As COVID-19 restrictions gradually lift, the Coast Guard this year is making a push to step up engagement in the Pacific islands as it continues efforts to combat illegal fishing.
Small Pacific island nations with limited medical resources quickly closed off their borders when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020. Delivering vaccines across the region's far-flung islands proved challenging, and many have begun to reopen to visitors only recently.
“We still patrolled and we still did information sharing, ” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jessica McCollum, who oversees fishery enforcement operations for the Coast Guard's Oahu-headquartered District 14. “We just couldn't do a lot of (operations ) where the crew gets off and engages with locals, ” she said.
But while some forms of partnership were scaled back in 2020, fishing operations weren't. In the summer of 2020 a massive fleet of Chinese fishing vessels descended on the Galapagos Islands and clashed with the Ecuadorean Coast Guard. Later that year the U.S. Coast Guard's then-commandant Adm. Karl Schultz wrote that illegal fishing had “replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat, ” decimating food sources and economic prospects for island and coastal communities that depend on healthy fish stocks.
Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (or IUU, as maritime professionals and policymakers call it) is…
