COLONIZING THE SPRATLYS, DESTROYING OUR FOOD AND ECOLOGICAL BALANCE
The conversion and occupation marine life
Although the world, because of international media emphasis seems to see only “freedom of navigation” as the crucial issue on the South China Sea disputes, buried underneath all the occasional political noise on the militarization of the islands and illegal conversion and reclamation of reefs and shoals are gut issues of human and ecological survival. This consists of the little known fact that the Spratlys are the savings bank for important fish and invertebrates that supply our coastal waters with marine life, feeding us and our neighbors and protecting the ecological balance of our common marine environment.
Dune Lawrence and Wenxin Fan have written a thoughtprovoking article in Bloomberg’s
Businessweek on the research and advocacy conducted through the years by Dr. John McManus, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines who has a doctorate in biological oceanography from the University of Rhode Island. Dr. McManus, now a professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami studied the marine ecology of the South China Sea for decades when he lived in the Philippines, and where he met and married his Filipina wife, Liana Talaue, a marine scientist.
The article goes back to the trade in giant clams that thrived on the coastal village of Tanmen on the island of Hainan, the southernmost part of mainland China, which is actually almost 900 kilometers from the Spratlys, or three times the distance from the nearest coastline of the Philippines. The Chinese, who value jade and ivory, have been subject of negative global publicity for causing the rapid threat to the survival of the elephant species in Africa.
The giant clams, harvested from the Spratlys by destroying corals to get to them using propellers, were discovered in Tanmen by a Taiwanese entrepreneur who had prospered from the business of producing beads and handicraft from seashells. The businessman, Zhan Dexiong, then set up factories in Tanmen to produce objet d’art from carvings made from the giant clams. The business thrived from tourism. Delegates to conferences in nearby Ba’ao, the Chinese and Asian counterpart to Switzerland’s Davos had spread the word about the newly discovered objet d’art and thus attracted tourists to Tanmen who became patrons of the artfully carved giant clams.
The thriving business of carved giant clams soon came to the attention of Chinese Premier Xi Zin Ping who forthwith made a trip to Tanmen and offered incentives to the fishers to harvest more and more from the Spratlys. The government provided funding and large boats to enhance the capability of the harvesters. Perhaps the objective was economic, but quite likely, a good excuse to send more Chinese fishing boats to the Spratlys, thus perhaps paving the way for occupying the “islands” after converting the reefs and shoals through destructive reclamation of the ocean’s floor, and covering the corals and cementing them.
Today, as we know, the illegally occupied islands host runways, hangars for fighter planes, lighthouses, jogging paths, and basketball courts. China has never accepted the UN Arbitral Court’s verdict in favor of the Philippine claim to part of the South China Sea, despite their having affixed their signature on the UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). Other claimants to the marine territory ( Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei, and Indonesia) are beneficiaries of the Philippine’s victory in The Hague and can rightfully bolster their claims, on the basis of the Arbitral ruling.