Part one of the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s treaty to ban harmful fisheries subsidies finally came into force Sept. 15. WTO member states adopted the treaty in June 2022 following a grueling 21-year negotiation. The agreement, dubbed “Fish One,” aims to improve ocean sustainability by banning government subsidies that support the fishing of already-overfished stocks and curbing those that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. “There are weaknesses and gaps, and there’s still work to be done, but this is the start of the WTO trying to have a positive impact on environmental sustainability,” Daniel Skerritt, a senior analyst at U.S.-based conservation NGO Oceana, told Mongabay via email. The WTO had to split its effort to ban harmful fisheries subsidies into two parts in order to reach any agreement at all. The body requires full consensus to strike any deal, and its member states could not iron out their differences over subsidies that contribute to building fleets with capacity to fish unsustainably and other forms of overfishing. They decided in 2022 to leave these crucial issues for later in the interest of breaking the deadlock to agree on part one. It took the required two-thirds, or 111 of 166 member states, more than three years to ratify Fish One — a milestone achieved when Brazil, Kenya, Tonga and Vietnam submitted their acceptances to the WTO on Sept. 15. A special meeting of the WTO general council in Geneva marked the occasion. The WTO had previously failed to seal…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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