressure. Potentially sidelined by the high drama on the high seas is the series of environmental crises, from overfishing to dredging and island building and destructive clam harvesting that the stalemate had either caused or exacerbated.
What this in turn poses to humans was demonstrated by the recent stand-off on Reed Bank when a Filipino fishing boat was rammed and sunk, affecting the lives of 22 fishermen and their families. Broadly speaking, it’s the fishers from the Philippines, China, and Vietnam who will bear the brunt of what’s going to happen if the claimant states fail to effectively manage the fisheries situation and preserve the marine environment in the important sea lane.
A roundtable forum on “Environmental Crises and Opportunities in the South China Sea” was recently organized by independent think tank Stratbase ADR Institute. An important part of the discussion was Poling highlighting the scale of the environmental crises in the area using a combination of remote sensing tools and imagery analysis. With a clearer picture of the situation, he then proposed a path forward, a blueprint development by an international team of experts from all the claimant states and beyond.
The ongoing disputes could be categorized into two, Poling said: Sovereign territory and maritime competition. The first one should have been clarified and covered by the 2016 arbitral ruling but which continues to create friction due to Beijing’s adamant refusal to recognize it. The second one is defined in terms of waters, seabed, airspace, and even rules of conduct among regional actors and external actors.
In many ways the center of the broad disagreement is on the application and use of international laws, Poling said. “You cannot have a regime of international law where the world’s second-largest power decides it will have its own set of rules.”
It’s this defiance of a rules-based order that can characterize Beijing’s gradual but unceasing militarization of the disputed waters, Poling said, from the creation of islands to the construction of military facilities. The goal has always been to have enough of a reach to cover every inch of its nine-dash claim. Even so, Poling said China will never knowingly start a war against any country, instead trying to subdue states into helplessness.
What this unopposed Chinese military activity has done to the marine environment is dire. For instance, what is considered one of the most productive fishing zones in the world is increasingly pushed to the brink of collapse due to the lack of fishing management, reef destruction, and clam poaching and digging. As 12 percent of global fish catch comes from this region, this threat carries serious global implications.
The lack of policies that limits or creates order in the conduct of fishing activities has led to a 70-to-90 percent decline in fish stocks. Between 2013 and 2016, China destroyed some 15,000 acres’ worth of reef, which has gone up to 40,000 since.
While woeful, Poling said there is still something that could be done. The Code of Conduct, which has languished in the corridors of ASEAN, does not cover marine conservation and cannot guarantee a binding agreement. What he suggested instead is a fisheries agreement among claimant countries, which will settle provisions on conduct, restrictions, and preservation.
“Unfortunately, this cannot be done unilaterally,” he said. “If Manila were to declare fisheries or marine-protected areas, the Chinese would simply overfish in them to simply show that they can. What is needed instead is the Philippines in cooperation with other Southeast Asian countries, to demand a separate negotiation on fisheries management in parallel with the China-ASEAN Code of Conduct.”
All claimant countries have the legal responsibility to cooperate and manage fish stocks, he said, and while there are outstanding sovereign rights, there must be a shift to provisional jurisdictional lines, which can have the same language and mutually agreed upon fisheries code. On the other hand, while the legal aspect of such a code can be easy, the political aspect, including possibly policing Beijing, might be trickier.
“We are talking about an ecosystem-based, scientifically-grounded series of marine parks where some reefs, ones that were most overfished or most intentionally damaged by China would be a no-fish zone. They would be given the time to repair themselves,” Poling explained.
At the end of the day, alongside the military and political theaters of the ongoing row in the South China Sea is the potentially more urgent matter of keeping the marine ecosystem in the area alive until it’s too late.
