India will not compromise on fishermen’s livelihood, Goyal tells WTO meet

Commerce and Industries Minister Piyush Goyal, has said the livelihood of traditional fishermen cannot be compromised while negotiating with fisheries subsidies. 

Speaking at the WTO meeting in Geneva, the Minister said “we cannot institutionalize the privileges of few countries and take away the right to progress for those who are working for the vulnerable marginalized sections of the society. 

“Particularly for those countries, which are not engaged in harmful deep-sea fishing, we need to have different views. Otherwise, we may have a similar situation like the agreement on agriculture, where inequities and asymmetries persist, causing several countries to still depend on food aid”, the Minister said. 

“The current proposals for WTO reform could fundamentally change its institutional architecture, skewing the system against the interests of developing countries. We need to move ahead preserving the core principles of consensus and ensuring special and differential treatment, with people and development”, Goyal said. 

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Pirate fishing ruled out

With WTO meeting on fisheries subsidies triggering a global discourse, marine fishery experts here have ruled out the possibilities of overfishing or pirate fishing in Indian territorial waters. 

WTO negotiations are pertaining to prohibiting subsidies concerning pirate fishing (better known in the name of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing); over-fished stocks and overcapacity.    

However, experts pointed out that India’s total fish catch hovers around 3.5 million tonnes per year and not crossed four million tonnes, despite the potential of 5.3 million tonnes.  This indicates that the country’s stocks are healthy to keep overfishing at bay at an aggregate level. This is in stark contrast with developed countries that practise industrial fishing.   

Socio-political issue

There is no record of pirate fishing in the waters as per the FAO definition. More than a biological or technical issue, overfishing needs to be approached as a socio-political issue. “What is the guarantee that prohibition of subsidies will avoid overfishing, given the fact that payments on access agreements, where less developed countries sell fishing rights to developed nations, are kept out of the subsidy purview?, experts have asked. 

WTO allows subsidies to rebuild a stock that collapses by continued overfishing. However, many developed countries utilize this nomenclatural advantage and re-pack their subsidy portfolios. But India whose stocks are harvested well within its potential yield could come under the threat of limiting its meagre subsidy basket just because the size of its fishing fleet (most of them artisanal) in operations is large enough to be treated as overcapacity. 

The present WTO draft, according to experts, does not clearly define what “overcapacity” means for a member country and how to arrive at the optimum size of fishing fleet. 

The spending of fishermen on kerosene for sea venture is common in India and other tropical waters. Safety at sea as well as good fisheries governance comes with a price, and if the WTO draft is approved without such changes that should yield a Special and Differential Treatment (S&DT) regime. India has rightly argued for S&DT considering the lack of level playing field across 164 member countries. 

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