‘Fishing pact’ may solve South China Sea dispute

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The conflict over the South China Sea will be resolved not by military posturing but by fishing.

That is, by mutually beneficial fishing arrangements, Dr. Clarita Carlos of the National Research Council of the Philippines said yesterday.

The Philippines, Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam have competing and even overlapping claims over the South China Sea. It is one of the world’s most important fisheries where more than 3.7 million people harvest around 16.6 million tons of fish a year worth billions of dollars.

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It is estimated the region holds a potential 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

“A Regional Fishing Agreement is needed so that it’s not only China who decides when and where countries can fish, each of the claimant countries should be able to do so too,” Carlos said in a media forum.

“Fish is the real source there,” she said, pointing out that while there is oil and natural gas these “have become less potent” in the long-term because of the move towards renewable energy.

“A fishing agreement is likely to come about rather than a Code of Conduct which has been around for 30 years now,” said Carlos, a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines and a former president of the National Defense College of the Philippines, the first female civilian to hold the post.

“The key word is interdependence,” she said. “The enemy is not a country but rather climate change… which we know will happen.”

“We have to harness the collective of Asean and protect the South China Sea resources.

There is only one ecology there. If you watch it above, there is only one continuous water there. To subdivide the area is absurd,” she added.

She said it is easy to change the facilities there from military to research, like in the Antarctica where countries co-exist to conduct scientific studies.

Carlos doubts a shooting war will erupt in the South China Sea, never mind that American aircraft carriers and naval forces have positioned in the Pacific and Indochina area in recent days. “It’s not likely because everybody is now faced with economic and pandemic challenges,” she said.

“China would like to resume selling to the world and you cannot sell to your enemies,” said Carlos who also heads the StratSearch Foundation, a think-tank that describes itself as a provider of evidence-based research to policy makers.

“Alliance systems are dead, we should talk about interdependence and not dividing the world into alliances. It doesn’t work anymore, like what Trump is doing,” she added.

China too must change the way it behaves, Carlos said. “It keeps on talking about shared options but it must not be just one sided.”

She said China’s modus operandi is to establish de facto claims, like at the China-India border where skirmishes are now happening over territorial disputes.

The same is happening at the South China Sea where China has established seven artificial islands, Carlos said.

“China is now practically dictating to everybody where and when to fish. So let’s be smart.

Anything happening here is with our consent. Don’t jump later saying that we’ve been exploited when we have allowed ourselves to be exploited,” she said.

Carlos have been told by Filipino marine scientists there is no problem with Chinese colleagues, that Filipino and Chinese scientists never talk about territory. “And that’s where we want to go, to change the trajectory from the military to research,” she said.

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