Broadening the global debate on harmful fisheries subsidies through the use of subsidy intensity metrics

Abstract In line with Target 14.6 of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (SDGs), the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been tasked with achieving a multi-lateral agreement on eliminating harmful fisheries subsidies. Despite almost two decades of negotiations and increasing public attention, an agreement remains elusive. There are numerous roadblocks to these negotiations, but one key issue is that there is no clear metric for the potential scale and relative impact of fishery subsidies. As such, much attention has been targeted towards the provision of large sums of subsidies to industrial and distant-water fleets, and the subsidies provided by the largest subsidising countries—the top seven together provide over 65% of the global total. This large percentage justifies the focus on these countries but doing so alone and without understanding the context within which the subsidies are provided, may ignore pervasive impacts of subsidies unrelated to their scale, such as their inequitable distribution. Using recently available data and various scaling analyses we developed a series of different subsidy metrics in order to broaden our understanding of the distribution of fisheries subsidies. We show that different global regions and individual countries could be considered as ‘top’ subsidisers, depending on the metric used. This highlights a potential issue of focusing on the absolute amounts provided as a de facto indicator of harm alone, which can detract from efforts by developing countries to redirect their harmful subsidies towards better support for their fishers and industries. Failure to eliminate harmful fisheries subsidies has ramifications across the SDGs and across global regions, regardless of the absolute amount of subsidies that are being provided therein.