Cape Town - The Global Ocean Commission has called on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to scrap fisheries subsidies – one of the main drivers of overfishing and which have led to the decline and collapse of fish stocks.
In its report “Global Ocean: From Decline to Recovery”, the commission calls on the WTO to ask member states to adopt urgently a three-step approach to getting rid of fisheries subsidies as these have led to too many boats chasing fewer and fewer fish.
Subsidies have meant the high seas have become an almost exclusive zone for rich countries to fish. They enable vessels to fish in remote parts of the ocean where they would not be able to fish economically were they not funded with public money.
The subsidies, particularly fuel subsidies, provide incentives for fishing vessels and have led to a tenfold growth in the number of boats fishing the high seas. The high seas are the parts of the ocean that do not belong to any country.
In the US in 2000, the bottom trawl fishing vessels made a profit of $60-million and had received subsidies of $150m.
As a first step in dealing with the problem of subsidies, the commission has called on the WTO to insist that member states fully disclose information about fishing subsidies.
The second step would be to classify the subsidies to identify those that are harmful. The final step would be to place an immediate cap on high seas fishing fuel subsidies, and to phase these out over five years.
The WTO Doha Declaration of 2001 committed member states to “clarify and improve WTO disciplines on fisheries subsidies”. However, the commission said there was “clearly a lack of political appetite to tackle this issue” in the WTO. Also, the WTO lacked the expertise to implement and administer a legally binding agreement to deal with environmentally harmful subsidies in the fisheries sector.
Member states were obliged to report on specific subsidies, but did not. “This paradox should be resolved urgently. The enforcement of the existing WTO obligation should be expedited without delay.”
Developed countries granted 70 percent of the subsidies, with Japan, China, the EU and the US being the highest spenders.
Rich countries’ subsidies constituted unfair competition, the commission said. Subsidies had distorted the market by lowering artificially the price of fish caught on the high seas. This put small-scale fisheries at a disadvantage. It also meant that some consumers ended up paying for fish twice: once at the shop and through their taxes.
Subsidies had led to bigger vessels, which caught 65 percent of the fish caught globally. However, these vessels employed only 4 percent of the world’s fishers. Also, the quantity of fish caught by each ship had not been lower. The global fishing fleet was nearly three times the size necessary to catch global fish stocks sustainably. - Cape Times