The mice that roared: how eight tiny countries took on foreign fishing fleets | Hacker News Reader

The mice that roared: how eight tiny countries took on foreign fishing fleets

theguardian.com

117 pointsvijayr0239 comments

I was hoping the article would say something about enforcement. Isn't it a hard problem even for developed countries with well-equipped coastguards? The article doesn't paint a picture of countries able to do that.

What if the Chinese fishing fleet arrives one day and says, "so long and thanks for all the fish"?

Otherwise, good on them and sustainable fish, but this is not much different to OPEC or other cartels.

No, enforcement is an easy problem. You sink violating ships. Fishermen will give your coastal waters a wide berth if they know there is even a 1% probability they will be killed. If you're not willing to sink ships then it's pretty much impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati#Law_enforcement_and_m...: Kiribati has no military and relies on both Australia and New Zealand for its defence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea_Defence_Force...: According to Janes the navy is badly underfunded and much of its equipment is in need of maintenance; as a consequence it is scarcely able to carry out its tasks, with operations often delayed or cancelled. The navy's patrol craft are barely effective; fuel costs and maintenance problems mean that often only one boat is available for sea duty at any time, while the heavy landing craft have high upkeep costs and are nearing the end of their service life. Although the patrol boats may be at times serviceable, the task of patrolling such a large Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is too great and they are heavily reliant for information about the presence of foreign ships on daily reports supplied by US satellite surveillance. The main concern is illegal tuna fishing by Japanese vessels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Islands#Military: the country has not had any regular military forces since independence. The various paramilitary elements of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) were disbanded and disarmed in 2003 following the intervention of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). RAMSI has a small military detachment headed by an Australian commander with responsibilities for assisting the police element of RAMSI in internal and external security. The RSIPF still operates two Pacific class patrol boats (RSIPV Auki and RSIPV Lata), which constitute the de facto navy of Solomon Islands.

I suspect the other countries have similar military power.

Having satellite coverage, especially wide field-of-view naval reconnaissance types, would seem more valuable than brute force and numbers.

Especially since I believe fishing fleets have centralized utility boats? Impound a processing & refrigeration ship... and what's the rest of the fleet going to do?

[Edit] US example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_Sys...

Also, apparently the ex-Soviet radar version with the brilliant idea of boosting their nuclear reactors into a higher orbit at EOL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A

Fishing fleet support vessels and factory/processing ships tend to stay in international waters, outside the reach of any particular nation's coast guard or naval forces. Many such vessels rarely, if ever, visit a port to avoid actions like boarding and seizure. And when they do, they try to dock at a port in a jurisdiction that's unlikely (or expressly made it clear) they aren't going to take any sort of police action against the vessel and its crew.

While these vessels are out in international waters, one can't simply board/seize/sink such vessels without causing a major diplomatic incident with economic consequences at best. At worst, it would be perceived as an act of war and invite military response.

My crazy notion is to attach some kind of mechanical remora to offending vessels. Something that attaches below the water line. Slows the vessel. Messes with the nets. Has to go back to port to be removed.

Or maybe ensnare the vessels, like the Tholians did to USS Enterprise. Defenders equip fast ships with spools of nylon. Race around the offenders, dragging the nylon, hoping to tangle their props. Mindful to stay out of gun shot range.

In the “cod wars” between Iceland and UK Icelandic coast guard ships were cutting off the trawling nets. Not sure how well that works nowadays.

Since you will only be able to hit a tiny fraction of the ships, the enforcement has to be deadly, or the incentive will still be to violate.

I understand.

If I could hurt the Bad Guys, I would consider it. But from my reading of the popular press, many of the workers are victims too.

The legality of this under international law is .. questionable. It's also a very American solution, extra-judicial execution by the state away from any witnesses.

The rules of due process in civilian court don't apply to nations enforcing their rights to sovereignty against foreign incursion. And if you think extra-judicial execution is "American," I'd like to introduce you to the entire history of Earth.

> the entire history of Earth.

History has a lot of reprisal attacks too, vengeances etc. Not a road to go down lightly with any nation, let alone China.

IDK, I hesitate to call thinking that this is a simple or good idea "very American", but a certain sector of American internet forum commenting civilians do tend to think this way. Serious people, American or otherwise, not so much.

I can't think of a single nation that wants to deal with the consequences of sinking a vessel with Chinese citizens on it. In all likelihood it won't lead to a shooting war but the CCP has so much power and influence that they could severely disrupt any nation's economy.

But time has come. Enough for chinese poachers to fish the oceans dry.

I think some South American countries (Chile or Argentina) have sunk illegal Chinese fishing vessels in their waters.

Why? It would be far better for them to capture the vessels and sell them to their own citizens.

Exactly my thinking. My first thought was 'Without someone to enforce them, laws are merely suggestions'.

At a guess, the ships who _did_ pay the entry fee are incentivised to report freeloaders, who take part of the catch from them?

Knowing about those ships is a start, but if you can’t boot them out, as other comments say, that’s not much of a success.

Perhaps it's time to bring back the golden age of piracy! "We didn't sink them, those evil pirates did!"

For those who are unfamiliar: the title is a reference to the (satirical) novel The Mouse That Roared[0], about a small nation that declared war on the US and won.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared

> the scheme has raised fishing revenues from $25m a decade ago to $160m, or $1,400 per capita

It's hard to imagine just how much fishing is going on, when that amount per head is just skimming the total value of fish caught.

The real question here is how did they actually made it work? Who enforces the rules? There are hundreds of foreign fishing boats plundering the coast of Argentina right now, and it's not for lack of agreements or regulations...

> There are hundreds of foreign fishing boats plundering the coast of Argentina right now

This has always been a problem, for Uruguay too, it has only come to the current level of attention because "the evil Chinese" are doing it these days as opposed to Vietnamese, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, English or US trawlers which are still there turning off their transponders and raiding National waters

But I very much agree, I would have quite liked to read more on the enforcement mechanisms to avoid delinquent fishing

Why don’t infiltrate the fleets and spoil the catch with some disturbing underwater sound that makes the fish flee? Im sure it’s not impossible to do that and it is not illegal either

Trawler fleets are huge and tow huge nets (or use floating nets). You can't really scare fish away because the volume swept by the nets is so huge. Driving off the fishermen is the only worthwhile solution.

Out of curiosity, I dug up a list of EEZs, sorted by total area.

Since it's mostly a function of coast distance, and especially of number and distribution of islands, it's definitely different than I expected.

And shows some major gaps in area:GDP, if we're talking about enforcement. (Noting: different areas can be substantially different in fishery value)

https://www.liquisearch.com/exclusive_economic_zone/rankings...

The mighty English navy used to take on unarmed fishing vessels. Lethally. The Dutch first came up with the concept of international waters but it took a few centuries before everyone was on board...

I wonder what minimum size of steel billet can be dropped from space and punch a hole in a fishing vessel's hull?

You really don't need that. A few patrol boats, planes, or helicopters with one or more heavy machine guns would be plenty of deterrent. A few hundred bullets would be enough to smash the bridge of a small ship.

On the cheap, you could have a small fleet of turboprop recon planes, each armed with a pair of machine guns. They aren't all that expensive to operate, use widely available ammunition and fuel and often don't require much more than a smooth stretch of dirt for takeoff.

If that still isn't enough, shop around for small warships or gun boats. Or mount a gun pod on your planes. A rapid-firing 20mm cannon can do a significant amount of damage since they can use explosive shells.

Even the largest US Coast Guard cutter is smaller than a WWII destroyer and outgunned by any warship larger than an inflatable raft.

Edit: Heck. If you want an even cheaper solution, board ships with people carrying knives and guns like the 1700s. Modern pirates already do this.

> If that still isn't enough, shop around for small warships or gun boats. Or mount a gun pod on your planes. A rapid-firing 20mm cannon can do a significant amount of damage since they can use explosive shells.

Yeah, you can pretty effectively and safely (to you) threaten un- or lightly-armed ships with a 1930s-vintage biplane. Don't need fancy or expensive equipment to do that, if you're willing to go so far as actually firing on violating vessels. A handful of cheap used Cessnas with light "dumb" bombs attached would probably be damn effective at getting fishing vessels to go away and not come back for a while, even—again, if you're willing to actually attack. It's got to be restraint, not cost, preventing damaging or sinking the violating vessels, even for fairly small nations.

The cost to launch that weight into space and make sure it hits its intended target on landing would make it prohibitively expensive.

Sustainability clearly can be done so why isn't it?

Capitalism and selfishness (pun unintended).

It doesn’t have to be capitalism. Ships from countries with other economic systems have and do participate in illegal fishing. If you have hungry people, unproductive land, and tapped out fisheries of your own it might be tempting to sail into your neighbors waters.

For a lot of illegal fishing it's not even neighbors' waters but waters of countries on the other side of the globe.

Yes you're right but I meant neighbors in a loose sense of international community.

I'd assumed even (say) Chinese fishing fleets were capitalist enterprises. Are they government-owned, or are private-party to private-party transfers of fishing-related capital highly restricted?

Who could possibly even know for sure. But I think my point stands, as Vietnam has the 2nd or 3rd largest fishing fleet in the world right now, and for a few decades the Soviet Union was the 3rd largest. Pursuit of profit isn't the only reason for the tragedy of the fisheries held in common.

Fish tomorrow doesn’t make money today. It’s literally a tragedy of the commons illustrated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com