International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2018/Spring 2019 | Page 68

The Toxicity of Maritime Overcapacity
a first wave of public assistance for the development of fishing fleets. Europe and
the USA in particular provided this assistance. In East and Southeast Asia, geopolitical
concerns contributed to this aid being strengthened with foreign development
aid from the 1950s to the 1970s, in the context of the domino theory and
the Cold War conflict. This is why Taiwan, 5 Japan, South Korea, and Thailand were
transformed into fishing superpowers. These developments in capacity were encouraged
by free access to international fishing areas, at a time when the Exclusive
Economic Zones (EEZ) of 200 nautical miles 6 did not yet exist. The international
notion of the territorial sea then saw its distance from the coast gradually increase
from six to twelve nautical miles. The framework of international maritime limits
was consolidated in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that was
signed in 1982 and ratified in 1994, in other words, after these waves of capacity.
These maritime investments became obsolete with each innovation, and
reinvestment in the latest or most high-performing tool was required, 7 in particular
as part of a race to resources that were still free to access: first there was the
invention of onboard freezing, but then came trawling, drift netting, and different
motorizations. Nevertheless, the fishing fleets that had become obsolete were not
dismantled and were instead transferred to other areas of the world. Trawlers from
Lorient found a place in Argentina or Africa. The economic decline of the sector
(overfishing combined with the oil crisis of the 1970s) made it necessary to sell
ships to reinvest in more economical vessels. On the global scale, fishing fleets
progressively reached overcapacity by the 1980s.
The gradual nationalization of the seas 8 was accompanied by an improved
awareness of the issues related to sustainable and renewable fishing. The most developed
countries that had a better understanding of the balance between access
to fishing zones, capacity, and investment began to reduce the size of their fishing
fleets. However, this reduction took place over a long period and went through the
imposition of a numerus clausus for capacity. To reach that point, regulations on
the entry of new capacities and aid for dismantling or exporting overcapacity were
needed. It is estimated today that in 2008/2010, fishing in European seas returned
to the capacity level of the 1970s.
Aid in exporting capacity encouraged some sectors to make their activity
international by creating joint companies and reregistering their ships to work in
5 One could also examine the consequences of this aid for economic operators who based their success
on gaining political support from the Kuomintang, which was notoriously interconnected with
the Triads.
6 Or 370 km from the baseline of a country, in other words, almost its coastline. 12 nautical or sea
miles are equivalent to 22 km from the baseline.
7 This leads to the appearance of “Schumpeterian” cycles, named after the economist Joseph Alois
Schumpeter, who theorized these relationships between innovation, obsolescence of the tools of
production, and the need to reinvest in modernized tools.
8 In particular in the mid-1970s for Europe with the establishment of a European fishing zone, before
signing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea mentioned above.
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