September 6, 2o22 — Oceana Senior Analyst Daniel Skerritt has warned the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, agreed to in June 2022, will only remove a “trivial” amount of harmful fishery subsidies unless further expanded, as promised when the deal was approved.
While acknowledging that the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies is a “significant achievement, at least politically,” Skerritt said it currently falls short of addressing Target 14.6 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to “prohibit … subsidies which contribute to overcapacity and overfishing and eliminate subsidies that contribute to IUU fishing.”