Duterte to declare marine sanctuary in SCS
PHILIPPINE officials said on Monday President Rodrigo Duterte planned to declare a marine sanctuary and nofishing zone at a lagoon within Scarborough Shoal, a reef China seized in 2012.
The announcement followed Duterte’s meeting with President Xi Jinping of China on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Peru over the weekend. It was unclear whether the plan had Xi’s backing; the Philippine national security adviser, Hermogenes Esperon Jr, said in a statement Monday that creating the proposed sanctuary was “a unilateral action.”
The plan comes about four months after the Philippines largely won an international arbitration ruling that had challenged China’s seizure of Scarborough Shoal. It also comes as Duterte has tried to reset frayed relations with China and has publicly questioned his country’s long-standing ties to the US
Duterte’s communications secretary, Martin Andandar, quoted Xi as having called for a “favourable environment” at Scarborough Shoal, which both countries claim. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a faxed request for comment on Monday.
Experts said Monday that it would be difficult to assess the feasibility of Duterte’s plan without further details, and that a crucial question was whether China would be involved in the implementation or enforcement of the proposed sanctuary.
Last month Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies and an adviser to the Chinese government, said that the government was open to making the lagoon within the shoal into an “envi- ronmental protection park”.
“Until we have a management plan, we won’t know,” said Clive Wilkinson, an expert on coral reefs in Australia and the former lead coordinator for the nonprofit Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.
He added that the Philippines probably did not have enough ships to enforce such a ban, and that the lagoon sanctuary would offer only marginal fisheries protection in the absence of a corresponding fishing ban along the shoal’s outer flanks.
The South China Sea has some of the world’s most productive fisheries. A 2015 academic study found that the sea had 571 known species of reef corals alone, significantly more than most other reefs around the world.
But the sea is also facing an overfishing crisis, and scientists say that China’s campaign to turn seven disputed reefs into artificial islands and build military facilities on some of them is damaging crucial spawning grounds. They say the establishment of port facilities at the new islands may also encourage Chinese fishing fleets to travel farther afield from the Chinese mainland, putting even greater pressure on beleaguered fish stocks.
Scientists have long called for the creation of marine conservation areas in disputed parts of the South China Sea, arguing that the areas would help defuse tension over competing territorial claims while protecting ecologically sensitive spawning grounds from commercial fishing fleets.
Leaders from China and Southeast Asian nations have mostly ignored the suggestion.
Scarborough Shoal, known in the Philippines as Panatag Shoal and in China as Huangyan Island, is at the centre of both the ecological and political dramas.
Although Chinese coast guard ships have granted Philippine fishermen access to the shoal in recent weeks as part of a reconciliation between the countries, the shoal is still widely seen as a potential target of the island-building campaign. Scientists say that is especially worrying because the shoal plays an important role as a site where countless fish and coral species can breed, helping to maintain the sea’s extraordinary biodiversity.
Wu, the Chinese government adviser, said in an interview last month that the Chinese government had decided that no fishermen from the Philippines or China should be allowed into the Scarborough lagoon because both sides had inflicted “huge” damage on it by fishing with dynamite. He added that a Chinese-administered “environmental protection park” in the lagoon would represent an effort at bilateral cooperation, but he included an important caveat.
“A precondition for that is that the Philippines will respect China’s sovereignty and jurisdiction in Scarborough Shoal,” Wu said.