Huge fishing fleets, overfished seas: this is partly due to government subsidies for fishing.
An international treaty should put a stop to this.
Geneva - Huge fishing fleets are out on the world's oceans, and this has devastating consequences: In some marine regions, fish stocks are on the verge of collapse, which means that more fish are being removed than are regrowing.
According to the World Food Organization (FAO), a good third of the fish stocks are already overfished.
One of the reasons for this is state subsidies, especially for fuel, which make many otherwise unprofitable fishing expeditions to distant seas lucrative.
A stop is now to be put in place with a global agreement that prohibits harmful subsidies.
On Thursday, ministers from the 164 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) want to set the course for an agreement this year after 20 years of online negotiations.
Federal Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner called for a clear sign of sustainability.
"Fishing must function according to clear, reliable rules, otherwise overfishing will result," said Klöckner of the German Press Agency.
"I expect the WTO trade ministers to consistently implement one of the United Nations' important sustainability goals."
The fishing
According to the FAO, the total amount of fish catches worldwide has been stable at around 85 million tonnes per year since the 1990s.
60 million people work in the fishery.
For three billion people, fish is the most important source of protein, according to the environmental foundation WWF.
Problems
Partly because many species of fish are already in short supply, the same amount of fish is caught today by many more vessels, and much more often by large commercial fleets.
These boats often use harmful trawls in which turtles, whales and dolphins perish.
Foreign boats fish in the economic zones of coastal countries that have no funds for patrols.
Too many young animals are being removed so that stocks cannot recover.
Small fishermen also fall by the wayside, often in developing countries, who find less fish near the coast and have no money to go further out.
The rules
In fact, fisheries in almost all ocean regions are organized and controlled by 17 regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs).
They monitor stocks and issue licenses for catch quotas.
However, not all fishermen and fleet operators obey the rules.
The criminal element
Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing (IUU) is a major problem.
Boats fish in the territorial waters of other countries, switch off their tracking devices in order not to be detected, fish species that are under protection.
In the IUU index of the “Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime”, China comes off worst, followed by Taiwan, Cambodia and Russia.
The fleet
Fishing in waters far away from local coasts is problematic.
Here the EU countries with around 250 and the USA with around 300 boats are dwarfs.
China dwarfs everything: officially there were around 2,700 registered long-distance fishing boats in 2019.
But according to analyzes by the London think tank Overseas Development Institute from 2020, around 17,000 Chinese boats are caught far from home.
The subsidies
According to a Canadian study, global fisheries subsidies totaled around $ 35.4 billion in 2018.
A few billion are used to strengthen good fisheries management and sustainable fishing, but according to the study, 63 percent of the money goes into harmful subsidies, especially for fuel.
The largest donors of subsidies
According to the Canadian study, China is by far the largest payer of harmful subsidies.
There, 5.9 billion dollars were paid, from Japan 2.1 billion dollars and from the EU two billion dollars.
The agreement
Subsidies are to be banned for boats caught illegally, as well as for boats looking for overfished species and for those fishing far from home waters.
The sticking points
It is unclear who determines how, whether a boat has been involved in illegal fishing and how long subsidies will then be suspended, or which stocks are overfished and which management methods are appropriate to avoid overfishing.
One of the biggest
The sticking point from the EU perspective is the fact that China, the second largest economy in the world, claims the status of developing country in the WTO, for which “special and preferential treatment” applies.
These can be exceptions to obligations or longer transition periods for the implementation of measures.
Europeans and Americans insist that China, with the world's largest fishing fleet, be explicitly exempted from such preferential treatment.
Benefit of an agreement
The American environmental organization Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the total amount of fish in the world's oceans would increase by 12.5 percent by 2050 if all harmful fishing subsidies were abolished.
That would be 35 million tons more fish - three times as much fish as is eaten in Africa in a whole year.
dpa