WTO members on 18 July agreed to move to the next phase of negotiations on fisheries subsidies after a surge of new and revised proposals aimed at reaching a decision by December 2017 at the Ministerial Conference were submitted. Members assented to the preparation of a document compiling the proposals in the form of a matrix, which is intended to help members firm up positions over the summer ahead of intensive September 2017 negotiations.
At the 13 July meeting, revised submissions from the EU and Indonesia were introduced, as was a new proposal from Norway. After that meeting, the African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) Group of States and the Least-Developed Countries (LDC) Group submitted new textual proposals, and a group of six Latin American countries submitted a revised text. The Latin American group is composed of Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru and Uruguay. All six of the new and revised proposals were discussed at the 17 to 18 July 2017 meeting. Along with a previously discussed joint submission by New Zealand, Iceland and Pakistan, these make for a total of seven textual proposals on fisheries subsidies.
All seven proposals will be reflected in the compilation matrix which, the chair clarified, the proponents had asked him, with the help of the WTO Secretariat, to prepare on their behalf. He emphasised that this would not be a chair’s proposed text, but a simple compilation of members’ proposals with nothing added or subtracted. The chair said this document, with its side-by-side presentation of the various proposals, should help members as they prepared to consult with their capitals over the summer. The next cluster of meetings will be scheduled in September 2017.
A number of members reiterated calls - reflected in all of the proposals - for a fisheries subsidies agreement to be reached at the 11th Ministerial Conference, which will be held in December 2017 in Buenos Aires. Several members lauded, in particular, the timely inclusion of LDCs’ and ACP members’ interests in the text-based phase of the negotiations.
The chair, summarising the meeting, said the discussions were “preliminary but useful”. In terms of prohibitions of subsidies that led to overfishing and overcapacity, the chair said members were exploring various approaches to pinpoint such subsidies and needed to thrash out a solution.
On the issue of the geographic scope or how different parts of the seas and oceans would be covered by the disciplines, the chair said that interesting ideas had arisen and he encouraged members to continue to think these through. On another issue of scope, he remarked that there was a sense of “emerging clarity” that the agreement would be restricted to subsidies to maritime fishing and would exclude subsidies granted for aquaculture and inland fishing.
A further issue identified by the chair was what role, if any, certain determinations by national, regional, and international fishery management authorities should have in WTO rules. Special and differential treatment for developing countries and LDCs remains “a work in progress”. The chair urged members to continue to check with their respective national fishery authorities.