Young, Margaret --- "Food security, sustainability and trade distortions: fisheries subsidies and the WTO" [2012] ELECD 1057; in Rayfuse, Rosemary; Weisfelt, Nicole (eds), "The Challenge of Food Security" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012) 190

Book Title: The Challenge of Food Security

Editor(s): Rayfuse, Rosemary; Weisfelt, Nicole

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939371

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Food security, sustainability and trade distortions: fisheries subsidies and the WTO

Author(s): Young, Margaret

Number of pages: 16

Abstract/Description:

The consumption of fish provides a major source of protein for much of the world’s population. Government payments to the fishing sector have a significant effect on the economic and physical access to this limited resource. At times, such subsidies maintain domestic vessel capacity to harvest within and outside national coastal areas and thus provide food within a state. At other times, such subsidies are used to facilitate the fishing effort and the trade and exports of fish products, sometimes to the detriment of the food security of local populations. At all times, paying the fishing sector to build more boats threatens a resource that is already 80% fully or over exploited. Dwindling fish stocks are a major threat to the food security of all people, and the perverse incentives represented by fisheries subsidies are a part of the problem. At the very least, the continued subsidization of fishing industries may conflict with states’ implementation of the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security.