Malaysia-Vietnam Relations: Managing the IUU Fishing Challenge

On February 17, Malaysia’s foreign minister suggested that the Southeast Asian state may soon sign an agreement with Vietnam tied to managing the issue of illegal fishing. While specifics remain unclear, his comments nonetheless highlighted a sensitive issue for the bilateral relationship that both countries continue to struggle to deal with amid wider trends and developments.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has long been a problem for Malaysia. However, it is far from a unique problem for the country, with others in the region contending with the same challenge. Furthermore, the issue is affected by broader dynamics, from varied government approaches to managing fishing industries to regional shortages of fish, which can affect the movements of fishermen. Previous government estimates indicate that Malaysia loses an average of 6 billion ringgit ($1.43 billion) annually due to IUU, with the majority of fishing vessels coming from Thailand and Vietnam. That’s in addition to the other implications, including assaults to the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In response, Malaysia has undertaken a series of initiatives in the past, including issuing diplomatic protest notes, prosecuting apprehended foreign fishermen, and at times even sinking ships. There have also been ongoing efforts to address the structural challenges behind Malaysia’s illegal fishing problem, whether it be the lack of more formal bilateral understandings with other countries or the coordination issues in the conduct of maritime policy in the Southeast Asian state.

Malaysia’s government under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has elevated the focus on tackling the illegal fishing challenge over the last two years. (On February 24, Mahathir submitted his resignation and his party, Bersatu, announced it would drop from the ruling coalition.) In general, managing maritime challenges including illegal fishing has factored into formal strategy documents publicly released last year, including the Foreign Policy Framework and the Defense White Paper. More specifically, Malaysia has also intensified efforts to directly address the illegal fishing challenge through various means, including operationalizing a long-held idea of forming a multiagency special task force to tackle IUU fishing.

One aspect of the government’s response is the management of the IUU fishing issue within Malaysia-Vietnam ties more broadly. Beyond responding to individual incidents, including rising tensions last year when several Vietnamese vessels were apprehended, IUU fishing has factored into high-level discussions, such as Mahathir’s visit to Vietnam last September. Both sides have also worked on furthering arrangements and mechanisms that may affect the issue, including an MOU on maritime law enforcement and search and rescue cooperation and a broader high-level committee on defense cooperation.

Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah suggested recently that the two countries could sign a pact that would help manage the issue of illegal fishing.

Per the Malaysian media outlet Daily Express, speaking to reporters at a fisheries event in Kuantan on February 17, Saifuddin said that Malaysia intended to enter into an agreement with Vietnam to overcome encroachment of deep-sea fishermen into Malaysia’s territorial waters, where 141 Vietnamese fishermen were detained just last year alone. Saifuddin characterized the nature of the problem as serious “because lately there has been an increase in the number of foreign fishing boats encroaching into Malaysian waters in the east coast, with most of them from Vietnam.”

Saifuddin did not provide much more in the way of specifics, and it was unclear whether this was an agreement already under discussion or an entirely new pact. He did note similar efforts that Malaysia has undertaken with Indonesia; the two countries have been working on various approaches including a joint development area for the fishery industry and renewing previous pacts. He added that there was mutual agreement on the need for action, noting that Vietnam had also indicated its willingness to take steps to address the challenge as Hanoi was aware of the seriousness of the problem as well.

Saifuddin’s comments themselves are not surprising: they are in line with Malaysia’s heightened attention to the challenge and the steps both sides have been trying to take to address it thus far. But they are not without significance. If Malaysia and Vietnam are able to formalize an understanding on this, it would alleviate Malaysia’s broader IUU fishing challenge, which is crucial to address if the country is to realize its ambitions of becoming a maritime nation – a goal Mahathir has repeatedly set out for the country. It will also begin to remove what has continued to be a thorn in the side of the overall security realm of the Malaysia-Vietnam relationship, paving the way for potentially more progress in this domain.

To be sure, given both the sensitivity of the issue as well as the typically slow pace for agreements to be operationalized in the bilateral relationship, we will have to wait for more specifics to truly assess the potential implications of a formal pact for the IUU fishing challenge in Malaysia-Vietnam relations. And how both countries manage this will occur alongside wider developments. Malaysia is facing ongoing governance challenges now that the ruling coalition has been dissolved, while Vietnam faces a busy year while holding the ASEAN chairmanship, a nonpermanent seat at the UN Security Council, and preparing for its Party Congress in 2021. But given the significance accorded to the challenge by both sides, this evolving development, along with the IUU fishing issue more generally, will continue to warrant attention in the months and years to come.