Developing countries like India provides a meagre $35 per fisherman per year subsidy as compared to $76,000 per fisher annually by developed countries like Norway, India told the World Trade Organisation ahead of its general council meeting next week and proposed to shift from aggregate subsidies to per capita subsidies for determining WTO obligations equitably, two officials close to development said.
India is committed to safeguard interests of its millions of small fishers against the lobby of developed world comprising China and European countries engaging in distant-water fishing in industrial scale, which is unsustainable, they said requesting anonymity.
“Like safeguarding interests of our farmers and ensuring food security for 800 million poor through MSP [minimum-support price] programme, protection of fishermen is also non-negotiable for India. We have communicated our position to WTO ahead of the meeting on December 16-17,” one of them said. According to the ministry of fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying, Indian fisheries and aquaculture sector provides livelihood support to 28 million fishers.
India said multilateral talks on the subject of sustainable fishery must first start with determining responsibilities of developed nations in damaging global fisheries wealth. They must first withdraw all subsidies to distant-water fishing and agree on treating the subsidy issue equitably, the official said.
India is against the developed nations’ approach to calculate subsidies given by individual countries in absolute term as an annual aggregate amount and the same has been raised in our paper submitted to the WTO recently. “Aggregate figures can obscure disparities in subsidy allocation per fisher across countries. Per fisher subsidy metrics, on the other hand, offer insights into how much financial assistance each fisher receives. This granularity helps identify the level of support reaching different segments of the fishing population. Therefore, using the total value of subsidies as the benchmark runs the risk of pinning responsibility on countries that are not responsible for unsustainable subsidies while exonerating countries that have a small absolute size (or fishing sector) but have a high intensity of subsidization that could be unsustainable,” the paper said.
“Therefore, a more rational and prudent approach would be to consider the subsidy amount per fisher, as the basis for imposing more rigorous disciplines on Members,” it said giving an illustrative example. India provides a subsidy of $35 per fisher per year. This translates to a meagre amount of subsidy, less than $3 per fisher per month, which also accounts for subsidies provided during the fishing ban period, it said. Indian fishermen traditionally stop fishing for two months during the breeding season, thus sustaining the nature.
“A fisher receiving such a meagre amount of subsidy is unlikely to create overcapacity or engage in overfishing. In fact, Indian fishers, on average, catch about 480 kg a year or 40 kg a month. Therefore, such traditional fishing practices can be characterized as subsistence fishing. In contrast, historical subsidizers [the developed countries] provide subsidies as high as $76000 per fisher per year. The catch per fisher for historical subsidizers is as high as 2330 kg per year,” the paper said.
