Somali Piracy – Can Law of the Sea be an issue in child health?

Just last month, I was saddened to read several news reports describing how illegal overfishing by foreign fleets has severely depleted fish stocks within the national waters of Sierra Leone and Namibia. Apparently, declining harvests there have meant that once prosperous local communities are starving and fisherman can no longer feed their own families. According to some estimates, even fisher-families have had to cut back from three protein meals per day to one, with predictable consequences for nutrition status, general health and susceptibility to the usual gamut of childhood illnesses.

A few weeks later, we were all greeted with the story of the Sirius Star being hijacked off the horn of Africa. These two stories are not as disparate as might first appear to be the case.

Make no mistake, piracy in the Gulf of Aden is a criminal conspiracy involving corrupt politicians, lawless warlords and heavily armed militia. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overlook its historical origins. It is easy to forget how unscrupulous European and Far Eastern governments allowed their commercial fishing fleets to essentially invade Somali waters, counting on the failure of its central government and the absence of effective policing, coast guard, or military resistance. When Somali fisherman cried foul, they were met with indifference from the international community. As noted above, recent reports indicate that precisely the same scenario is now unfolding in other locales, with consequences beyond just the question of national sovereignty.

Canadians, in particular, can therefore appreciate what prompted some Somali fisherman to borrow a page from our own playbook and seize European trawlers, imposing 'fines' in the form of ransom for their release. Lured by easy money, it was not long before their example attracted the attention of the warlords and their political cronies, who continued to cultivate the romantic myth of modern-day Robin Hoods. Before we scoff, we would do well to recall that our own history and popular culture continue to glorify shameless pirates (in recent fare, Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh comes to mind :). The perception of hypocrisy is further reinforced when you consider that the story was barely newsworthy - despite 95 confirmed attacks in the Gulf of Aden in 2008 alone - until the Sirius Star dramatically revealed it as a threat to western oil supplies and commerce.

As long as wealthy western nations are perceived as hypocrites, the pirates will enjoy the protection of their local hosts, and there will be no practical military solution. And even if brute force were to pacify the Suez Canal zone and the Gulf of Aden, failure to achieve some form of global consensus on control of predatory commercial fishing fleets and the rescue of failed states will ensure no lasting solution to the problem, merely shifting the theater from Somalia to, say, Sierra Leone or the South China Sea.

Given our own history and status as a maritime nation, I would be delighted if Canada stood up to demonstrate global leadership on the issue. At the very least, we must resist the temptation to reduce the story to a mindless caricature of ‘cops and robbers’, as none of us can say how we might also react if forced to watch our children starve and our livelihoods vanish as the result of illegal predation. More to the point, the consequences of unrestrained overfishing on the health and well-being of local communities has important policy implications, where solutions are only possible through international cooperation and policing of commercial fleets. Though others may disagree, I am convinced that this will not happen unless we first identify the problem honestly and recognize the nature of the relationships between seemingly unrelated questions.

Atul Sharma MD, FRCP(C)
Montreal