Burning Vietnamese Boats For Fishing Illegally Does Not Seem To Deter Illegal Fishing

Recently, the reports of Vietnamese wooden blue boats venturing into the federal water of many Pacific countries and Indonesia have attracted a lot of attention. These illegal fishing methods were criticized and the international media made an open appeal to stop them.

These boats have limited electric equipment and can easily cross international borders without being detected. Over the past many years, they have been detected fishing illegally near the states of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Caledonia. In 2016, 13 of such boats from Vietnam were found near Indonesia and were blown up by the Indonesian Navy, The Wall Street Journal reported.

However, the boat burning and sinking strategy seems ineffective. More and more number of blue boats are still found near many Pacific countries, trying to catch reef fish and beche de mer.

Pacific fisheries advisor Francisco Blaha from New Zealand suggested that the best possible way to stop these illegal fishing boats is by making Vietnam officially acknowledge the country of origin of these vessels and implement appropriate measures to stop them.

RNZ reported that this might be done by levying "economic sanctions on Vietnam, placing tariffs on its seafood exports or getting the EU to issue it with one of its yellow cards signifying concern with Vietnam's lack of effort to control illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing."

"So here is a yellow card, we need to have a serious dialogue, if you don't fix this we are going to put a red card on you and that means that anything that was caught by vessels of your country will not be able to enter the European Union," Blaha suggested.

As per Blaha, such strict impositions will draw the attention of the Vietnamese government towards this international issue and it might be resolved at their end.

The local authorities find it difficult to track these Vietnamese blue boats because they are already overloaded with tracking the large fleets of boats trying to sneak in for the tuna resources in the region.

The time has come when countries realized that the infamous "Vietnamese boat burns for fishing illegally" is not working any more.