World Trade Organization negotiators working on a deal to curb harmful fishing subsidies are “closer to a deal than ever before,” according to Isabel Jarrett of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
“Members are working from the same, single text, and not only that but the chair of the negotiations, Ambassador Santiago Wills, will circulate a revised text [in November],” she told SeafoodSource. “This tells us that the text is evolving, and negotiations are gathering momentum. The next month will be absolutely critical, and we remain hopeful.”
Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen recently told a Zoom call of World Trade Organization commerce ministers that China will push for a deal on harmful subsidies this winter and said China would take a “zero-tolerance” approach to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
According to Stephen O’Sullivan, a Singapore-based seafood trader with sales across the region, China’s need for food security and its expanding search for seafood around the globe realigns the country with its “win-win” approach to international trading relationships. That type of long-term thinking has been absent in its approach to controlling its distant-water fishing fleet, but it’s an instinct that may reassert itself as coastal nations protest, O’Sullivan said.
“A successful global effort to end illegal fishing would result in increased legal seafood imports to China as well as increased Chinese innovation in aquaculture,” O’Sullivan said. “When you are not self-sufficient in seafood, you need friends. Playing a zero-sum game doesn’t exactly help you win or keep friends and is also inconsistent with the ‘win-win’ [Communist] party line of old.”
A World Trade Organization deal would benefit small-scale fishermen around the globe, according to a paper titled “The Global Fisheries Subsidies Divide Between Small- and Large-Scale Fisheries,” published in September by Frontiers in Marine Science. Poorer coastal states, such as those in West Africa, have faced increasing pressure from Chinese distant-water fleets, but they lack the resources to fund better enforcement of their own fishing rules, even with assistance from data-based observation platforms like Global Fishing Watch.
Additionally, the average fisher involved in large-scale fishing receives 3.5 times more subsidies than a fisher involved in small-scale fishing, further marginalizing local fishers who are already hurting as a result of overfishing, the paper found.
“Our latest research shows that four-fifths – more than USD 18 billion [EUR 15.2 billion] – of harmful fisheries subsidies per year is estimated to go to large-scale, industrial fishing fleets that are overfishing the oceans,” independent fisheries scientist and the paper’s lead researcher, Anna Schuhbauer, told SeafoodSource.
Photo courtesy of Environmental Justice Foundation
