Fights over illegal fishing lead to armed conflicts and deaths
Protesters from across Sri Lanka descended on the nation’s capital in February, shouting above the street noise and pumping their fists in the air in frustration.
The group was made up of fisherman and their supporters, and their rage was sparked by the Indian boats that regularly sail into Sri Lankan waters by the thousands, hauling away valuable sea cucumbers and prawns. Sri Lankan fishermen say they’ve lost business, and some have lost their lives in confrontations with foreign crews.
The protesters demanded more action from the government, even as Sri Lanka’s navy has used force to guard its fisheries — destroying Indian fishing gear, charging at the vessels, and in at least one violent episode, firing shots. Five Indian fishermen were reportedly killed last year in encounters with the navy, although Sri Lankan authorities deny they killed or shot at crews, and say they were not the aggressors.
Violence and death
“The intensity is increasing, the level of violence is increasing, deaths are increasing,” said N. Manoharan, who has researched the conflict as director of East Asian studies at Bangalore’s Christ University. Warnings and arrests, he said, have failed to keep Indian trawlers from crossing into Sri Lankan waters — in part because their own shores are overfished. “They are so desperate for the catch, and they go and lose their lives.”
This 600-mile stretch of the Indian Ocean is far from the only place where
tensions over fishing run high. Elsewhere in the region, fishermen in India and Pakistan are also entangled in an ongoing boundary dispute between the two nations in the Arabian Sea. According to Indian news reports, Pakistan’s maritime authority has shot at Indian fishing boats at least twice in the past two years.
Around the world, from Sri Lanka to Argentina to the South China Sea, the ocean has become an expanding front in the armed conflict between nations over illegal fishing and overfishing, practices that deplete a vulnerable food source for billions of people worldwide. Jessica Spijkers, a researcher for Australia’s national science agency, found a rise in global fishing conflicts when she studied a four-decade period ending in 2016. Her analysis included nonviolent disputes that sometimes precede the outbreak of violence.
An Associated Press review
of conflict databases compiled by non-governmental organizations, government tallies, and media reports found in the past five years more than 360 instances of state authorities ramming or shooting at foreign fishing boats, sometimes leading to deaths.
Destroying boats
During that same time, another 850 foreign fishing boats were seized by authorities and systematically crushed, blown up, or sunk.
The figures cover incidents across six continents but are likely an undercount since no single entity tracks violent conflicts over fishing rights worldwide. The AP analysis did not include routine citations and arrests but focused on where and how violence has escalated in fishing grounds around the world.
Environmental and national security experts say countries that depend on fishing both as a source of food and commerce are at risk of greater conflict in
the coming years. Already, industrial fishing boats extract droves of fish from the sea, with distant-water fleets from China and other countries roaming far beyond their domestic waters in search of stocks that have been depleted closer to home.
The search for new sources of fish comes as nations are tasked with feeding growing populations and climate change further endangers ocean life.
“It is getting significantly worse,” said Johan Bergenas, a World Wildlife Fund expert on oceans who first warned of a rise in global fishing conflicts five years ago.
“We are now seeing armed conflict and tensions and strains as a result of fish stocks and competition over in West Africa, in the West Indian Ocean, in Latin America,” he said. “There’s going to be conflicts and armed engagements over these incredibly important fish stocks around the world.”