GARCIA: Ocean conference: Ensuring rules-based maritime order

When the United States launched the Our Ocean Conference in 2014, the premise was simple and, frankly, American: the ocean is a shared inheritance, and the people who live closest to it have the strongest claim to shape its future.

More than a decade and $169 billion (Sh21.9 trillion) in commitments later, that premise has carried the conference from Washington to Valparaíso to Malta to Bali — and this month, for the first time, onto African soil.

Kenya's stewardship of the 11th Our Ocean Conference recently held in Mombasa is a milestone the United States welcomes without reservation. The continent that borders two oceans and some of the most productive fisheries and ecologically unique habitats on Earth has more than earned its place at the head of this table.

Our Ocean has always drawn its strength from breadth rather than exclusivity. Governments sit alongside industry, port authorities, marine scientists, island microstates and coastal communities whose entire economy fits inside a single bay. 

A coastal fishing village in Lamu or Kilifi understands the consequences of an unregulated trawler in ways no distant ministry can replicate. The United States will continue to advocate that every entity with a legitimate coastal and maritime interest be able to bring its expertise and practice to bear, regardless of the politics that surround it. The ocean does not check credentials at the reef.

The first pillar is the sovereign right of coastal nations over the resources within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ). The legal architecture here is settled: under international law as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention, a coastal state holds sovereign rights over the living and non-living resources of the waters extending 200 nautical miles from its shore.

Those rights are not abstractions. For many African coastal states, the fish in their EEZ are food security, employment, and foreign exchange in a single resource. Yet too often those resources vanish — not through some natural scarcity, but through a laundering operation hidden in plain sight on the water.

A foreign vessel flying a flag of convenience, registered through a paper arrangement to a state it has never meaningfully answered to, fishes a coastal nation's waters without authorisation. Its catch is then transshipped at sea to a refrigerated processing vessel sitting just outside the EEZ, beyond the practical reach of the coastal state's enforcement.

By the time the product reaches a distant port, its origin has been scrubbed clean. The coastal nation that should have had ownership over that fish never sees the revenue, the data, or the recourse.

This is not a victimless accounting trick. It is theft from some of the world's most vulnerable economies and communities, and it thrives precisely where transparency and enforcement are weakest.

The encouraging news is that African states are moving deliberately to close these gaps. Earlier this year, Cameroon confronted the abuse of its own flag directly — shutting down a compromised offshore ship registry and revoking the fraudulent registrations that had attached themselves to it. That is not a small act.

A nation choosing to forgo registry revenue rather than lend its flag to illicit operators is precisely the kind of sovereign leadership that makes the broader system more honest. Bogus registration and at-sea transshipment are significant parts of the connective tissue of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and dismantling them requires exactly this combination of national resolve and shared enforcement.

In the Western Indian Ocean, Seychelles has earned recognition for its growing leadership in regional maritime security, anchoring exercises that sharpen the ability of coastal states to see and police their own waters. The United States is proud to enable this work — with training and technology that support maritime-domain awareness.

The second pillar is freedom of navigation, which is vital whether off the Horn of Africa, in the Mozambique Channel or along the Gulf of Guinea. The same body of international law that secures a coastal state's resources within its EEZ also guarantees the right of innocent and transit passage through the world's sea lanes.

These two concepts are not in tension; they are the same bargain. A coastal nation's sovereign rights over its resources and global navigational rights and freedoms stand or fall together, because both depend on a rules-based maritime order that applies equally to the powerful and the small. Erode one and you welcome the erosion of the other.

None of this asks the conference to become a forum for grievance. Quite the opposite. The United States was at Mombasa to support maritime-domain awareness that lets coastal states see who is operating in their waters, and to stand with African partners as they convert a decade of commitments into enforcement on the ground.

Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs