India’s Crucial Role In Combating Global Overfishing Crisis

India is calling for a 25-year transition period to curb the global overfishing problem, a deal being negotiated ahead of the World Trade Organization’s meetings next month in Abu Dhabi. But the transition period is not needed. In addition to the environmental benefits of more sustainable fishing practices, this is an opportunity for India to stand up for fishers and citizens across developing coastal nations. The sooner it’s put into action, the better. Here are three reasons why.

First, the effort required to catch fish in and around India’s ocean areas has been in constant decline for many years, signaling too much strain. Its “per-capita catch per fisher has declined from 3.0 metric tons in 1980 to 2.3 metric tons in 2019,” report Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan and M. Krishnan, two Indian economists and fisheries experts. If overfishing continues at current levels, India’s fishing stocks will continue to deteriorate with devastating environmental and economic implications for coastal communities.

The WTO agreement aims to curb subsidized illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which is particularly harmful. Time is of the essence because post-overfishing recovery is often impossible. Few today remember the spectacular collapse of the North American pollock fishery in the Aleutian Basin of the central Bering Sea. It would be one of the largest fisheries in the world if it still existed.

Large foreign subsidized fishing vessels scrape the bottom of India’s ocean areas. The WTO agreement could be a helpful tool to stop that. For instance, in January 2021, two of India’s fishing associations alerted officials to 10 Chinese trawlers in the Arabian Sea. It only takes one of these vessels to haul more than 500 metric tons of fish — hundreds of times larger than the catch by one Indian artisanal fisher, according to Bradley Soule, a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard and INTERPOL.

Second, while there are countries that engage in massive annual fishery subsidies to incentivize the unrestrained fishing at which the WTO agreement is aimed, India is not one of them. India offers only about $300 million of subsidies per year to the small-scale Indian fisheries, which pales in comparison to the massive annual fishery subsidies of $7.3 billion by China, $3.8 billion by the EU and $3.4 billion by the United States. There is nothing in the WTO agreement that would prevent India or any other country (developing or otherwise) from continuing to subsidize its fishers as long as those subsidies don’t lead to IUU fishing.

Third, India wants to be seen as a global leader of developing countries. So many coastal nations are developing countries with communities reliant on fishing for their livelihoods. An estimated 600 million livelihoods depend at least partially on fisheries and aquaculture. Indian leadership to stop the damage from subsidy-driven industrial fishing would be a prestigious demonstration of good stewardship. Coastal communities in South America, for example, are also victimized by large subsidized foreign vessels overfishing their waters.

Among India’s own fishers are highly skilled individuals with impressive knowledge of the sea. But there have been reports of these skilled artisanal fishers being reduced to unskilled labor on foreign trawlers. The longer overfishing continues, the more devastating the consequences for local fishermen and their communities.

To the extent India’s subsidies go towards IUU fishing activities, the Modi government could redirect them in other ways to benefit coastal communities and for the long haul. For instance, about one-third of India’s fishery subsidies go to fuel. The number of multi-day trawlers, many of which receive fuel subsidies, exceeds the optimum fleet size by about 60 percent. Redirecting funds toward safety and navigation gear, insurance premiums, and funding for research and development of fisheries management would benefit the coastal communities in the immediate term while helping them build sustainable fisheries management and practices.

Swift adoption of the WTO agreement to curb harmful fishing subsidies is vital for India to reverse the alarming decline in its own fish stocks and protect its own vulnerable fishing communities. It is also a unique window for India to assert its role as leader of the Global South on emerging environmental issues.