Asian Trade Giants Reject WTO Fishing Subsidy Ban
Date: 24-Feb-05
Country: SWITZERLAND
The three Asian trading giants, also major fishing nations, told a group negotiating modernisation of WTO trading rules that only subsidies that could be shown to cause direct damage to stocks should be barred.
Their intervention came in response to proposals last November from a six-country group -- Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, New Zealand, Peru and the Philippines -- for a "top down" approach to be adopted in the talks.
This would involve agreement first on a blanket ban on subsidies -- currently totalling about $20 billion a year worldwide -- with exceptions to be negotiated later.
The fishing issue is one of the most sensitive in the WTO's Doha Round, launched in November 2001 with the aim of shaping a new overall global treaty on lowering trade barriers.
Environmental bodies, supported by independent scientific research, assert that large-scale subsidies allow better-off countries like the Asian three to dominate fishing worldwide with huge fleets that scoop up vast catches.
According to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), 75 percent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are either exhausted, over-exploited, depleted or only slowly recovering.
Smaller countries originally sought totally separate negotiations on fishing in the Doha Round but, facing Japanese objections, agreed to have the issue included in talks on rules and subsidies.
In a joint statement to the Round's rules negotiating group, the three Asian states said the "top down" approach would effectively impose a ban on "benign or noble" support for the industry at a national level, and was "fundamentally wrong".
"It has never been established that fisheries subsidies in general distort trade per se," they declared.
A general ban could hit at small-scale subsistence fisheries and vulnerable groups of fishermen not necessarily involved in the large-scale commercial fishing which supporters of a total end to subsidies specifically target.
Their own approach, they said, would bring prohibition of subsidies "deemed to directly cause serious harm to the resources" and could be extended to support for building new vessels that would increase a country's fishing capacity.
It would also ensure that governments could continue support for research into sustainable fisheries, they argued.