Friends Versus Interests: Strategic Rationality in the Barbados - Trinidad and Tobago Maritime Dispute

• Author: Clifford Griffin
• Profession: Professor
• Pages: 185-202

185

Friends Versus Interests

Friends Versus Interests: Strategic

Rationality In The Barbados-Trinidad

And Tobago Maritime Dispute

66

66

6Professor Clifford Griffin

Introduction

Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the rest of the Caribbean are coastal

states, whose maritime environment has shaped their history and continues

to be vital to their future. Not only does the fishing industry remain at the

heart of the region’s maritime culture but it provides important economic

and social benefits as well. Contemporaneously, global concerns over the

potential of over-harvesting of fish stocks in the region, coupled with the

exploitation of hydrocarbons in Trinidad and Tobago, the proven hydrocarbon

resources in Guyana and Suriname and the potential sources that are likely

to exist under the seabed throughout the region, and the high demand and

world market price of this resource, all serve to increase the importance of

the maritime environment in the Caribbean. Given that current history reflects

ongoing attempts to exert and exercise control over these resources, the

maritime dispute between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago must be seen

as but one in a series of millennia-old attempts by political entities of one

stripe or another to secure control over the world’s oceans. More precisely, it

is the global importance of fisheries and hydrocarbons that are central to this

yet-to-be-resolved fisheries dispute between Barbados and Trinidad and

Tobago.

In order to better understand the nature and context of this dispute, this

analysis is situated within an international relations/international political

economy (IPE) conceptual frame that provides a wider and more

comprehensive analysis of the strategic interactions of both Barbados and

186 Interview, Border and Maritime Issues in CARICOM

Trinidad and Tobago as each seeks to exert and exercise control over its

maritime environment. This approach will help to explain why Barbados

triggered the dispute resolution mechanism under the UNCLOS Treaty and

invoked binding arbitration against Trinidad and Tobago. And it will also

help to explain why Barbados does not gain automatic access to Trinidad

and Tobago’s EEZ nor access based on “historical” or “artisanal” fishing

rights; instead, access must be negotiated, and will be dependent upon the

acknowledgement and acceptance of Trinidad and Tobago’s sovereignty over

the area.

Contextualizing and Conceptualizing the Dispute

Usually, it is the annual Atlantic hurricanes that disturb the tranquil

waters of the Caribbean Sea. However, on February 16th 2004, several months

before the start of the hurricane season, tranquility was disrupted when

Barbados triggered the dispute-settlement procedures under the UNCLOS

Convention, initiating binding arbitration against Trinidad and Tobago

ostensibly over the failure of both countries to broker a fishing agreement

after more than a decade of bilateral negotiations. Notwithstanding the

centrality of the fisheries issue, evidence indicated that below the surface

lurked much more complex issues, including rights of access to migrating

stocks of fish; sovereignty over exclusive economic zones (EEZ); and the

prospects for control of potential sources of hydrocarbon resources that lay

beneath the seabed. This maritime disturbance took on the characteristics of

a political “perfect storm” that threatened to produce the biggest political

cyclone in the region since the 1983 US military invasion of Grenada.

Approximately three decades of prior negotiations concerning the use of

resources in their overlapping maritime spaces provided the energy to fuel

this political storm that has engulfed both countries. Nevertheless, fisheries

and hydrocarbons have consistently remained the principal issues under

consideration throughout this period. Following several meetings that began

in 1976, both countries entered into a Memorandum of Understanding on

Matters of Co-operation (MOU) that covered, among other things,

hydrocarbon exploration and fishing, on April 30th 1979. Meanwhile,

consistent with the principles enshrined in the UNCLOS Treaty, which provides

a coastal state with the right to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 200

nautical miles from its baseline, and an extended continental shelf of up to

350 nautical miles, the government of Barbados passed its Marine Boundaries

and Jurisdiction Act - also knows as an “Act to provide for the establishment