Talks at the WTO to save the world’s fish fail to reach agreement

“A DEBT THAT we owe to the global community” is how Santiago Wills, Colombia’s ambassador to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva, described the talks he has been chairing on ending subsidies for fishing that damages global stocks. Sadly, he was announcing a default. The aim of finalising an agreement by the end of this year will be missed. Negotiations have dragged on for two decades. They had been given some impetus by the decision in 2015 to include in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the aim of eliminating subsidies “by 2020”, a target missed and reinterpreted to mean the end of the year. But environmentalists are despondent that the last vestige of a hard deadline has now vanished. “Missing the SDG target is really important,” says Annabelle Bladon of the International Institute for Environment and Development, a think-tank in London.