ENVIRONMENT-UNITED NATIONS: Groups Push for Ratification of Fish Treaty

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 29 1997 (IPS) - The majority of the world’s major fishing nations have not signed a U.N. treaty that would regulate world fish stocks – two years after the agreement was presented for signature.

Now, environmental groups are pushing to ensure that the holdouts – including eight nations, which account for more than one-quarter of the world’s fish catch – sign on to U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement so it finally can enter into force.

“This agreement offers real hope of reversing the decline in world fisheries,” said Michael Sutton, director of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Endangered Seas Campaign. “But foot- dragging, and a lack of political will among the top fishing nations, so far has prevented the treaty to enter into force.”

As the U.N. General Assembly meets this week to re-open its yearly discussion of the world’s oceans, the WWF upped the ante by putting out a ‘scorecard’ of the major fishing nations, showing that only four – Russia, Iceland, Norway and the United States – have ratified the treaty.

By contrast, eight developing nations which account for 27 percent of world fishing have not igned the agreement: Chile, Peru, India, North Korea, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysiaad Vietnam.

The agreement, formally called the U.N. Agreement on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, has been ratified by only 15 countries in the two years since it was opened for signing. This is half the number of signatures needed before it can go into effect.

During discussions this week on oceans and the related Law of the Sea Treaty, the 185-nation General Assembly should urge governments to ratify the Fish Stocks Agreement and set up a timetable so that the treaty can enter into force by the end of 1998, argued Carole St. Laurent, a WWF consultant on fisheries.

Environmental groups, like Greenpeace and the WWF, also look to the General Assembly to push for World Trade Organisation (WTO) action to prod nations to reduce government subsidies that favour commercial fishing. Those subsidies amount to tens of billions of dollars a year, an are linked to the ‘over-capacity’ of the fishing industry, said Sutton.

“The European Union alone spends two-thirds of its fisheries budget subsidising commercial fleets” which in turn are linked to over-fishing in the waters off the developing world, he contended.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that some 70 percent of the world’s main fisheries either have been exploied to their maximum capacity, or over-exploited. Meanwhile, the largest-scale fishing fleets, which account for most of the over-fishing, receive an immense amount of government subsidies – amounting to 54 billion dollars in 1989 alone, according to FAO.

Some groups are challenging the use of large-scale trawlers directly. Earlier this month, the U.S. Congress passed legislation which prevents the re-entry of factory trawlers and other large fishing vessels into the waters off New England, and also imposed a one-year moratorium on any U.S. activity by foreign-based large- scale fishing vessels.

Just last week, said Clif Curtis, political adviser for Greenpeace, Chile’s Supreme Court ruled against allowing the U.S. based vessel ‘American Monarch’ to enter Chilean waters. The Court ruled that the boat, which is capable of catching 1,000 tonnes of fish per day and which exports most of its catch to Japan, could cause “irreparable damage” to Chile’s marine life.

Greenpeace, in a statement issued from Chile, called the ruling “a positive step in defending the country’s natural resources,” but warned that the ‘American Monarch’ is only “the tip of the iceberg” of potential overfishing threats.

Fishing as a whole has increased dramatically in recent years, with the fleet of middle- and large-scale vessels doubling from 585,000 in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990, according to the FAO.

The Fish Stocks Agreement intends to reduce the harm from over- fishing by urging countries to adopt a ‘precautionary approach’ in which vessels must err on the side of conservation rather than of increasing the volume of fishing.

The treaty also pushes governments to cooperate in managing fisheries and promotes the use of non-destructive fishing gear. Greenpeace estimates that some 27 million tonnes of unwanted fish are caught, killed and dumped back into the sea each year, simply because some large-scale fishing technologies – like driftnet fishing – pick up a heavy volume of undesirable fish.