According to Greenpeace (GP), powers in the World Trade Organization (WT) are trying to significantly reduce and perhaps even eliminate tariffs on international fish trade. Their rationale is that further liberalisation of fish trade is both important and beneficial to developing countries. But GP disagrees.
In a recently published paper “Trading Away Our Oceans – Why trade liberalisation of fisheries must be abandoned”, (by Marc Allain, marcallain@sjma.net and edited by Daniel Mittler et al., daniel.mittler@int.greenpeace.org), GP says that further liberalisation of trade in fish and fish products, particularly through the reduction/elimination of tariffs, will only bring lasting economic benefits to a handful of developed, fish-exporting countries that have relatively well-established and well-managed domestic fisheries.
GP is taking for granted that such liberalisation must increase fish supply beyond sustainable levels, and only a handful of industrialised countries have the means and, hopefully, political will to withstand the suppliers’ pressure. Outside of those, says GP, no other countries will benefit because of the lack of effective fisheries management at the exporting and importing end. Three case studies of the impacts of past fish trade liberalisation, in Mauritania, Argentina and Senegal, and characteristic of most of the world, demonstrate that with weak fisheries management fish market liberalisation is detrimental to economies, societies and stock conservation.
Greenpeace concludes that further fish trade liberalisation will accelerate already severe rates of stocks’ depletion. While tariff reductions for fish and fish products may bring short-term boosts in some developing countries’ export earnings, the margins for doing so, are very tight.
GP further says that with most high-value export stocks already far beyond sustainable levels of exploitation, developing countries will deplete what is left, and reduce in the process both genetic and biological diversity. Their marine ecosystems will be eroded, while their consumers would have to pay higher prices, as more of the national fishing effort is diverted to fishing for export.
GP complains also that global liberalisation will boost the diverting of fish from the plates of the third world’s poor to produce fishmeal for unsustainable salmon and shrimp aquaculture, and that there will likely be a shift of tuna canning industry from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries to South-East Asia, with Bangkok becoming the hub of the tuna canning industry. African countries will lose the trade preferences associated with the Lomé and Cotonou agreements between the EU and ACP countries.
Further liberalisation may eventually affect even industrialised countries that benefit from inadequate management regimes in developing countries. Faced with the competition from cheaper imports their domestic fleets are likely to respond by fishing harder already depleted or threatened stocks. Thus, while consumers in developed countries should see in short-term less expensive seafood, further liberalisation will only accelerate continued over-fishing – especially in developing countries – leading to rising prices as global supplies diminish.
Until international fisheries management instruments are universally adhered to and enforced, further trade liberalisation of fish and fish products would be irresponsible. Hence, GP wants to have the Non Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) negotiations suspended, and tariff liberalisation for fisheries removed from bilateral and regional trade agreements. Instead, states should ensure that international law is implemented fully and establish new rules to ensure sustainable and equitable management of the high seas. GP wants also to see developing countries provided with the capacity and know-how to establish and enforce effective fisheries management regimes in their own waters.
The Greenpeace appeal should by no means be dismissed as just another green alarmism. It illuminates a facet of the WTO crusade for world trade liberalisation that should, undoubtedly, be taken into consideration in intergovernmental deliberations. However, while GP mainly focuses on possible damage to fish stocks by both developed and developing countries’ fisheries, worldwide trade liberalisation may also be disadvantageous, mainly to the smaller producers.
Massive fish producing fisheries often are able to export ‘small extras’ of their catches at prices substantially lower than small local producers, who if unprotected by tariffs, won’t be able to sustain their processing plants. The result: processors turn from local to imported fish. Since, consumers as a rule hardly enjoy any markdowns, the increased profits stay with the processors and in the marketing channels. Some processors may find out that importing processed fish product pays better than processing fish, whether caught or imported. The outcome is socially adverse: shutting down plants and sacking workers. A typical case to study: Israel, which following liberalisation of fish-importation lost the bulk of its small-scale pelagic fishery in the Mediterranean, almost all of its Lake Kinneret bleak fishery, and several canneries.
Notwithstanding, I see a sort of mystification when it comes to GP’s statement that “developing countries must be provided with the capacity and know-how to establish and enforce effective fisheries management regimes in their own waters”. Thus, one is made to understand that there’s an effective fishery management model all set and ready to be transplanted to Third-World countries. As if the world’s greatest management flops and stocks’ depletion hadn’t occurred where fisheries management establishments boasted best data collection, sea surveys, and population dynamics science, not to speak of enforcement capacity.
In fact, some of the developing countries practice traditional and other forms of fisheries management, different from that practiced by EU and North American countries, which I suspect represents the model that GP is allotting to developing countries. Their fishery resources are not worse off than the ones in the North Sea or off East Canada, and the greatest risk they face is the one coming from foreign industrial fleets that, with or without all sorts of agreements and ‘arrangements’, are guilty for almost every depletion of fish stocks in the EEZs of developing countries.
Fish trade liberalisation might become an asset or an injury. Every fishing nation would have to make up its own mind what it would do for its fish stocks and its economy.
benyami@actcom.net.il
