A watered-down and partial agreement, of course, but an agreement all the same: the one hundred and sixty-four member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) concluded their negotiations on subsidies in the fishing sector, Thursday, June 16, with thirty -six hours behind on the agenda, after endless nocturnal discussions and more than twenty years of dithering. The stakes are high: it is a question of tackling this financing with disastrous consequences for the ocean, since it helps fishermen to equip themselves with ever more powerful vessels to find the last fish of overexploited species. .
This subject was one of the three main themes – along with the global food crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the temporary lifting of patents for vaccines against Covid-19 – of the 12e ministerial session of the WTO which has just ended, in Geneva, the first to be held since December 2017. “The results demonstrate that the WTO is capable of responding to the urgencies of our time”rejoiced the Director General of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, about the package of measures ” unprecedented “ finally adopted.
Emergency
On Tuesday, she had urged the ministers to redouble their efforts as the discussions seemed unable to succeed. “It requires us to work harder”, she insisted to an assembly, which adopts its decisions by consensus. With regard to the halieutic resources which decline in the world, there is urgency. According to United Nations estimates, 34% of fish populations are overexploited and will not be able to recover. Since 2015, the UN has been calling for a reduction in all public support that encourages the overexploitation of the ocean: construction and modernization of ships, acquisition of new engines, equipment, fish detection technologies, without which the very costly campaigns on the high seas or the towing of heavy trawls on the seabed would not be profitable. The sensitive case of the very popular fuel subsidies has been postponed.
To unblock this file, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala proposed the creation of a fund of 20 million dollars (about 19 million euros), intended to promote the conversion of developing countries towards more sustainable fishing methods. We are far from the generous amounts of subsidies to the sector, generally evaluated at more than 32 billion dollars per year, of which 22 billion are considered as direct levers of overfishing.
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