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Editorial
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 11
July 2007
Subsidies vote puts blame where it belongs
The US Congress recently got a good education on the impact of foreign government fishing subsidies, which drive the true – and barely regulated – industrial fishing operations that have caused so much destruction in the world’s oceans.
The environmental group Oceana turned up the heat on its “Cut the Bait” campaign in conjunction with the World Trade Organization’s ongoing Doha trade negotiations.
As a result, this spring both the House and Senate passed resolutions calling for the US to pursue through the Doha talks a ban on government subsidies that fuel overfishing on an international scale.
The unanimous vote in both houses was a remarkable achievement considering that today’s Congress is among the most divided and confrontational in recent memory. However, the information Oceana and other environmental groups used to make their case was compelling.
According to a recent study by the University of British Columbia, governments worldwide subsidize their fishing operations to the tune of $30-$34 billion every year. The study characterized at least $20 billion of that amount – equal to a stunning 25% of the world’s fishing revenue – as “harmful” subsidies that are used to increase and intensify fishing effort by supporting new boat construction and modernization, as well as pay for fishing equipment, fuel, and other operational costs.
The countries doling out the largest subsides annually are: Japan at $5.3 billion; the European Union at $3.3 billion; and China at $3.1 billion.
That probably comes as no surprise to informed readers, especially those Northeast fishermen who have staked their livelihoods on highly migratory species fisheries such as swordfish and bluefin tuna only to see their resource and opportunities slip away due to flagrant overfishing outside of US waters that is not only tolerated but actually sanctioned by foreign governments.
As US Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) recently pointed out, many of these countries use subsidies to “super-size” their fleets and then turn a blind eye to their vessels’ illegal, unreported, or unregulated (IUU) fishing activities. IUU boats are increasingly undermining efforts by regional fishery organizations like the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas to effectively promote fair and uniform conservation measures across the migratory ranges of many species.
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act Reauthorization of 2006 directed the US government to take action to strengthen international fishery management organizations and address IUU fishing and bycatch problems. In response, the National Marine Fisheries Service recently published a proposed rule that would set up procedures to certify whether IUU nations are taking appropriate corrective actions.
All of this may feel an awful lot like too little, too late for fishermen who have been forced by unilateral US regulations to shoulder the conservation burden for the entire world for far too many years. But at least it is a start. And hopefully, it has heightened awareness in Congress and among the public that US fishermen – unlike their counterparts in many other areas of the world – are doing the right thing. /cfn/
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