The Philippine government has called on fellow ministers of agriculture and trade at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to speed up trade negotiations and come up with new disciplines to eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal fishing, not declared and unregulated (IUU), overfished stocks and overcapacity and overfishing.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar and Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez made the call at the virtual ministerial meeting of the WTO Trade Negotiations Committee on Fisheries Subsidies.

“The Philippines stands alongside other WTO member countries who have pledged to achieve an outcome in the fisheries subsidy negotiations ahead of the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference (MC12) in December this year Lopez said.

“This will only be possible if there is strong political will and diplomatic flexibility in the negotiations,” he added.

For his part, Dar urged WTO members to reconsider the current wording of the current draft of the trade agreement on fisheries subsidies.

“The current draft text of the agreement contains an exception that if a prohibited subsidy occurs in disputed waters, it will not be reviewed by a WTO panel, as this will provide a loophole for countries involved in disputes. maritime disputes to be exempted from the disciplines, ”Dar said.

“Questions of land claims or the delimitation of borders or maritime areas are of the utmost concern to the Philippines, but nothing should prevent a properly constituted panel from hearing a case,” he added.

He also stressed that flexibility and exemptions for poor and vulnerable artisanal fishermen in developing and least developed countries should not create a permanent exception to effective disciplines to tackle overcapacity and overfishing.

Declining fish stocks threaten to worsen poverty and endanger coastal communities that depend on fishing, WTO says, based on latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations agriculture (FAO).

He added that fish stocks are at risk of collapsing in many parts of the world due to overexploitation, where an estimated 34 percent of global stocks are overexploited from 10 percent in 1974, reflecting the pace of exploitation and indicating that the fish population could not rebuild as quickly as it should.

In the Philippines, illegal fishing accounted for 27 to 40 percent of the fish caught in 2019, representing an annual value of about 62 billion pesos (US $ 1.3 billion). In addition, at least 30,000 or 30 percent of municipal vessels are still unregistered, and commercial fishermen fail to report up to 422,000 metric tonnes of fish each year.