Fishing nations reject NZ plan to ban subsidies

1.00pm

GENEVA - New Zealand has called for a complete ban on all state subsidies deemed to encourage over-fishing by the world's fleets, but major fishing nations such as Japan and South Korea firmly rejected the plan on Wednesday.

The proposal was put to negotiators at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is seeking accord on how to limit state aids to fishing, blamed by many experts for a worrying depletion of world fish stocks.

New Zealand, which was backed by a number of WTO members, including Chile, Peru, Norway and the United States, said that the simplest way to resolve the issue would be to begin with a ban and then negotiate any exemptions, trade officials said.

"It would be easier to apply and would be more transparent," the New Zealand negotiator was quoted by officials as telling the closed-door meeting.

But the European Union, which favours new restrictions on subsidies, called the scheme "brutal" and said it would make it difficult for it to come to the aid of small fishing communities in some of its poorer members, such as Portugal.

Japan, along with its fishing allies South Korea and Taiwan, said the plan went far beyond the goal of "disciplining" fishing subsidies, which WTO members had set themselves when launching the negotiations.

The talks are part of a wider round of free trade discussions due to be concluded by the end of this year but which have fallen well behind schedule because of deep differences over how to reform world farm trade.

According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 75 per cent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are either fully fished, over-exploited, depleted or just slowly recovering.

Exports say that fishing subsidies, which run to some US$20 billion ($32bn) a year worldwide, are a prime cause of over-exploitation.

But despite the negative response to the New Zealand plan, officials attending a separate meeting of experts at the United Nations in Geneva said that there were clear signs that countries were at least agreed that something had to be done.

"The polarisation has been reduced and there are good prospects that this (negotiation) can move forward," Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, a senior official at Germany's Ministry for the Environment, told reporters.

In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg recognised the need to "eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing".

- REUTERS