Ambitious subsidy reform by the WTO presents opportunities for ocean health restoration
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NOTE AND COMMENT
Ambitious subsidy reform by the WTO presents opportunities for ocean health restoration Christopher Costello1,2 · Katherine Millage1 · Sabrina Eisenbarth3 · Elsa Galarza4 · Gakushi Ishimura5 · Laura Lea Rubino6 · Vienna Saccomanno1 · U. Rashid Sumaila7,8 · Kent Strauss2 Received: 20 April 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in a unique position to deliver on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.6 by reforming global fisheries subsidies in 2020. Yet, a number of unanswered questions threaten to inhibit WTO delegates from crafting a smart agreement that improves global fisheries health. We combine global data on industrial fishing activity, subsidies, and stock assessments to show that: (1) subsidies prop up fishing effort all across the world’s ocean and (2) larger subsidies tend to occur in fisheries that are poorly managed. When combined, this evidence suggests that subsidy reform could have geographically-extensive consequences for many of the world’s largest fisheries. While much work remains to establish causality and make quantitative predictions, this evidence informs the rapidly-evolving policy debate and we conclude with actionable policy suggestions. Keywords Fisheries subsidies · Overfishing · Sustainable development goals · World trade organization · Fisheries management
Introduction
Handled by Carolyn Lundquist, University of Auckland Institute of Marine Science, New Zealand. * Christopher Costello [email protected] 1
Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2
Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
3
Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute, University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK
4
Research Center, Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru
5
Faculty of Agriculture, Iwate University, Morioka, Japan
6
Environmental Defense Fund, New York, NY, USA
7
Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
8
School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Though global awareness of the ecological and economic benefits of fisheries management reform is increasing, the tragedy of the commons still plagues much of the world’s ocean. For example, fishing on the high seas has increased to the point where cost now exceeds revenue (Sala et al. 2018), and fisheries lacking formal assessments—from which the majority of global catches originate—are more likely to be overfished or experiencing overfishing than their assessed counterparts (Costello et al. 2012; Hilborn et al. 2020). One explanation for these phenomena is that subsidies for fuel, vessel construction, and other “capacity-enhancing” activities are artificially lowering fishing costs and enabling these economically irrational and wasteful increases in fishing pressure. Indeed, g
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