Ambitious subsidy reform by the WTO presents opportunities for ocean health restoration

Christopher Costello, Katherine Millage, Sabrina Eisenbarth, Elsa Galarza, Gakushi Ishimura, Laura Lea Rubino, Vienna Saccomanno, U. Rashid Sumaila, Kent Strauss

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle in a journalpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1391-1396
Number of pages6
JournalSustainability Science
Volume16
Issue number4
Early online date28 Sep 2020
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2021

Bibliographical note

Bibliografía: páginas 5-6
The article Ambitious subsidy reform by the WTO presents opportunities for ocean health restoration, written by Christopher Costello, Katherine Millage, Sabrina Eisenbarth, Elsa Galarza, Gakushi Ishimura, Laura Lea Rubino, Vienna Saccomanno, U. Rashid Sumaila and Kent Strauss, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 28 September 2020 without open access. With the author(s)’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 08 December 2020 to © The Author(s) 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

The original article has been updated.

Keywords

  • Fisheries subsidies
  • Overfshing
  • Sustainable development goals
  • World trade organization
  • Fisheries management

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