In this webinar, Dr Edyta Roszko discussed the role of fisheries in Vietnam’s South China Sea strategy and the historical continuity of fishers’ practices in Vietnam.
VIETNAM STUDIES PROGRAMME WEBINAR
Thursday, 7 July 2022 – ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute hosted a webinar on “The Role of Fisheries in Vietnam’s South China Sea Strategy” presented by Dr Edyta Roszko, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, and Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe.
Citing the examples of Dutch and Vietnamese fishers engaging in illegal maritime activities, Dr Roszko showed how fishers often function as not only fishers but also traders, transporters, smugglers, pirates, and maritime militia in the service of the state. This gives the impression that many fishers have abandoned their legal profession. Dr Roszko then introduced the research puzzle: Is so-called fisheries crime a present-day phenomenon related to the modern fishing industry or maritime security?
To explain the existence of organised crime by fishers, political scientists and economists have cited structural factors such as geographical and peripheral location, lack of employment, poverty, overcapacity, and over-exploitation. Some scholars have also argued that subsidised and militarised fishers in the South China Sea are simply instruments for the state to advance their geopolitical goals. Dr Roszko challenged these views, suggesting that these activities should not only be understood as coping strategies in relation to external forces but a continuation of older historical patterns of maritime livelihoods.
In Vietnam, some local fishers receive training and allowance from the government to join the maritime militia force, whose establishment was based on Vietnam’s 2009 and 2019 Laws on Civil Defence Force. These fishers are required to defend sovereignty, conduct intelligence, engage in patrols, surveillance, resupply and other missions.
Some Vietnamese fishers also receive subsidies to “stick to the sea” as long as they meet certain conditions. However, such commitments may put them in a situation where they have to operate in disputed areas and engage in illegal activities from the perspective of another state. For example, subsidised Vietnamese fishers have bargained with Chinese fishers on extracting fossilised giant clam shells, trespassed into the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Australia and the Pacific Islands to harvest live giant clams, and intruded into Malaysia’s EEZ to buy freshly caught seafood from brokers.
These illegal activities have been fuelled in part by harmful subsidies. In particular, Dr Roszko stressed the lack of transparency and accountability, as well as the lack of coordination with other natural resource management policies. These increase short-term incomes and profits for processors, retailers, and seafood companies but deplete resources in the long term. Nevertheless, subsidies are also seen as a useful tool to boost offshore fishing, which helps the state consolidate sovereignty and presence in disputed areas.
Dr Roskzo then provided the historical patterns that underlie Vietnamese fishers’ present engagement in fisheries crime and maritime militia. Prior to the existence of exclusive sovereign rights, the Paracels and Spratlys had historically sustained mobility and economic circulation and exchange among various fishing communities in the South China Sea. Marine resources were accessible to those familiar with local geography and had navigational skills. The maritime and marine knowledge and skills accumulated by sea-fearers were limited to kin networks and passed down through generations.
Fishers’ practices predated the state, but once the state learned about them, it wanted to valorise them for geopolitical and economic gains. Dr Roskzo’s ethnography focuses on an 18th-century militarised fishing settlement in Phu Quy Island that gradually evolved into a civilian hamlet. Established by the Nguyen Lords (1558-1778), this erstwhile “maritime militia” was responsible for exploiting marine products, doing topographic surveys of reefs and islets, and delivering annual tribute to the royal court in Hue.
The institution of maritime militia on Phu Quy Island comprised of people with diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Vietnamese, Cham, and Minh Huong (Chinese). The island’s economic basis, therefore, was built upon three capabilities: Cham seafaring skills, Minh Huong (Chinese) trading capabilities, and Viet political connections and sovereign claims. However, seafarers’ occupational identities overrode their ethnic affinities, as indicated through the practice of assigning names based on functional or occupational categories.
After discussing these historical patterns, Dr Roszko highlighted the continuity between imperial and modern states to control and appropriate fishers’ skills. For example, if in the past fishers were recruited for maritime militia by the imperial court and operated as royal navy, today they are recruited for maritime militia by the state and operate as subsidised fishing fleets.
Dr Roszko noted that fishers are not simply compelled by “social forces” to commit fisheries crimes. They are actors who actively create and sustain cosmopolitan economic networks. They may also be drivers of territorial enclosure whose mobilities might benefit or contravene the state’s interests.
In the Q&A session, Dr Roszko answered questions about, among others, the differences between Vietnam’s and China’s maritime militia, Vietnam’s efforts to remove the EU’s IUU yellow card, lessons that Vietnam can learn from other countries in improving its fishing practices, the role of the Cham people in fishing communities, and how the Vietnamese government can better protect and support Vietnamese fishers.
