Ocean Fish Populations at Risk: How WTO Subsidies Still Fuel Overfishing

0:09 A new World Trade Ocean. A new World Trade Organization fishery subsidies was released earlier last or later last year in 2025. And it talks about subsidies, fishery subsidies, and it's supposed to help with transparency, help with controlling the amount of subsidies that are given in the fisheries industry. But the problem is the fight is not over. We are still funding the problem. And if you like this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, consider following this show so you get an ocean news. every weekday. So just hit that follow button right now so you don't miss tomorrow's story.

0:51 All right, let's talk about what happened in 2022. The World Trade Organization adopted the first phase of a fisheries subsidies agreement. And this in 2025, it adopted the second phase, which was kind of cool. The agreements target subsidies and linked to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, often called IUU fishing. That's what I'll refer to it the rest of this episode. It provides subsidies for vessels engaging in IUU activities and for fishing of over stock fish or over stocks, over fish stocks under certain conditions. However, it does not yet fully address subsidies that drive over capacity and fleet expansion.

1:33 So there's still some problems with this fisheries. It's a great start. Don't get me wrong. It is a fantastic start, but we still have problems with this type of subsidy. We can still poke holes in it, let's just say. Now what the data shows, and the Pew Charitable Trust shows that the agreement is historic but incomplete. Most major subsidy categories that encourage overfishing remain largely untouched. So further negotiation of these phases are required to close all these different types of loopholes. So the government's provided, in a Nature study in 2019, government's provided an estimated 35 billion USD per year in fishery subsidies globally.

2:16 Roughly two thirds of that total is considered capacity enhancing or harmful. We'll talk about that in just a moment. So fuel subsidies are among the most significant contributors to overfishing pressure. And again, we're gonna get into that in a minute. So from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we saw that fisheries support Fisheries support remains uneven across countries. So there's a problem with equity around there. The reform progress is inconsistent and transparency is reporting subsidy flows that still varies widely. So here's the problem with these subsidies, right?

2:57 When you have these capacity enhancing subsidies, it allows fleets to fish farther. basically what it's doing is it gives, it'll give like a tax write-offs or write-offs on gas. It'll allow for, you know, boats, more boats to go further. And so when you go further, you start going into different regions. You start going further away and you start fishing further away. So there may not be a lot of fish along your coastline, right? Or anywhere within your nation's exclusive economic zone. But then all of sudden you can go out those boundaries. You can go to the high seas, right? If your boat is big enough and it's safe to go and you have enough fuel to go, you'll go there. You might go to a different country and fish their stocks.

3:39 Whether you're allowed or not, that's another case. But in these regions, sometimes the borders overlap. And so you can go into a different country that may not have the right expansion. As I said, the equity is not equal. It's not there. So some countries that can't afford to pay their fishers to go further or to be able to fish even within their own boundaries, they lose out because others are coming over because those countries have more money. and the equity, the subsidy equity is just not there. So industrial fleets can even out-compete small-scale fishers like artisanal fishers, which also increases inequity. So you have all these major industrial fleets that go around, these large trawlers, and they even have processing plants on the trawlers, and they can go around and they can fish as many as they want.

4:29 Because they have more fuel, they have bigger ships, they can travel longer, and they can actually process right on the boat. They can even store all the processed fish right on the boat. these subsidies allow for these industrial fishers to just uh profit over these artisanal fishers, over these small-scale fisheries. And subsidies distort the market signal, so masking the true ecological cost of fishing. So essentially, if you start to subsidize boats and subsidize fishers to go out further, to go out longer, to have bigger boats so they can go out further. then they'll come back with a lot of fish and they'll be like, you know what? The fisheries economy is doing really well because they're catching more fish.

5:09 But over the long run, you have all these uh problems ecologically. The fishery stocks will collapse. They're overfished. The food web will collapse or it'll change because the prey that was originally caught by those uh fish species, now overfished, are just gonna blossom. They're gonna go out of control. It's gonna change. the way the food web is and it you know it food webs change it happens but when humans cause that change we're not ready for the consequences of that change the ocean will will be there and they'll survive okay but as of from a fisheries perspective we start to fish smaller pelagic fish and they're not at they're not as as economical it takes longer to catch them and stuff and then we'll start fishing down the food chain and that's not good So if governments pay to expand fleets while claiming to rebuild stocks, policy and science are moving in opposite directions.

6:05 So it's just like yesterday's episode when we talked about political will just being like, you know what, we're just going to subsidize this fishery so that you can go out there and we can make it look like we actually have a lot of fish. That's only gonna last for a certain amount of time. And depending on the country, some countries may not care. We know certainly there's certain administrations that really just don't care. Even in Canada here where we talk about fisheries and fisheries is a big part. We have the longest coastline in the world. A lot of the times we leave our fishing communities out to dry when it comes to managing fisheries because we previously over fish species to continue to be fished. We bow to the political will of the stakeholders even though we're not looking out for the small fishing communities.

6:54 So this is the kind of breakdown you enjoy to hear. Obviously it's not good news, but you enjoy hearing because it's stuff that you don't hear each and every day. I just want you to follow the show. Click that follow button to make sure that you don't miss any episode every weekday morning that we put it out 5 a.m. Eastern. Fridays is an interview episode, but all these during the week, like Monday to Thursday, is all solo ocean news episodes. trying to keep you up to date on what's happening around the ocean. So the overall picture, the bigger picture in this story today, in this episode, is that fisheries populations cannot fully recover if fishing pressures artificially propped up by public money. This is taxpayer money. It's the government providing this money.

7:35 It has to come from somewhere, it comes from the people. And of course, climate change is already reducing ocean productivity in many of these regions, which exacerbates the problem. You start to increase fishing pressure, that fisheries goes down, it has a tough time to recover because of climate change and just continues to go down and down or it just doesn't never reaches the levels that it once was. Continuing to finance over capacity increases risk of the stock collapse. We saw this over and over again in the 70s, 80s and early 90s when the cod fishery collapsed. know, scientists saw the trends. They would tell the minister, in Canada.

8:19 The minister ignored it because the stakeholders still wanted to fish. They would subsidize the fishing fleet to make sure they could go out and continue to fish. Cod Halibut had it basically collapsed. And it hasn't really fully recovered. It still hasn't. 30 years later, it still hasn't fully recovered. Yeah, it's starting to recover, but we haven't seen full recovery. And we continue to bow to stakeholders to say, you know what? Yeah, if you want to fish further offshore, you can do it. Every country does it. Every country. Now, the next negotiation phase of the World Trade Organization will determine whether real reform happens or whether harmful subsidies remain protected. And look, we have seen how these uh large negotiation meetings happen, like how they work.

9:05 We've seen it in the plastic treaty. We've seen it in the climate treaty. know, oil and gas and fisheries lobbyists will be sent out to really start to uh mold the future. to their will so they can continue to pollute with CO2 and harmful greenhouse gases. They can continue to make money hand over fist without worrying about local communities, without worrying about the environment. so, know, fossil fuel companies, fishing company, large industrial fishing companies, all they care about is profit. That's all they care about. They don't care about you, they don't care about the people. All they care about is profit. And when you have a situation where you have these meetings, is important that nonprofit organizations send all their people.

9:52 It is important that we send all our support so that we want better managed oceans and less subsidy so we can get a fair World Trade Organization fishery subsidies document and policy so that we can reduce IEU fishing and eventually eliminate IEU fishing, which comes out with a lot of other things that come with that, not only in the environment, but human rights. and we reduce and eliminate fishery slaves. So the big question here is can we rebuild fish populations while continuing to subsidize fleet expansion? And I think you can, but you have to do it very carefully. I'm not an economist, so I don't know exactly how, but I feel like there's a middle ground here where you're not trying to increase the fishing pressure.

10:37 And I think the problem is you have to follow the science. The subsidies should match what the science says. If the quota has to go down, the subsidies shouldn't go out. If the quota can come up, maybe the subsidies go out. But it has to be fully managed and monitored. Until harmful subsidies are fully removed, we are still paying to deplete the ocean. That's really what it comes down to. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Go to speakupforblue.com forward slash feedback. You can either voice your thoughts by leaving a voicemail or write it out, text it out. Love to hear what you have to say. And of course, follow this podcast if you want to hear the latest and greatest of ocean news. each and every weekday, 5am Eastern.

11:19 And thank you for joining me on today's episode of how to protect the ocean podcast. I am your host, Angelo and have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.