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The Military Earth Government

A Global Fish War is Coming, Warns US Coast Guard (usni.org) 192

schwit1 shares an article from the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine. It includes this warning from the Coast Guard's chief of fisheries law enforcement: Nearly two decades into the 21st Century, it has become clear the world has limited resources and the last area of expansion is the oceans. Battles over politics and ideologies may be supplanted by fights over resources as nations struggle for economic and food security. These new conflicts already have begun -- over fish... In 1996, Canada and Spain almost went to war over the Greenland turbot. Canada seized Spanish vessels it felt were fishing illegally, but Spain did not have the same interpretation of the law and sent gunboats to escort its ships. In 1999, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter intercepted a Russian trawler fishing in the U.S. exclusive economic zone. The lone cutter was promptly surrounded by 19 Russian trawlers. Fortunately, the Russian Border Guard and the Coast Guard drew on an existing relationship and were able to defuse the situation...

Japan protested 230 fishing vessels escorted by seven China Coast Guard ships entering the waters of the disputed Senkaku Islands. Incidents in the South China Sea between the Indonesian Navy and Chinese fishing vessels and China Coast Guard have escalated to arrests, ramming, and warning shots leading experts to suggest only navies and use of force can stop the IUU fishing... The United States needs to show it is serious about protecting sustainable fisheries and international rule of law. It needs a fleet that not only will provide a multilateral cooperation platform, but also take action against vessels and fleets that are unwilling to cooperate... If cooperation cannot be achieved, the United States should prepare for a global fish war.

When I read "fish war," I was imagining it more like this.
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A Global Fish War is Coming, Warns US Coast Guard

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    "The United States needs to show it is serious about protecting sustainable fisheries and international rule of law." Right. Change that to protecting its own interests, and international rule of law where it benefits self. As history has shown time and again.

    So, please, don't try to play just and rightful, it has not worked for America for many decades.

    • "The United States needs to show it is serious about protecting sustainable fisheries and international rule of law." Right. Change that to protecting its own interests, and international rule of law where it benefits self. As history has shown time and again.

      So, please, don't try to play just and rightful, it has not worked for America for many decades.

      Of course we are. Canadians do the same as do the Japanese. It's the job of our governments to do what is right for the citizens with the exception of tech workers of course :-)

      But, governments like Canada and the US do so for good reason. Not to help pump up the shareprices of Sunkist Tuna, but also to prevent a disaster like the Canadian Cod Industry [wikipedia.org] from poachers. 17 years later they still are not back! Other predators came in that eat younger Cod. It will never come back probably as a result.

      It is bad w

    • The world's fisheries have _already_ collapsed and we're all just fighting over the dregs now. Read Cod by Kurlansky.
  • by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Sunday August 20, 2017 @10:36AM (#55052495) Homepage Journal

    Nearly two decades into the 21st Century, it has become clear the world has limited resources and the last area of expansion is the oceans.

    Ah, the exclusivity of our times — surely, nothing like this has ever happened before. Except around Newfoundland [marianopolis.edu]:

    After the War of American Independence the new United States demanded, as part of the peace settlement, continuation of the fishing rights they had enjoyed in North Atlantic waters as British colonies. Great Britain at the end of the War was not in a position to resist American demands and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 accorded United States inhabitants equal rights with British subjects to fish in the waters of British North America, including Newfoundland.

    • Oh, do you mean that we are NOT all that special in the history of humanity, and we are merely acting in ways very similar to those societies that came before us, showing only a tiny bit of evolution despite our extremely technological advancement?

      I call hate crime on that! I am a special snowflake, mommy said so, so I can't be driven by the same weaknesses or strengths as other people. Our times are unique and we have never had to fight such evil (like hearing opinions we don't like or fight

      • by vlad30 ( 44644 )
        The difference now is that we have rapid population growth with good medicine and life spans that are increasing and the usual things that keep the human population down, biological agents and war are increasingly ineffective. Add that some humans pollute there food sources so need to look outside there own borders. What the world needs now is a rapid depopulation. maybe constrained resources might be the new methof of population control
        • Look up "demographic transition" in the social science sense, then get back to me.

          The situation you describe is no different from many others, and other species - population expands to the limit of the resources as a rule. The human race is the first to lift a significant fraction of the population of the species above survival level, first, a tiny fraction as the result of the agricultural revolution, and now a significant fraction as the result of the industrial revolution.

          Living on

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:25AM (#55052651)

      Why do people pull something out of the past and just say, "See it happened before so we have nothing to worry about."

      Things are different now. The World's fisheries are teetering on the brink of collapse. As one species gets fished out, another one is fished. There are fish in my super market's case that I've never seen before.

      And the prices of what is still being fished is obscene. $30/lb for wild caught CoHo Salmon.

      And farmed fish - they feed farmed salmon with wild caught fish. There is no such thing as sustainable fish farming in reality - just in the industry's PR.

      And with government subsidies around the industrialized World for fisherman to haul more in, it's just accelerating the problem.

      Also, show us where in the past there was over 7.2 BILLION people on Earth? And you're gonna point and say this happened before?

      It's not Doom and Gloom yet, but we're getting there real fast. And people get hungry and thirsty, they go where the food is and fight for it.

      • Farmed carp should work fine. Has been for milennia, making it domesticated. And these buggers eat all konds of crap so they can be fed like chickens.

      • ...And people get hungry and thirsty, they go where the food is and fight for it.

        Sounds like a wall on our Southern border isn't such a bad idea

    • by idji ( 984038 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @01:56PM (#55053167)
      What';s different now is that we are depleting the seas of fish, hence reducing notrogen, phosphorus and iron, not to mention the biological impact. I hope we don't see in the next century life in the sea consisting of low energy jellyfish, because there is not enough bio-energy in the system to sustain more energetic creatures.
      What we are seeing is real, unprecedented and will cause many human catastrophes.
    • Except around Newfoundland [marianopolis.edu]:

      And Iceland [wikipedia.org].

      Hey, it's Iceland. Cue Rei to come in complaining (quite rightly) about not being able to type the thorn in "ÃzorskastrÃÃin".

  • by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @10:36AM (#55052497) Homepage

    This is a literal example of the case example known in economics as "tragedy of the commons."

    • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@eartBO ... minus physicist> on Sunday August 20, 2017 @01:12PM (#55053045)

      Right, and there are two ways I see to fix this.

      The first possible solution requires a government entity to enforce limits on individuals. This enforcement must mean punishment harsh enough that people cannot simply pay a fine and still come out ahead.

      A second possible solution is to divide up the commons into places that an individual has near complete control. That way if they overuse then they are just putting themselves out of business.

      My dad would rent out land to neighboring farmers but never for less than three years. The reason he said was because if they rented for just a year or two then they'd tend to not care for the property. They'd plant a crop, and not bother with weed control or fertilizer. If they had "ownership" of the land for three years then they'd have to take care of it the first year if they expected a crop that third year.

      Giving people ownership, of anything really, doesn't seem popular though. It seems people would rather live in the mess that a commons inevitably becomes than see some individual actually own something.

      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday August 20, 2017 @02:52PM (#55053309) Homepage Journal

        Giving people ownership, of anything really, doesn't seem popular though. It seems people would rather live in the mess that a commons inevitably becomes than see some individual actually own something.

        The problem is that the economic systems tend towards runaway effects. Whether they're climatological, or just money helping already-wealthy people get more of the money, it almost doesn't matter. The fact is that ownership begets ownership. In and of itself, it is not enough. There's always someone who can afford to accrue property with the intention of crapping it up.

        I don't know what the answer is, but I know that more people have to become more involved. I don't think that letting a few people ultimately own everything is going to foster that.

      • Well, there IS a third solution, mentioned in the "future documentary" titles "Soylant Green"...
      • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @04:08PM (#55053555) Homepage Journal

        The enclosure worked out really well for a few wealthy people. Not so much for everyone else.

      • How exactly do you plan on parceling out the ocean for ownership? And what about the movement of fish?

        Also, even if individuals do own parcels of the ocean, they still need some sort of navy to protect their parcels. It's not possible for people to manage small portions of the ocean. So, they will sell their parcels to a big corp. And now, you have big corps that own the ocean.

      • But if you "own" a few square miles of sea, can you prohibit your neighbour from pumping the fish out of your part of the sea?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Anyone with half a brain, has seen this coming. Fish stock declining, half assed attempts at increasing them. Growing world population.
    The west subsidizing poor countries to have more kids.

  • is $30/lb sometimes. That's insane. And I don't mean at Whole Foods or similarly overpriced places. Just regular grocery stores. It was never the cheap fish, but $30/lb is insane.
    • This reminds me of what I've gone through with bison. Two years ago I was buying it for $5/lb.. Two months later my grocery store stopped selling it because they said the price got too high. A few months later they got it back in...at $10/lb.

      The reason: The meat manager said it was being bought up by all of the restaurants. So it was entirely due to supply and demand.

      This was about two years ago. And the price is still $10/lb. with no end in sight. Just like your fish, does this mean no one thought of incre

      • This reminds me of what I've gone through with bison. Two years ago I was buying it for $5/lb.

        Bison is typically 2 to 3 times the price of beef. I have a friend who tried to raise them in Wyoming. He installed powerful electric fences, and still had problems with them breaking through. Cattle can be artificially inseminated, but bison cannot, so he kept a few bulls, which are big and mean. Loading a herd of yearling bison into a truck to go to the slaughterhouse can be ... challenging, and not so good for the truck.

        There are some advantages. They can graze on crappy pasture contaminated with lo

    • So don't buy it
    • You can thank the politically powerful IPHC [wikipedia.org] for some of that price. Visit this site [iphc.int], and look at this map [noaa.gov]. There is no biological basis for how the catch quota for area 3A exceeds the catch quota for all parts of area 4 combined. That's strictly the IPHC keeping its members happy (ie wealthy). Of course the other factor is that the number of people around the globe who are willing to pay $30/lb for halibut grows every year.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    In the next century or so, when temperatures continue to react to carbon levels in the atmosphere, and ocean temperatures continue to shift, the oceans may release enormous amounts of trapped methane, leading to mass extinctions.

    It's happened a few times in Earth's history:

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

    If we don't cut back on the fossil fuels, we might want to focus our technology on developing enclosed fungus/mushroom growing techniques. Because about the only way we large mammals survive such a scenar

    • Re:Notaproblem. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thinkwaitfast ( 4150389 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:11AM (#55052605)
      It's too late. This is already going to happen even if we went to zero today. That would lead to big wars and even more release of carbon. It's so inevitable (as I have been told numerous times) that I gave up caring and never felt better about my own personal future.
  • Small, sometimes violent confrontations along borders are common when relations between the neighbouring countries are tense, but are not the cause of bad relations.

  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @10:57AM (#55052561) Journal

    My money is on the sharks. I don't think there's any question they're going to win the fish wars.

  • A documentary [imdb.com] on the coming fish war.
  • by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:20AM (#55052641) Homepage

    Mr. President, we must not allow a fish gap!

  • Every day we hear this or that policy could start a trade war. But the last "trade war" was like 40+ years ago. They've predicted hundreds of trade wars since then and none have occurred.

    Why should we listen to people telling stories about what they imagine the future might be like? Stop crying wolf all day every day.

    • by Sique ( 173459 )
      There are ongoing trade wars all the time. Whenever you hear about two countries signing a "trade and mutual support agreement", you know another trade war has been ended.
      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        So "trade war" means "any disagreement at all about trade policies" then? Or even potential disagreements that might become disagreements because the sides haven't addressed them at all yet?

        It's still crying wolf if you conveniently decide to call every plant and animal and insect "wolf".

  • by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:29AM (#55052677)

    The US could give a fire and forget torpedo to every one person fishing rowboat in Malaysia and similar places. Something they can just point towards any Chinese trawler and dump overboard. That'll win via attrition and help solve China's habit of randomly scrawling lines all over the map and saying it's theirs.

  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:36AM (#55052707)
    Something fishy going on here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Backwards barbarian countries don't GAF, and are just out to smash and grab as much as they can. There will be no sea life, the oceans will die, we will die, but they won't care, because a few well-connected mafia types got to make a bit of easy money.

      Long live American and Western hegemony. Because it may be the last line of defence between us, and oblivion triggered by greedy, selfish barbarians.

      I know that it's trendy to blame the west but the most irresponsible fishing is coming from Asia.

  • I was thinking more like this [youtu.be]. (https://youtu.be/lefP0_ZM-Lw)
  • call that a fish war?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] now that's what i call a fish war...

  • Hunting and gathering works as a lifestyle only for small nomadic bands that are used to constantly subsisting at the edge of starvation. We escaped the trap by inventing agriculture, it only assuring our long term survival but allowing us to build large permanent settlements, with all the civilizing potential they carry.

    Now it's time for us to stop hunting and gathering at sea. Fish farming has already outgrown its startup problems. It's time to support the idea in a major way.

  • by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @02:54PM (#55053325) Journal
    Seriously, what is going on, is that Chinese boats come across the pacific filling up, and then sells in America. This is what allows them to then sell fish DIRT CHEAP at home. The worst part is, that not only do they do their legal limits on the way over, but then fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for.

    The only way to stop this is to prohibit their selling in America, or importing from Canada/Mexico if China sells there. Then no more licenses for CHinese boats to be in American economic zone.
    As it is, they are fishing our waters and destroying these faster than their own.
    • Seriously, what is going on, is that Chinese boats come across the pacific filling up, and then sells in America. This is what allows them to then sell fish DIRT CHEAP at home. The worst part is, that not only do they do their legal limits on the way over, but then fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for.

      The only way to stop this is to prohibit their selling in America, or importing from Canada/Mexico if China sells there. Then no more licenses for CHinese boats to be in American economic zone.

      As it is, they are fishing our waters and destroying these faster than their own.

      Do you have sources for this? I have no doubt that China is doing a poor job of managing its fishery, but I'm really skeptical that they "fill up again, with fish from American waters that they do not have a license for".

      The one thing the US is really good at is military, and foreign vessels illegally fishing in US waters is something the US Coast Guard would care about.

      • by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:13PM (#55054931) Homepage
        Yes & no. The USCG doesn't have the budget to patrol the entire edge of the EEZ [wikipedia.org]. Any additional budget they got when they moved from department of transportation to department of homeland security was directed more towards improving other than economic aspects of security. Whether they care is moot when they don't have the vessels or the fuel to be on the spot every place there's a violation. You'll notice blobs of USA EEZ that are closer to mainland China than they are to mainland USA. Those are the ones where you're more likely to find Chinese fishing vessels.

        I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that NMFS and the Chinese government have different ideas about resource conservation, considering that even as our fertile soil exceeds theirs by 3:1, our fishing EEZ exceeds theirs in area by more than 12:1. Whereas, their population exceeds ours by 4:1 leading to a per capita fishing EEZ disparity between USA and China of more than 48:1.
      • I have heard about this from 2 of my friends that work on fishing boats in our EEZ (2 ppl normally; 1 checks sanitary conditions, the other is supposed to check catch and keep legal ; they tell some horrible stories ). Google will produce a lot for you [google.com]
        But this is pretty good, but talks about China's action all around rather just American water. And yes, China deploys driftnets in our waters on way out.
        our real issue is that coast guard is severely undermanned since we send too many to the middle East. Now
  • by Scarletdown ( 886459 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @03:13PM (#55053381) Journal

    If there is a fish war coming, who will be the belligerents, and which faction should I support?

    There are two that will most likely be involved, but I am torn between backing the sea bass and the sharks.

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