17/02/2016
Palau is on the front page of the NYT and I'm ready to teach an incoming batch of Indonesian maritime officers. Ke b**g! Ayo! Let's do this!
"Palau employs a marine police division with just 18 members and one patrol ship. Yet it has authority over roughly 230,000 square miles of ocean. Under international law, a country’s ‘‘exclusive economic zone,’’ the waters where it maintains fishing and mineral rights, extends 200 nautical miles from its coasts. That means that a country roughly the size of Philadelphia is responsible for patrolling a swath of ocean about the size of France, in a region teeming with supertrawlers, state-subsidized poacher fleets, mile-long drift nets and the floating fish attracters known as FADs."
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"Palau’s work suggests a hopeful future. It offers a model for successful ad hoc collaboration among countries, companies and nongovernmental organizations. Palau has also emerged as a testing ground for some of the technology — including drones, satellite monitoring and military-grade radar — that might finally empower countries to spot and arrest the pirates, poachers, polluters, traffickers and other scofflaws who prowl the seas with impunity."
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"Fish ignore borders — and, it turns out, so do many of the people pursuing them. While port inspections, wheel-room cameras, locational transponders and onboard observers are essential to better monitoring the oceans, policing is the only thing that will make Palau’s new reserve, and others like it elsewhere in the world, more than just lines drawn on the water."
The island nation has mounted an aggressive response to illegal fishing in their waters. How they protect themselves may help the rest of the world save all of the oceans.
