WTO Has Negotiated Ending Fishing Subsidies For 20 Years; Now Another Delay, Thanks To COVID
Twenty years is a long time to talk about fish. But hopes that World Trade Organization (WTO) members would finally reach a meaningful agreement to ban subsidies that enable overfishing at the Ministerial Conference (MC12) this year were dashed Friday when organizers postponed the event indefinitely, due to concerns over the novel Omicron COVID-19 variant. “This does not mean that negotiations should stop,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the WTO’s director-general, said in a press release about the postponement. “On the contrary, delegations in Geneva should be fully empowered to close as many gaps as possible. This new variant reminds us once again of the urgency of the work we are charged with.”
The global trade regulator is grappling with how to keep itself relevant amid rising calls for reform of trade rules made last century that observers say no longer fit present-day economic conditions. Many observers saw MC12, formally the Twelfth WTO Ministerial Conference and scheduled to run Nov. 30 through Dec. 3 in Geneva, Switzerland, as a chance for the WTO to prove its ability to conclude major trade deals and to reform its dispute settlement and negotiation pillars. Other major agenda items for the meeting were the waiver of trade-related intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines and reform of the WTO’s organizational process.
Okonjo-Iweala had emphasized the importance of the fisheries subsidies negotiation at an April meeting of delegation heads: “[C]oncluding these negotiations is a top priority for this organization, not only for the fisheries, but also for the WTO system. We simply cannot afford to fail here,” she said. “if there is anything that would demonstrate that the WTO is back and capable of having positive results, it is a good outcome early enough this year to these fisheries subsidies negotiations.”
Globally overexploited fish stocks have risen from 18% to 34% over the 20 years that WTO members have been talking about banning “harmful” fisheries subsidies, according to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization ()FAO) reports published in 2000 and 2020. The targeted subsidies are deemed harmful because they enable overfishing, environmental degradation and destruction of food security and livelihoods. Governments collectively dole out an estimated $22 billion in such subsidies each year, according to a 2019 paper.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/latest-delay-casts-pall-over-wto-bid-to-end-harmful-fishing-subsidies/