WTO takes aim at subsidies
Work to tackle overfishing dates back 20 years
Fishing nations around the world are trying to find a consensus to eliminate subsidies that encourage overfishing.
It’s not the first time the member nations of the World Trade Organization, including Canada, have met to discuss the issue.
The work began in 2001 and pushed along in 2017 with a mandate issued at a WTO ministerial conference.
At the WTO meeting Thursday, the nations were to review a draft agreement in an attempt to find wording that would be acceptable to all nations.
According to the latest data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, fish stocks are at risk of collapsing in many parts of the world due to overexploitation.
It is estimated that 34 per cent of global stocks are overfished, compared with 10 per cent in 1974, meaning they are being exploited at a pace where the fish population cannot replenish itself.
SUBSIDY FACTOR
Subsidization by governments in fishing nations is one of the factors contributing to overfishing, according to fishing interest groups and researchers.
A recent report by Oceana noted the top 10 providers of harmful fisheries subsidies spent more than $5.3 billion on fishing in the waters of other nations. According to that report, China and Japan provided the highest subsidies of all nations.
The Oceana report used data collected by Daniel Skerritt, a postdoctoral research fellow with the fisheries economics research unit at the University of British Columbia. He has co-authored several reports on the issue, including the latest, published in June.
Skerritt told Saltwire that Canada sits in the middle of the pack among more than 150 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on fishing industry subsidies.
Canada invests heavily in beneficial subsidies, said Skerritt, like fisheries management, research and protection. According to figures from the OECD, this nation’s annual investment in fisheries management has ranged from $463 million in 2010 to $505 million In 2018.
But Canada also ranks high in terms of bad subsidies provided to the industry, he said.
“One of the areas where Canada did come out quite high is in the amount of subsidy provided compared to the number of fishers it has. It calculates to about $1,700 per fisher for these harmful subsidies,” Skerritt said.
And that’s not counting money going to fish harvesters through the Employment Insurance system.
In 2018, according to OECD statistics, Canada spent about $339 million in fishing income subsidies via EI and other wage subsidies.
Skerritt said he and his fellow researchers consider this a grey area in terms of contributing to overfishing stocks, and they haven’t concluded whether the practice is good or bad.
“Paying a fisher to not fish for a while might be good if you think they’re reducing fishing on fish stocks, but then you’re also keeping them within the fishery, when really what might be best for the fish stocks is to not have fishers exploiting them at all.”
There might simply be too many fishermen, Skerritt said, and in that case governmentfunded income support would be counterproductive.
GOOD INTENTIONS
That’s the danger of government subsidies, he said.
“In the EU, there was a lot of money spent on making vessel engines more fuel efficient. The argument was this would reduce C02 emissions and help mitigate climate change.
“Actually, what we found was that suddenly it created these fishing vessels that for the same amount of money they usually spent on fuel . . . could now chase fish further offshore and fish for much longer. So, we actually didn’t see the reduction in C02 emissions that we thought we would. We just created more efficient fishing machines.”
From Skerritt’s perspective, the global rule on subsidies for the fishing industry should be simple.
“Anything a government does . . . that artificially reduces (fishing) costs or increases profits, we think is a bad thing. Once you start reducing their fishing costs, they can fish stocks beyond what they would do if there was no government subsidy.”
Skerritt acknowledged the issue of government subsidies is complex, so much so that the WTO has not been able to find global consensus since it began the process in 2001.
He is hopeful the WTO will make some progress on the issue this year, but he said don’t expect a final agreement to come from this week’s meeting.
“I think there’s still a lot of negotiating to do.”