A purse seiner off loads its tuna catch in Majuro. Photo: RNZI / Giff Johnson

No WTO deal on fisheries subsidies for Pacific nations, but PANG pleased

The following is an excerpt from an article published by RNZ:

A fractious meeting of world trade ministers in Abu Dhabi ended with little to show for the time and money spent early Saturday morning New Zealand time.

Pacific Island nations were seeking at the WTO ministerial meeting to have the governments of the larger fishing nations stop or reduce the subsidies they pay their fishers.

This did not happen but a spokesman for PANG, the Pacific Network on Globalisation, Adam Wolfenden, said this is a better result than having a substandard deal foisted on them, which had been the prospect right to the end.

"It's not for lack of effort. And I think we've seen what was put on the table, the text particularly on fisheries subsidies, and that was on offer right up into the last minute, there was still quite a few holes in it that from."

Wolfenden said from PANG's perspective a lot needed to be fixed in that offer for a deal that would fulfill the promises of the negotiations.

He said the Pacific did a lot of negotiating and really fought for an outcome which would hold the big distant water fishing fleets to account.

They wanted a standstill and eventual reduction in the subsidies, he said.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14.6 calls for the prohibition of certain forms of subsidies that contribute to overfishing and overcapacity, while ensuring appropriate and differential treatment for developing nations.

But Wolfenden said at the ministerial "the prohibition on those rules that were going to dictate how those subsidies would be cut was so watered down and so weak for, particularly for those countries who could meet the thresholds."

He said at the end it was very much a case of try your best to not make these subsidies, which he calls a complete failure of the WTO mandate.

"The mandate was saying, you need to prohibit these subsidies that contribute to overfishing and over capacity. And what was on the table for the big fishing plane failed that completely."

The Pacific plan

He said the Pacific came to the meeting with a "strong proposal to explicitly come up with a mechanism to make the subsidies for distant water fishing come to a standstill, and then reduce within a certain amount of time."

"So they were very clear in what they were asking for and explicit that this had to have an impact on the subsidies.

"This was heavily contested by a lot of the big fishing nations, because you know, it's very much in their interest to not have that come into effect."

Wolfenden said the end result was a text that largely gave those big fishing nations a number of options to evade the push on subsidies.

Why is the removal of subsidies so important?

Pacific nations now earn significant amounts of money from fishing licences, so why the emphasis on removing subsidies?

He said firstly there is the matter of overfishing, so cutting subsidies would help both in terms of limiting the distant water nations ability to catch more than they're allowed.[...]

Author/source: Don Wiseman / RNZ | | Read the full article by clicking the link here

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