The Blue Economy including both those who work at sea and those whose livelihoods depend on it presents a unique challenge for efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Ports depend on the movement of goods and people, something antithetical to pandemic control. Many of the world’s 4.5 million fishing vessels remain at sea for weeks or months at a time, leaving them intensely vulnerable to shipboard Covid-19 outbreaks that may arise from stops at harbors around the world. Yet ports must remain open, and fishing vessels must continue to fish90 percent of the world’s cargo moves by sea, and fish provide essential protein for 1 billion people, many of whom would be undernourished and vulnerable to the disease without it.
This commentary examines how Covid-19 will affect life at sea, outlining the potential impact of the pandemic on ocean security, the marine environment, the blue economy, and health and human rights aboard fishing vessels.
Even in the best of times, the ocean is a poorly-policed, untamed frontier. The Covid-19 pandemic will exacerbate the offshore law enforcement gap, as coast guards and navies look inward to manage domestic crises rather than police the seas. The U.S. Navy has already canceled this year’s Obangame Express joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Guinea, the world’s most piracy-prone region, with 112 attacks in 2017. Pirates, poachers, and smugglers, on the other hand, can continue operating. They may even have greater incentive to resort to crime, faced with few other opportunities in a global recession.
Illicit fishing is likely to increase as well. As law enforcement on the ocean declines in the coming months, it will be worth watching data from vessel automatic identification systems (AIS) and satellites to determine whether signals of illicit fishing, such as activity within marine-protected areas and AIS spoofing and toggling, tick up. A less secure ocean will be less well-managed and less able to sustainably provide resources like fish over the long term.
By contrast, legal industrial fishing operations are likely to decline, especially over the near term, from a combination of the risk of being at sea in a pandemic and supply chain complications caused by market closures. The last time a global crisis affected the fishing industry on a similar scale was World War II. During the war, the closure of the North Sea allowed regional cod and haddock stocks to rebound, resulting in robust catch throughout the 1950s.
Fish is the world’s most widely traded food commodity, but market disruptions, as a result of the pandemic, have already begun to change that. Consumers have dramatically increased demand for frozen and processed seafood while turning away from fresh caught products. This is a result of both a run on foods that may be kept through periods of isolation and a reflection of the fact that in many developed markets, such as across the United States, most consumers eat fresh fish in restaurants and other public spaces that are no longer open.
Market closures in Europe have caused a crisis for fishers in the United Kingdom, which exports 70 percent of its catch. In the United States, 90 percent of seafood is imported or processed overseas . Some U.S. companies outsource a portion of their processing needs by sending U.S.-caught seafood abroad to facilities in China before reimporting it for final packaging for the U.S. market. Covid-19 may drive these companies to re-shore processing operations to avoid trade disruptions caused by the pandemic and future crises.
Covid-19 outbreaks aboard fishing vessels represent a significant threat to public health. Fifty million people are employed in marine fisherieslargely in developing countries with dismal records on safety, health, and human rights. Long-haul fishing vessels are cramped, crowded, and can be exceptionally unhygienic. Crew are often malnourished and forced to work for up to 20 hours each day. A lack of medical supplies means cuts can stay infected for weeks. Moreover, many vessels rely on undocumented migrant workers who are not subject to public health controls.
Changes in the way the fishing industry operates caused by Covid-19 may in turn affect the human rights and working conditions of fishermen in a number of ways. Those who return to shore each day will have to continue working and interacting with others, putting them at increased risk of the virus simply because they are poorlike many others making subsistence livings.
In sum, to protect both fishermen and the public, a proactive strategy is needed, coordinated across jurisdictions, to provide health services to fishermen and monitor their health and ensure they are not stranded at sea in vulnerable conditions. These services should be provided to those who are healthy and sick, regardless of their legal or immigration status. The situation also highlights the ongoing need to improve working conditions and communication channels at sea so that fishermen are less vulnerable, during the Covid-19 crisis and afterward.
Center for Strategic and International Studies