Ring-fencing leaves Malaysia’s marine assets at risk

The world’s most important shipping lanes pass through the Strait of Malacca.

Yet, within Malaysia’s maritime boundaries, there is no single framework to determine who gets to use which patch of water and for what purpose.

That shortcoming was the subject of discussion at a recent Ensearch forum “Our Seas, Our Future” where Dr Gopinath Nagaraj and Dr Harinder Rai Singh of FanLi Marine and Consultancy Sdn Bhd (FanLi) made the case for marine spatial planning with a clarity Malaysia would do well to heed.

Their framing of the sea as overlapping estates of biodiversity, fisheries, industry and maritime activity is right. The ocean is not just a shipping lane with some fish in it.

Their point is that fragmented governance, rather than a lack of awareness, is the real barrier.

The numbers bear this out: fisheries production was valued at RM11.43 billion in 2023, Malaysian ports handled more than 30 million TEUs in 2024, and offshore oil, gas and tourism all draw on the same finite waters.

Yet each sector is planned or managed by a different authority under a different law.

Fragmentation is not a natural disaster. It is a choice — the accumulated result of agencies guarding their own turf and a Cabinet unwilling to make one give ground.

The department of environment approves reclamation and coastal EIA reports one environmental impact assessment at a time. That is not enough.

Every silted estuary and buried mudflat in this country may have been approved through a valid EIA. Until the DOE requires cumulative-impact assessments — measuring the combined effect of projects along an entire coastline rather than assessing each project in isolation — its approval process risks certifying decline one project at a time.

The fisheries numbers tell another story. In 2022, marine landings totalled 1.308 million metric tonnes (mt), valued at RM11.3 billion. In 2023, they fell to 1.27 million mt, valued at RM11.43 billion. In 2024, they rose to 1.392 million mt, valued at RM11.84 billion, and in 2025 to 1.393 million mt, valued at RM11.88 billion.

The fisheries department holds the nursery-ground data any marine plan would need. Yet there is still no publicly available national fish-habitat atlas. Food security is its responsibility. Where is the map?

The marine department and the transport ministry plan sea lanes and port expansions as though reefs and fishing grounds simply are not there.

Navigation matters enormously, but it is not the only estate at sea. Too often, the ministry behaves like the senior claimant whose needs are settled before anyone else is consulted.

The malaysian maritime enforcement agency and the navy have the mandate to secure our waters. Yet illegal sand dredging, unpermitted reclamation and foreign incursions continue.

This is the half of the conversation too often forgotten: a marine plan without enforcement is a coloured map. Zoning that no one polices protects nothing.

State governments control the foreshore out to three nautical miles and monetise it through reclamation deals that federal ecological policy struggle to stop.

Every attempt at a “national” ocean policy eventually runs into this constitutional divide. Sabah, Sarawak and reclamation-hungry peninsular states cannot keep hiding behind the Federal Constitution while treating the coastline as an asset to be sold to the highest bidder.

PlanMalaysia (formerly known as the department of town and country planning) and local authorities have been told to extend spatial planning into marine areas.

Yet they lack both the statutory machinery and the planning expertise to do so effectively. Beyond the high-water line, they have done little.

Petronas operates across the same seabed designated for conservation, under terms negotiated federally, without having to reconcile its footprint within an integrated marine plan.

Its data can also become difficult to scrutinise when national security is invoked.

And above all sits the Cabinet. The draft National Ocean Policy, with its proposal for an oceans and fisheries ministry, has remained a draft for years.

This is not a technical shortfall. It is a decision no one has been willing to make because unification means one ministry losing authority to another. That is a failure of political will dressed up as a coordination problem.

The experts who advocated for marine spatial planning (MSP) can only diagnose and recommend.

Their prescription is sound: a national MSP governance unit with a real legal mandate; a marine data system and conflict atlas; pilot planning zones in Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak; and zoning developed through genuine consultation with fisherfolk who actually know the waters. It is the right blueprint.

But blueprints have never been the problem. Malaysia does not lack marine policy; it has too much of it, scattered across a dozen agencies, with none willing to surrender an inch and no single body empowered to force them to work together.

So the test is simple, and it is a test of government, not consultants.

Give one body three things: a legal mandate strong enough to override sectoral silos, a budget line in the next Malaysia Plan, and enforcement teeth on the water.

Most importantly, give it a political structure capable of bringing competing interests together.

The draft National Ocean Policy advocated such an approach. Drawing on a similar challenge faced by Canada, it proposed a ministry of oceans and fisheries.

Anything less, and the next forum will be another well-attended description of a problem we have all agreed on for a decade — held while the reclamation barges keep working just offshore.

The sea is a shared and finite national asset, not empty space reserved for the most powerful claimant. Right now, it has no ministry, no map and no enforcer of its own.

That is not the ocean’s failing. It is ours.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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