Canberra eyes Indian Ocean 'great game'

CANBERRA - Australia intends renewing its focus on the Indian Ocean amid warnings of new tensions and an emerging "maritime great game" in which the United States, China, India and other powers are jostling for advantage.

At stake are huge energy reserves, key trade routes and strategic primacy in the world's third largest ocean that a report warns will increasingly affect Australian interests.

Despite holding the largest slice of the ocean - a total jurisdiction of about 5.9 million sq km - the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said Canberra's attention had instead remained fixed on the Pacific.

"Australia should be the pre-eminent country in the Indian Ocean region, but we have neglected it in favour of the Pacific," said the report's authors, Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security professorial fellow Sam Bateman and ASPI director of Research Programme Anthony Bergin.

Canberra has already begun to heed the message, swinging greater effort to the ocean.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the security of the region - home to 2.6 billion people - went to the heart of Australia's national interests.

"That the Indian Ocean is of critical importance to Australia is substantially under-appreciated," he said at the release of Bateman and Bergin's report.

"Indian Ocean shipping routes are vital to Australia's economic interests, particularly for the energy and resources that meet demand in the Middle East, India and China."

Smith said Canberra had neglected the region but as economic, political and strategic influence shifted towards it, this needed to be rectified.

Reflecting the report's call for a greater military presence, Smith said that large and growing naval powers and transnational security issues, including piracy, required Australia to place the Indian Ocean alongside the Pacific at the heart of the nation's maritime strategy and defence planning.

Canberra has already joined the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, is urging the expansion of the role and focus of the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Co-operation, and has been invited to become an observer at the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation.

Australia has also beefed up its relationship with India - including a joint declaration on security co-operation and a feasibility study into a possible free trade agreement - and is working to boost relations with Pakistan and Africa.

More than 150 Australian companies have interests in more than 40 African countries, involving present and prospective investment estimated at A$20 billion ($25 billion).

The ASPI report warned tensions would increase in a region in which more than 40 per cent of the world's conflicts occurred in 2008, including nine wars and many of the world's high-intensity conflicts.

"The risk of interstate conflict, perhaps in the Middle East or between the US and Iran, India and China, or India and Pakistan, are significant," the report said.

The ocean was an increasingly important global trading thoroughfare, especially for energy supplies, and the risk of disputes over maritime sovereignty were magnified by the potential wealth beneath its waters.

Fishing was another potential flashpoint, with depletion of fish stocks in the Atlantic and Pacific pushing more European and Asian fishing fleets into the Indian Ocean.

Smith said the total tuna catch in the Indian Ocean had increased dramatically over the past 20 years, and the trend had continued despite moves to protect migratory or straddling stocks through the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement and the Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The ASPI report said tensions could be increased by the international campaign against piracy.

Some of the countries that had sent warships to fight piracy off the Horn of Africa also had boats fishing illegally in the economic zones of regional countries which lack the resources to patrol their waters effectively.

Elsewhere, the report said strategic competition between China and India, the rising powers of Asia, would be played out in the Indian Ocean.

Because of its territorial disputes with China in northern areas and Chinese ambitions in the Indian Ocean, India felt it was being locked in by Beijing.

But China believed it was being strategically contained by growing links between India, Japan and the United States.