Fisheries Subsidies, Sustainable Development and the WTO

Earlier this year, Anja von Moltke, as Editor, and his publisher, Earthscan, with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released the book Fisheries Subsidies, Sustainable Development and the WTO. The book is actually a compilation of a long work developed by UNEP in the last 10 years about the complex relation between subsidies and sustainability in the fisheries activity. At present, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is developing a large discussion about the national subsidies in fisheries. The WTO is trying to evaluate the distortion produced by the subsidies on the international trade. On this question, well-known arguments and counter-arguments have been produced in the last 20 years. This discussion is being developed also in forums such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), inspired by the debate that took place in the recent past on the subject of agricultural subsidies. This discussion made it clear that in some cases the agricultural subsidies have negative effects on consumers, foster inequality of revenues or generate agricultural surpluses in some products. Of course, not all this is solved following the simplistic motto ‘all subventions are bad’, which reduces every solution to the removal of any national intervention. In my opinion, the present economic crisis introduces some additional questions in the controversies over the role of the national administrations and demands a new, more complex approach than that assumed in the past. In this line it is perhaps necessary to consider new aspects, such as food security, the role of small peasants, the role of large food-processing corporations, the real access to the international markets, the access to the credit or the manipulation of prices (that not only can be forced by national administrations, but also by private corporations).