Saving Seafood

WTO DG fixes July ministerial meeting on over-fishing rules

May 11, 2021 — The head of the World Trade Organization plans to host a ministerial meeting on July 15 where she hopes an agreement can be reached on cutting fisheries subsidies after 20 years of talks, a document showed on Monday.

Governments including major subsidisers China, the European Union and Japan spend billions of dollars a year to prop up their fishing fleets, contributing to over-fishing that is decimating wild stocks. The WTO was tasked by world leaders in 2015 with striking a deal to roll them back but missed a key deadline last year. read more

Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who took charge of the global trade watchdog in March, has made fisheries a top priority and urged ministers in an invitation letter seen by Reuters “to find the common resolve and spirit of compromise that the WTO needs to bring these twenty-year-plus negotiations to a successful conclusion at this meeting”.

Intensive negotiations will continue in Geneva with the chair of the talks, Santiago Wills, expected to issue a fourth version of the draft agreement this week.

Read the full story at Reuters

WTO Chief Sees Fisheries Deal as Key to ‘Watershed’ Year

April 28, 2021 — The world’s most important trade negotiation this year centers on a deal aimed at saving the world’s fisheries.

Back in 2015, global leaders tasked the World Trade Organization with ending excessive and illegal fishing. The idea was to eliminate government subsidies that incentivize companies to deplete the world’s fish stocks and threaten coastal economies.

But year after year, deadline after broken deadline, WTO negotiators failed to secure such an agreement.

This year it sounds different.

“It’s like a watershed year — we have to deliver some successes,” WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said Monday at a European Commission trade conference. She then recited her 2021 agenda with a fisheries deal atop the list.

A failure to conclude a fisheries deal would show that the WTO lacks credibility and is incapable tackling the more pressing problems of the modern global trading system. Okonjo-Iweala sees it as a way to signal to the world that the WTO is back.

There’s one big problem.

China, India and other developing nations are more focused on carving out exemptions than agreeing to enforceable disciplines that would help foster the sustainability of the world’s fish stocks.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

New WTO chief pushes for vaccine access, fisheries deal

March 2, 2021 — The new head of the World Trade Organization called Monday for a “technology transfer” when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines and urged member nations to reach a deal to reduce overfishing after years of fruitless talks as she laid out her top priorities after taking office.

Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian economist and former government minister, donned a mask and doled out welcoming elbow bumps as she took up her job at WTO headquarters on the banks of Lake Geneva. Still, she immediately set about trying to change the organization’s culture.

“It cannot be business as usual. We have to change our approach from debate and rounds of questions to delivering results,” she told ambassadors and other top government envoys that make up the 164-member body’s General Council.

“The world is leaving the WTO behind. Leaders and decision-makers are impatient for change,” she said, noting several trade ministers had told her that “if things don’t change,” they would not attend the WTO’s biggest event — a ministerial meeting — “because it is a waste of their time.”

Okonjo-Iweala, 66, is both the first woman and the first African to serve as the WTO’s director-general. Her brisk comments were a departure from the more cautious approach of her predecessor, Roberto Azevedo, who resigned on Aug. 31 — a year before the end of his term.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Boston Globe

Normalcy returning to Fukushima fishery, but new reactor cooling water releases loom

February 2, 2021 — As the tenth anniversary of the East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster approaches, fishery cooperatives in Fukushima Prefecture are making progress toward recovery by reopening damaged port cargo handling and auction buildings and sales outlets – even as new releases of cooling water from the crippled reactor appear imminent.

The 11 March, 2011, disaster resulted in fishing being banned in the prefecture due to radioactivity. Since then, the national government, in cooperation with the prefectural governments and fisheries cooperatives, has monitored radioactive materials in fish and fishery products. In trial fishing, the number of samples in which radioactive materials above the standard limits were detected decreased over time, and in marine species – for four years after June 2015 – there were no samples collected in Fukushima that exceeded the standard. A study performed in 2017 found that Fukushima Daiichi radiation was no longer a danger to seafood-eaters.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Water Wars Special: How IUU Fishing Increases the Risk of Conflict

January 28, 2021 — Illegal, unreported and unregistered (IUU) fishing, a global issue that many experts attribute to large state subsidies for fisheries, is more than simply an environmental or economic concern. Such activity heightens the risk of conflict at sea.

Most notably, China’s expanding fishing fleet—called the distant-water fishing (DWF) fleet—has precipitated tensions around the world. In 2016, an Argentine naval vessel sank a Chinese fishing boat illegally trawling in its waters, and the Argentine Coast Guard seized another Chinese-flagged vessel in May 2020. The vessel had turned off its identification system, illegally entered the Argentine exclusive economic zone (EEZ) at night, and carried 300 tons of fish in its hold. Similar incidents have occurred in the East China Sea. A South Korean attempt to interdict Chinese IUU fishing turned deadly in 2016, and Seoul recently announced enhanced efforts to seize Chinese fishing vessels illegally operating within its EEZ.

On Jan. 18, the World Trade Organization (WTO) reconvened negotiations for an agreement on fishing subsidies. Such a deal could stabilize global fish stocks, reduce IUU fishing and mitigate a potential source of maritime conflict. But an agreement is unlikely to come easily— geopolitical tensions and conflicting interests among major fishing powers have complicated subsidies negotiations since the 2001 Doha Round.

Four years ago, the WTO set 2020 as the deadline for an agreement to eliminate subsidies that promote overcapacity and IUU fishing. Although negotiators failed to meet the 2020 target, WTO leadership remains optimistic that efforts will prove successful in 2021. However, in a brief for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Alice Tipping and Tristan Irschlinger outlined several issues that may impede success. The application of “special and differential treatment” for China remains one contentious question, and its resolution implicates maritime security in the South China Sea and beyond.

Read the full story at Lawfare

WTO fishing subsidies negotiations resume, with exemptions for developing nations a key issue

January 25, 2021 — World Trade Organization members have restarted negotiations on ending harmful fisheries subsidies, with the key issue of exemptions for artisanal fisheries and developing nations under debate.

WTO members reopened formal negotiations on fisheries subsidies as the heads of delegations met on 22 January in Geneva, Switzerland. The organization had hoped for a deal in 2020, but talks repeatedly stalled over the issue of special treatment for developing countries. Some developing countries involved in the negotiations have called for an exemption from any ban on harmful subsidies, after China’s claim to be classed as a developing nation created tension in earlier phases of the talks.

Read the full story at Seafood Source