After more than two decades of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has announced it will miss its 2020 deadline to reach an agreement on eliminating harmful fishing subsidies. Countries will resume talks in January, trying to resolve the disputed passages in the consolidated draft document.<\/p>\n
Negotiators had been tasked with eliminating subsidies for illegal, unreported and unregulated<\/a> (IUU) fishing and prohibiting certain subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing. But talks were delayed this year due to Covid-19 restrictions and the US presidential elections.<\/p>\n Subsidies paid to the global fishing industry amount to around US$35 billion per year (228 billion yuan). Of this, $20 billion is given in forms that enhance the capacity of large fishing fleets, such as fuel subsidies and tax exemption programmes, according to the European Parliament\u2019s Committee on Fisheries<\/a>.<\/p>\n 30%<\/p>\n \u201cMembers had mixed views on the timeline for 2020 in light of Covid-19 disruptions but all are determined to deliver a meaningful outcome,\u201d Santiago Wills, chair of the negotiations, wrote in a statement<\/a>. He said he was disappointed to miss the deadline but not discouraged, claiming an agreement could come early next year.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Peter Thomson, the UN special envoy for the ocean and a long-standing supporter of the campaign to end harmful subsidies, told China Dialogue Ocean that he wasn’t worried by the deadline.\u00a0\u201cI know that the [talks] are progressing in a positive way but I\u2019m not hung up on dates \u2013 it\u2019s whether we\u2019re making progress and I believe we are.\u201d<\/p>\n The termination of harmful subsidies, which is embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs<\/a>), is seen as a key bit of progress on ocean sustainability ahead of next year\u2019s UN biodiversity conference in Kunming and the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
\nof global fish stocks are overexploited
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