We are in an advantageous position in that we have settled treaties. For some parts of this country, especially in British Columbia, there is still a lot of work to do on settling treaties. For ours, we are now in the implementation phase, and each one of these treaties has co-management bodies that are appointed from the federal government, the public government jurisdiction and from the Inuit, or, if there are overlaps, perhaps there are first nations interests as well.
Those bodies can be essential in ensuring that, for any of the projects we do that will increase ship traffic going through places where ships have not gone before, especially in the Northwest Passage, we do all we can to mitigate the worst effects, ensure that our environmental assessment processes are followed and that we have community buy-in for the work that we're doing.
We've already seen over the last 20 years a tenfold or more increase in ship traffic across our homeland, whether it be private vessels, cruises or military or foreign vessels that are going through unannounced. This is a continuing trend, and we don't expect it to stop.
The consideration for our communities is that we want to be included but not overwhelmed by all of this new traffic and all of this new activity. In the past, basically, as I've already mentioned, there have been fly-in and fly-out operations or a complete bypassing of our communities in any of the considerations for major business or major military expansion in the Arctic. We want to be included in these and have some auxiliary benefits as business, trade and other opportunities come to our homeland.
I'll give one example, which might seem far afield but I think should resonate. There are fish quotas for shrimp, for turbot and for other species in our homeland. Virtually none of that catch is offloaded in our homeland, and none of it is distributed to our people at all for sale. All of the markets are either in the U.S. or Asia. We already have systems where we are catching food and we're shipping it thousands of kilometres away to feed other people while we have a 68% food insecurity issue within our homeland.
We don't want to repeat those same types of structures across all the different business lines within Inuit Nunangat, our homeland. I hope that we can actually do the reverse and integrate our communities into any of the considerations for any development or any positive projects that are coming down the line.