A planned global agreement to better protect fish stocks has failed for the time being. The 164 participating countries at the WTO conference were unable to reach an agreement. There were also failures in other areas.
An international agreement to better protect fish stocks was planned, but nothing came of it. Negotiators from the 164 countries of the World Trade Organization were unable to achieve success. There was also no agreement at the conference in Abu Dhabi on other important points, such as in the area of agriculture.
The fisheries agreement should have curbed any subsidies that lead to overfishing or overcapacity. On the one hand, this is intended to protect fish stocks and, on the other hand, to prevent more and more boats from being built and used. It would have complemented an agreement reached in 2022 that only addressed the worst forms of subsidies. But despite extending the five-day negotiations, negotiators did not reach a positive conclusion.
“There was just no give and take,” a senior European official told Reuters. “Unfortunately, there was no happy ending in the poker between industrialized and developing countries,” said Anna Holl-Buhl, a fishing expert at the WWF Environmental Foundation. “The result of the negotiations is de facto a license to continue the overexploitation of the seas.”
Small success: Moratorium on e-commerce tariffs
Only an extension of the moratorium on tariffs for electronic commerce could be agreed upon – and only in the form of a minimal consensus. The countries agreed not to impose such tariffs for the time being, but only until March 31, 2026 at the most. German industry would have liked the practice without tariffs, which has been common since 1998, to be set as the standard once and for all.
Blockage by this Unanimity principle
World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala sought to put a positive spin on the final meeting of a difficult week. “We worked hard this week, we achieved some important things, but we weren’t able to finish others.” Other WTO participants described the talks as intense and at times heated. Negotiations will now continue at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva.
The difficulty is that the decision of the WTO members must always be unanimous. So each country effectively has a veto. The European Union is negotiating as a bloc for all 27 member states.
No Dispute resolution system
Even before the conference began, it was clear that another issue close to the hearts of German business would not make progress: the restoration of the dispute resolution system.
It has been partially blocked for four years because the US is preventing the appointment of appeals judges. They demand extensive WTO reforms, for which there is currently no majority.