Image:Reuters Berita 24 English - On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum to stop illegal fishing. This ...
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| Image:Reuters |
Berita 24 English - On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum to stop illegal fishing. This is part of the U.S.'s promise to help other countries fight alleged violations by fishing fleets, such as those from China.
In a statement, the White House said it would also form an alliance with Canada and the United Kingdom to "take urgent action" to improve monitoring, control, and surveillance in the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
U.S. officials have said they will come up with policies to fight illegal fishing, especially in the Indo-Pacific, as part of a plan to increase their involvement in the region to counter China's growing power.
Some countries in the area don't like how big China's fishing fleet is. They say that China's ships often break their 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZ) and hurt the environment and their economies.
In a briefing for reporters, senior U.S. administration officials said that the memorandum tells agencies to work to "end human trafficking, including forced labour, while promoting safe, sustainable use of the ocean."
The official said that the Department of Labor, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard, and other law enforcement agencies would work with private and foreign partners to "investigate fishing vessels and operators who are thought to be harvesting seafood with forced labour."
The effort wasn't aimed at any one country in particular, but the official said China was one of the countries that broke the rules the most.
"The PRC (People's Republic of China) is one of the biggest contributors to IUU fishing around the world, and it has slowed down the work of international organisations to come up with ways to stop IUU fishing and overfishing," the official said.
"As the flag state, the PRC has a duty to keep these promises and actively watch and correct the activities of its fishing fleets in the waters of other countries," she said.
China says it is a responsible fishing country that has been working with other countries to stop illegal fishing and that it follows bilateral agreements when it fishes in the EEZs that are important to it.
In a statement, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for China's embassy in Washington, said, "The U.S. accusation is completely false and does nothing to protect the marine environment or encourage international cooperation in sustainable fishing."
In early June, the Philippines said that China was fishing illegally in its EEZ. The U.S. State Department agreed with this claim.
The U.S. Coast Guard says that illegal fishing is now a bigger threat to global maritime security than piracy, and it could make things worse between countries that want to use overfished fishing stocks.
In May, Kurt Campbell, who is in charge of U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific region, said that countries in the area were working together to step up patrolling, training, and sharing technologies to find boats that are illegally fishing but have turned off their electronic transponders.
