Despite their recent strengthening, the navy’s measures don’t appear to be working, according to Steve Creech, the coordinator of Sri Lanka’s blue swimming crab fishing improvement project and a consultant on sustainability for the Seafood Exporters’ Association of Sri Lanka. At a recent seminar on Indian/Sri Lankan relations at the Bandaranaike Center for International Studies in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, Creech called for the Indian government to put more pressure on the state of Tamil Nadu to curb its illegal fishing.
“The Sri Lankan Navy has made sightings of more than quarter of a million Tamil Nadu fishing trawlers fishing illegally in Sri Lankan waters since 2009. The navy has actually identified 15,000 of these vessels. I understand that this information was given by the Sri Lankan government to the Indian High Commission, and I presume this information is given to [the government in] Delhi, and I imagine Delhi communicates that to Tamil Nadu,” Creech said. “[Yet even] today, as far as I know, the Tamil Nadu government has taken no action against any of the vessels that have been identified by number for fishing illegally in Sri Lankan waters. So this [problem] between Sri Lanka and India is a result of fishery mismanagement by the state government of Tamil Nadu.”
Creech has also called for help on the issue from the European Union, which has taken action against other countries involved in IUU fishing by issuing a so-called “red card,” which prohibits the targeted country from exporting seafood to the E.U. and implements trade restrictions prohibiting E.U. member states’ fishing vessels from operating in the targeted country’s waters. The European Commission, the regulatory body that issues red cards on behalf of the E.U., has thus far not issued any public comment on alleged IUU fishing by India.
The red card, however, remains a powerful weapon, as Sri Lanka itself discovered over the past two years. In February 2015, Sri Lanka was issued a red card for its “failure to properly monitor its fishing fleet, punish vessels guilty of illegal fishing, or develop robust fisheries laws to deter IUU fishing.” After Sri Lanka made significant reforms to its fisheries management system, the E.U. red card was lifted in April 2016. During the time of its implementation, it was estimated to have cost the country around EUR 150 million (USD 166 million).
In a recent article in Sri Lanka’s Daily News, Sri Lanka Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Minister Mahinda Amaraweera said the government was focused on resolving the issue through direct talks with India, but added no timetable or parameters for discussions had been set.
The politics of the issue, both internally in the two countries and bilaterally, are complex and hard to follow even for insiders, Creech said, with ethnic, caste and nationalistic issues all factoring in to the current political quagmire. But the end result is that tens of thousands of families that financially depend on fishing are seeing their livelihoods threatened. According to an article posted by Roar, a Sri Lankan news site, as many as 30,000 families in the poor Northern districts of Mannar, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, and Jaffna – all ravaged by the Sri Lankan civil war – continue to face threats to their livelihoods as a result of the incursions of Tamil Nadu trawlers into Sri Lankan waters.
It’s also hurting businesses like Taprobane that are invested in the local communities of northern Sri Lanka, according to O’Reilly.
“Economically, we’re drastically affected. If the [Tamil Nadu] trawlers were stopped, we would probably see 100 percent growth in our business overnight, and the implications for our supply chain would be enormous, nowhere more so than for our workers, who come from economically and socially marginalized communities,” he said. “Both for my company and on a personal level, I want to see these people who have suffered for 30 years get a break. But with the extent of the damage being done by the Indian trawlers, their entire resource may be destroyed in just a few years. And for these communities, there is no back-up. The ocean is their life. It frustrates me to no end that its bounty is being taken away from them.”
Click through below to get an incremental satellite view of Indian incursions into Sri Lankan waters
