21. World Trade Organization (WTO)

Abstract

In the past year, there were intensive meetings and negotiations for drafting a possible agreement among the WTO members to deal with fisheries subsidies that delivers on United Nations (UN) 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.6. These negotiations on fisheries subsidies were initiated in 2001 at the Doha Ministerial Conference, and the negotiations resumed in more detail in 2005 at the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference. In 2017, at the Buenos Aires Ministerial Conference, members reached an agreement on fishing subsidies to conclude the negotiations by aiming to adopt it at the next conference in 2019. The first meeting of the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment in 2017 was held on 20 June. Participants discussed how to regulate illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing for the better management of the world’s oceans and marine resources and how to negotiate fishing subsidies. Several members, including the European Union (EU), New Zealand, Iceland, Pakistan, Indonesia, the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States, a Latin American group, China, and the United States had already submitted separate proposals. However, members could not agree on how to determine IUU fishing activities, overfishing, and overcapacity and how to treat fishing activity within a member’s own exclusive economic zone. These fisheries subsidy matters were intensively discussed under the Negotiating Group on Rules, where the chair, Ambassador Wayne McCook (Jamaica) tried to narrow the differences among members in terms of the scope of disciplines for subsidies to marine captures, special and differential treatment matters for developing and least developed countries, possible exceptions for subsidies to small scale fishing, and so on. At the WTO’s eleventh ministerial conference, in an effort to fulfill SDG 14.6 by 2020, ministers confirmed their willingness to achieve comprehensive disciplines prohibiting and eliminating fisheries subsidies to IUU fishing, regulating overcapacity, overfishing, unfair competition, access to stocks by small scale fisherman, and improving transparency, with special and differential treatment for developing and least developed countries.