Two additional partnerships help strengthen maritime enforcement throughout the region: the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), which conducts joint patrols of the EEZs of its 17 members, and the Quadrilateral Defense Coordination Operational Working Group, or “Quads,” a maritime security partnership between France, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand throughout Oceania. In November 2012, law enforcement officers conducted the largest regional maritime surveillance operation to date: Operation Kurukuru 2012. In March 2013, these organizations plan to join forces, whereby high-level FFA and Quad leaders will meet at FFA Headquarters in Honiara, Solomon Islands.

The operation covered an area of more than 1 million square miles, including the EEZs of 20-plus Pacific Island nations – Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu – and involved fisheries surveillance and enforcement staff from these nations and their counterparts from the Quads. It employed 10 patrol boats from Pacific Island nations, two French patrol boats and a frigate, and the CGC Kukui, a 225-foot Juniper-class seagoing buoy tender homeported in Honolulu. The five aircraft used to conduct surveillance included a Coast Guard Hercules and a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion.

In two weeks, Operation Kurukuru 2012 resulted in 323 vessels sighted and 206 boarded and inspected – more than twice the number of inspections conducted during the same operation last year. Inspections discovered 27 infringements, some of which are now the subject of ongoing investigations.

Of course, migratory species such as tuna don’t recognize international boundaries, and much of the IUU fishing in the Pacific occurs on the high seas, in areas outside any nation’s EEZ. The United States has joined several treaty organizations designed to counter illegal fishing operations in these areas, such as the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), established in 2004 to conserve and manage highly migratory fish stocks in the region. The treaty allows law enforcement officers from one member nation to board a vessel flying the flag of another WCPFC member on the high seas.

As Hendrickson pointed out, enforcement authority still belongs to the flag state under the WCPFC. “We report what we observe as possible violations of CMMs, conservation management measures,” he said, “to the flag state of the vessel. And the flag state takes the enforcement action.”

This conglomeration of international partnerships allows the Coast Guard to move freely about the Pacific – from U.S. EEZs, to the high seas, to the EEZs of partner nations – without losing the ability to enforce applicable laws and regulations. It’s also an arrangement that increasingly, as the Coast Guard and U.S. Navy strengthen their own cooperative relationship in the Pacific, includes the participation of the Navy. The Coast Guard has already begun negotiating with its bilateral partners and WCPFC members to amend existing agreements and add Navy ships to lists of authorized vessels from which WCPFC boardings may be conducted.

It’s worth asking, Hendrickson said, why the Coast Guard is helping to enforce the laws of other countries and inviting their staff aboard expensive U.S. assets. But to focus on isolated U.S. pockets of ocean in the Pacific is to ignore both the map and the migratory patterns of pelagic fish species – particularly tuna – that the Coast Guard has pledged to protect. “These partner nations’ EEZs are adjacent to ours in the Pacific,” he said, “and the notion is that if we can push governance and enforcement into these EEZs, it’s going to push the bad guys out, so they’ll be less likely to slip into ours. If we’re able to keep the bad guys from poaching tuna in Kiribati, for example, that means as the stock migrates up into the U.S. EEZ, it will be intact.”

The U.S. Navy’s interest in fisheries enforcement, said Hendrickson, is only logical: “The GDPs [gross domestic products] of these Pacific Island nations are highly reliant upon the revenues generated by the fishing industry,” he said. “If these fish stocks collapse as a result of IUU fishing, then a significant portion of their GDP is going to go away – which would lead to significant economic hardship and possibly some unrest within that theater. The Navy sees that, and recognizes it as an important theater security initiative.”

As tuna grow increasingly scarce throughout the Pacific – just days after the $1.76 million bluefin was auctioned in Tokyo, the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean reported that fishing had reduced the population of Pacific bluefin tuna by 96.4 percent – this interest is likely to grow. And the Coast Guard, with its strong partnerships in the Western and Central Pacific, will be a leader in the effort to protect these and other fish stocks, both in territorial waters and on the high seas.

This article first appeared in the Coast Guard Outlook 2013 Edition.