Bigger Picture
Decades of lavish subsidies to global corporate fisheries, says a UBC economist, have been cheating the little guy, destroying fish stocks and causing immense environmental damage
Decades of lavish subsidies to global corporate fisheries have been cheating the little guy, destroying fish stocks and causing immense environmental damage
AFTER THE SECOND WORLD War, the global economy was in tatters, and so was its food-supply system. To feed people and support the fisheries industry, governments around the world began pouring money into support for fishing.
By 2009, six decades later, annual subsidies had reached US$35 billion. That’s more than a dollar for every three dollars fishing operations earned at sea. And the more governments spent, the more fish left the sea.
Enter Rashid Sumaila. An economist at the University of British Columbia in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the school of public policy, he has long trained his focus on the fate of fish. He’s such a maverick that in November 2017, he went to Stockholm to collect the prestigious Volvo Environment Prize — valued at $225,000 — awarded each year to scientists who have added most to the understanding of how humans can live sustainably on our planet.
Sumaila has spent a lot of his research energy tracking the intertwined phenomena of the depletion of fish and the effects of excess carbon dioxide on the ocean: acidification and warming. So he began to look at how those billions of dollars in subsidies might be affecting the health of the ocean.
The result is a remarkable paper that came out last year in the journal Marine Policy. It’s the first to look at how subsidies affect small-scale, or artisanal, fisheries. These are the opposite of fleets of commercial ships scouring the open oceans using radar to find schools of fish in deep waters. Instead, artisanal fishing operations tend to consist of small boats that set traps or haul in nets relatively close to the fishermen’s home shores. These are the people who feed their communities rather than consumers on different continents, who put sating hunger above amassing profits. And they are not, by and large, the ones responsible for pushing fish stocks to the brink of collapse: they are numerous but their catch is comparatively small.
Sumaila’s research (with colleagues from UBC and Memorial University of Newfoundland) found that the subsidies were giving large-scale, commercial fishery operations an unfair leg up over the small ones. For example, for every dollar going to an artisanal fishery, four were going to a big outfit.
Nearly half of the money tagged as supporting the small fisheries — US$2.7 billion out of US$5.6 billion — was actually being spent on research, fisheries management and creating marine protected areas, efforts to ensure that the seas can continue to produce fish.
But that was a tiny fraction of the US$20 billion spent on building the capacity of the very operations that have helped deplete the fishery worldwide since the Second World War. Of that, an astonishing US$7 billion went to offsetting the costs of fuel for those fleets that roam the ocean for fish.
To an economist like Sumaila, that doesn’t add up. Not only do fuel subsidies foster the use of inefficient, fuel-hungry equipment, but they also skew the economics of fishing toward the biggest operations.
At the same time, the billions in fuel subsidies support the degradation of the ocean itself through overfishing and emissions of the carbon dioxide gas that leads to ocean acidification and warming. It’s a toxic cycle.
How can the little guys compete? They don’t get as much money, and the very ability of the ocean to nurture fish is impaired by the money the big operations get. Yet those artisanal operations are fishing in a way that tends to preserve the stocks for the future.
To Sumaila and his colleagues, it’s a wake-up call for taxpayers: “As subsidies are completely paid for by taxpayers, results of this study should be of great concern to our global working population. Currently, their money is not only being used to exacerbate the degradation of our ocean’s ecosystems, but also to further support large industrialized fisheries and disadvantage small-scale fisheries, which support millions of livelihoods and food security worldwide.”
Policy-makers are also taking note, if episodically. After an attempt to refashion fisheries subsidies fizzled at the World Trade Organization several years ago, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development took on the issue in 2016, with the hope that changes will happen internationally by 2030.
That is a long way off. Unknown is how much more acidic and how much warmer the ocean will be by then. Also unknown is how these changes, combined with the overfishing going on day by day, will affect the fish stocks that remain.