Aside from government regulations, Vietnamese fishermen face severe storms, such as the expected arrival of Typhoon Kalmaegi in Da Nang in early November. Photo by Tien Dat/EPA
On a rusted wharf in the northern port city of Haiphong, where U.S. B-52s once rained bombs for 12 straight days, 70-year-old fisherman Bui Quang Mong mends a worn fishing net.
Half a century at sea has left his hands rough and steady, each scar a story of storms weathered, encounters with other boats and the relentless struggle to make a living from the sea.
For fishermen, the South China Sea has always been a treacherous frontier — typhoons, Chinese naval chases, detentions, confiscated catches, sinking boats. He’s had all of it.
But today, the sharpest wave hitting Vietnamese fishing communities is bureaucratic: Europe’s yellow card — imposed by the European Commission to penalize illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing — now runs through conversations like a silent current.
Vietnam is racing the clock to shake off the EU’s yellow card before the European Commission’s inspection at the end of 2025. Miss the deadline, and the country could face a full red card — slamming the door on seafood exports worth more than $500 million a year.
And now there’s another variable: a new U.S.-Vietnam tariff agreement — hailed by both governments — but with little clarity about what it will mean for ordinary fishermen. Meanwhile, Europe’s warning is already rippling across the Pacific.
U.S. trade officials are tracking the same IUU compliance data the EU uses. Analysts say if Hanoi fails to lift the yellow card by 2025, Washington could borrow the EU’s own justification to tighten tariffs on Vietnamese seafood and other exports.
Vietnam is celebrating a new U.S. tariff deal — but Washington is expected to sharpen scrutiny on traceability, labor conditions and subsidy distortions. If Europe doesn’t clear Vietnam, the United States has a convenient rationale to raise duties.
In practical terms, Vietnamese seafood exporters could get hit twice — first by Europe’s threat of a full red card and second by U.S. tariff adjustments that treat Vietnam’s regulatory gaps as unfair competition.
For fishers, it adds a new layer of uncertainty to an already shrinking sea: a bureaucracy in Brussels and Washington that now reaches all the way back to the deck of a small wooden trawler in Haiphong.
Mong shrugs off distant capitals.
” I don’t know Washington. I don’t know Brussels, he says. ” I only know if there is work.” For him — and thousands like him — the day is defined by the next haul of black tiger shrimp, yellowfin tuna and mackerel.
Hanoi has issued a fishing action plan — a highly technical roadmap with direct consequences for every vessel, crew and port official. Under the prime minister’s directive, all boats must be inventoried, reregistered and licensed, every catch must be digitally traceable, and every port entry and exit logged. Officials describe it as a nationwide campaign to stamp out illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
This transformation arrives at the same moment that Vietnamese boats are being forced closer to shore — fearing confrontation with Chinese maritime militia and navy vessels operating in disputed waters. For them, the sea is shrinking, rules are tightening and the world is watching.
But while regulatory compliance is one part of this story, the human cost is the harder chapter.
Among those on the front line is Captain Dang Van Nhan, a third-generation skipper who has fished these contested waters for decades. His wooden trawler was once rammed and sunk by a Chinese naval vessel, he told UPI.
Fishermen along Vietnam’s central and northern coast say the sea has always been dangerous — sudden squalls and fast-moving typhoons, such as deadly Kalmaegi that recently swept over the island of Cu Lao Cham and swamped fishing boats in the harbor.
But the arrival of armed Chinese ships has changed the calculus. The danger, the fishermen say, is not only weather — it’s political, unpredictable and lethal.
Meanwhile, government officials are trying to soften the blow of these fishing restrictions by charting new paths for the industry. The city is pushing high-tech aquaculture, especially in scenic coastal areas such as Cat Ba Bay replacing wood with plastic rafts and cages, promising greater durability and environmental benefits.
Authorities have established two major marine reserves — Bach Long Vi and Cat Ba-Long Chau — covering more than 35,000 hectares. They also set up five coastal protection zones and three inland reserves, and say they have released more than 2.1 million fish, shrimp, crabs and mollusks to rebuild depleted stocks.
Bach Long Vi Island, at the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin on key global shipping lanes, functions as a strategic security outpost and potential future fisheries hub.
Yet, environmental restoration takes time and fishermen still need fuel each morning. At more fishing ports, the changes are visible. Ships dock under the new rules with intact tracking devices, electronic logs and strict port control now the baseline for doing business.
Vietnam is fighting to keep its seafood in European markets, and Brussels is demanding proof of compliance. For fisherman Mong and Nhan, though, the regulations raise a deeper, unspoken question: “What if the sea itself is no longer enough?”
This is a question many coastal communities across Southeast Asia are asking. They are squeezed between a superpower conflict over sea control, climate impacts like typhoons and warming waters, and Western market enforcement of sustainability standards.
Meanwhile, the new U.S.-Vietnam trade tariff agreement may broaden exports — but does it reach fishermen?
The economic future for the maritime poor is now being determined in digital dashboard systems, big data servers, and compliance spreadsheets.
And the fishermen themselves, often poorly educated, formerly illiterate with paperwork, are now being asked to become fluent in an electronic regime they don’t fully understand.
While these fishermen believe the government is trying to help, they express fears that officials may forget what they have endured. Their concern isn’t Europe’s yellow card; it’s the looming naval shadow of China, the silent presence in every South China Sea conversation.
The Vietnamese state has to pull fishermen back into legal, traceable waters — and at the same time it cannot say openly what many fishermen say easily: Much of the IUU problem is political, not simply technical. China’s presence forces Vietnamese fishermen into risk and into corners — just as Europe tells them to stay clean.
And between those forces is a 70-year-old man repairing his net.
Vietnam is at an inflection point. It is trying to save both the fish — and the fishermen.
James Borton is a non-resident senior fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and the author of Harvesting the Waves: How Blue Parks Shape Policy, Politics, and Peacebuilding in the South China Sea.
