A University of Sussex economist is calling on global trade leaders to end harmful fishing subsidies that incentivize overcapacity and lead to overfishing.

Professor Richard Tol is calling on World Trade Organization (WTO) members to grasp the opportunity at their Twelfth Ministerial Meeting to reach an historic agreement that eliminates subsidies that lowers costs of fuel and vessel construction or which artificially inflate market prices.

The Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex Business School has put his name to a letter calling for global change co-signed by almost 300 academics from 46 different countries and newly published in the journal Science.

The letter calls on the WTO to eliminate subsidies to distant-water fishing fleets in order to prevent overfishing on the high seas and in waters under national jurisdiction in order to help meet Sustainable Development Goal 14.6.

The WTO is being urged to only allow exemptions to the rules to be considered for small-scale fishers that use low impact gears or that fish for subsistence.

The 12th WTO Ministerial Conference (MC12) will take place from 30 November to 3 December 2021 in Geneva, Switzerland having been postponed from its original scheduling in June 2020 in Kazakhstan due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Ministerial Conference, which is attended by trade ministers and other senior officials from the organization’s 164 members, is the highest decision-making body of the WTO.

Prof Tol said: “Subsidies for long-distance fishing reward large companies from East Asia and Spain to take the fish from poor families in Africa and the Pacific. This is unfair, bad for economic development, and bad for the environment.”