Dwindling fish populations are increasingly viewed as a national security matter. In 2020 the U.S. Coast Guard said illegal fishing had surpassed piracy as the most pressing security threat at sea.

“This exploitation erodes both regional and national security, undermines maritime rules-based order, jeopardizes food access and availability, and destroys legitimate economies,” Coast Guard commandant Adm. Karl Schultz wrote in a policy document outlining the threat and shifting priorities.

Last week, while en route to a major conference set to begin today in Palau — where President Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, will meet with regional leaders to discuss ocean policy — U.S. State Department officials touched down in Hawaii to meet with military officials to discuss efforts to curb illegal and unreported fishing.

Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Monica Medina met with officials from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Coast Guard, according to a State Department news release. Medina also visited the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology and met with local community leaders and conservation organizations.

Addressing the overfishing concern, Ethan Allen, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Waikiki, said among major fisheries globally, “somewhere between two-thirds to 90%” are not fishing sustainably. “That’s essentially just leading to a classic tragedy-of-the-commons kind of situation,” he said. Given that enforcing regulations can be difficult on the open seas, “people just keep taking more and more until the populations just crash.”

Unlike Honolulu-based longline vessels, which might spend a few weeks at sea before returning with hauls, much larger commercial fishing vessels from other countries — mostly from Asia — might stay at sea for months or even years. They refuel at sea and hand off catches to large refrigerated cargo ships known as “reefers” which can bring massive quantities of fish back to port.

“It becomes very hard in that process to track where particular fish were caught,” because the bigger vessels move around, picking up fish from smaller vessels, said Allen. “It makes it very difficult for those who really try to track the origin and the path that any given piece of seafood takes, which is part of trying to do sustainable fisheries.”

Further, Suzanne Vares-­Lum, president of the East-West Center in Manoa, points out, “On top of illegal fishing, you have the threat of climate change and its impact on the coral reefs and the lack of abundance of those fish.” The combined impacts hold potential to cause food shortages and forced migration.

With fishermen sailing farther from their homes in search of high-yield fishing grounds, foreign vessels have been on the rise around Hawaii, raising concerns among local fishermen about some aggressive tactics.

In the early hours of Feb. 1, 2020, Honolulu-based longliner Robin II had a violent encounter with the crew of a much larger Taiwanese-­flagged longliner, which charged the American vessel and threw paint on it before departing.

The next month, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council wrote a letter to the State Department requesting continued follow-up on complaints of assault by foreign fishing vessels on the Hawaii-based U.S. longline fishery and “appropriate diplomatic actions.”

Between January and February 2020, the Coast Guard intercepted several foreign vessels fishing within Hawaii’s and Guam’s maritime borders known as exclusive economic zones — marking the first time in nearly a dec­ade foreign fishing vessels had been spotted in those waters. Neither the Coast Guard nor the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which investigated the incursions, have commented on where the vessels came from.

The Coast Guard has since made efforts to further curb illegal fishing in the Pacific. Schultz traveled to Guam in 2021 for an unusual triple commissioning ceremony for three new fast-­response cutters.

The Pacific island nations within the Compacts of Free Association rely on a handful of fishery enforcement officials and boats donated by other countries to protect their waters. Palau has taken a particularly aggressive stance and has burned boats caught fishing illegally and deported crews.

But such enforcement teams are spread thin and often unable to confront larger fishing vessels, particularly when they’re operating in groups. The Coast Guard is often called upon to help, and officials from both Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia have discussed the possibility of permanently stationing Coast Guard personnel and cutters within their islands.

Overall, the Coast Guard’s 14th District, which is headquartered in Honolulu and conducts operations in the Pacific islands, has just 10 cutters assigned to it.

“That’s not a lot of coverage,” said Allen. “We are developing better and better technologies. All ships are supposed to carry these transponders to continuously track their movement and allow them to be tracked and located. But they can be turned off.”

The Navy has begun playing a larger assisting role. While Navy personnel don’t have the authority to enforce fishing regulations, Coast Guardsmen and fishery officials can operate and conduct missions out of Navy ships, giving them a wider reach. There’s also a push to increase cooperation between countries.

At a Navy League conference held in 2021 in Hawaii, Coast Guard Adm. Linda Fagan — who was nominated by Biden this month to succeed Schultz and become the first woman to lead a U.S. military branch — noted a 2020 incident in which several hundred Chinese squid-fishing vessels set up shop off Ecuador’s protected Galapagos Marine Reserve.

The U.S. Coast Guard redirected one of its cutters toward to the Galapagos Islands to assist Ecuadorean authorities, using a drone to gather evidence of illegal activity, which it shared with the Ecuadorean navy. “We often like to say that it takes a network to counter a network,” Fagan said.

Last week the U.S. Coast Guard and Philippine Coast Guard co-hosted the Southeast Asia Maritime Law Enforcement Initiative Commanders’ Forum on Guam. Representatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam attended. All are involved in territorial disputes within the South China Sea, including disputes over fishing rights.

In particular, concerns have centered on the activities of China’s fishing fleet. Allen said, “The Chinese fishing fleet is bigger by far than anyone else’s fleet, I suspect it’s bigger than almost everyone else’s fishing fleets put together.” He added, “It has a global reach … fishing Atlantic as well as the Pacific.”

Many Chinese-owned fishing vessels receive government subsidies to support their operations. Additionally, China has utilized “maritime militias,” ostensibly civilian fishing vessels, to stake out disputed territories in the South China Sea in support of the Chinese navy.

Allen said China has shown a “willingness to support their fishing fleet with their Coast Guard and sort of maritime militia boats and to push into other folks’ exclusive economic zones.”

Philippine food security advocacy group Tugon Kabu­hayan estimated in 2021 that fishermen in the Philippines had lost out on at least 7.9 million pounds of fish from Chinese ships barring them from their traditional fishing grounds.

But these disputes are about more than just the fish. Beijing considers almost the entirety of the South China Sea to be its exclusive sovereign territory. Vares-Lum said, “It just says much about the way in which the PRC (People’s Republic of China) views these areas, the disputed territorial waters, and trying to assert their own claims by adding the maritime militia.”

Once among the world’s most abundant fishing grounds, the South China Sea has been ravaged by industrial fishing methods. Vares-­Lum said Chinese scholars and scientists have raised alarms that the aggressive pace of fishing could eventually threaten China’s own food security and have urged closer cooperation with other countries.

“There are many people in the PRC who have brought up those issues and understand the importance of sustaining our waters and promoting healthy biodiversity in our oceans for generations to come,” said Vares-Lum. “It’s just a matter of whether those who are policy decision-makers are hearing those voices within China.”

Allen warned that it’s a race against time as the impact of overfishing becomes more pronounced, and permanent.

“Fish being caught are typically smaller than they used to be … even within the same species,” said Allen. “We’re not catching the big ones; they aren’t growing up as big. We’re actually putting pressures on them (and) probably literally are shaping the evolutionary history” of numerous species. “So it’s a very big issue.”