I agree with my colleague that fisheries are and will be an important issue in the region. As he mentioned, we can manage within 200 nautical miles, and that may be the area that we have to focus on in the near future, because it may not be much beyond that. Beyond that is an area of high seas. High seas means that any country in the world can fish in that area. No matter how far the continental shelf extends, beyond that 200 nautical mile zone is an area of high seas. High seas in every other area in the world now has complete coverage—not necessarily all agreed.
A regional fisheries management organization tries to get cooperation among those countries that are fishing in the area, or those potentially interested in fishing in the area. We had a bad experience with NAFO. Frankly, NAFO is not atypical of regional fisheries organizations. One of the big problems with regional fisheries organizations is that most of them do not have a binding system for setting total allowable catches and allocating quotas. Under NAFO, we have an objection system whereby for many years the European Union has simply said they didn't agree with the scientifically assessed quotas and they were going to go their own way and set their own quotas. That has been a source of difficulty. Now there are potentially opportunities for challenging their ability to do that. Still, we have a problem that we don't have a compulsory regime.
I would think that if we're going to develop a fisheries regime for the Arctic, we have to be fairly careful that we're not going to simply duplicate the existing fisheries management regimes, which do not have the ability to ensure that everyone adheres to the quota. They don't have very good systems to deal with what are called new entrants, when someone from outside the region says they'd like to fish in the area now. Because this will be an open area, it may well be that states will appear in the Arctic that have never fished in the northern areas before, because fish around the world are drying up. There's a substantial capacity in the southern Atlantic Ocean—way over-capacity in fisheries. If a new area opens up, we're going to have high-powered fishing vessels flagged, and flagged with convenience countries, crewed or captained by highly sophisticated former Russian naval captains who know how to fish and run vessels in this area.
It will be very difficult for management to occur. It's a big challenge, but it has to be done right; otherwise we will duplicate what has happened in other areas of the world.