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Over the next few months, decisions to be made in international trade negotiations could transform fishing on the Pacific Coast, and worldwide. Because real power over fisheries policy is moving to the international trade negotiating table, the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR) and Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), in collaboration with our international counterparts via the World Forum of Fish-Harvesters & Fishworkers (WFF), are demanding the protection of fisheries resources and the small, independent, and traditional fishing communities who depend on fisheries resources for their livelihoods.
As this article goes to press, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is trying to finalize agreements and rush through Congress new free trade deals that could impact important policy tools for protecting fisheries resources and fishing communities, including the distribution of quotas, the volume of fish imports and exports, the labels that inform consumers, the public assistance for marketing, infrastructure, habitat restoration, and a host of other fundamentals of fisheries policy. Two major sets of negotiations (the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement and the “Doha Round” of negotiations at the World Trade Organization, or WTO) aim to reduce the ability of people to use their governments to regulate the rapidly globalizing sector of the fishing industry that pledges no allegiance to people or place.
Fisheries resources are at risk of being put under a new global regime that is being written by the world’s largest corporations. Importers, processors and distributors, well-represented by the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), have hired a new top gun as trade counsel to advise US government negotiators in their deals with other nations. Coastal communities need to counterbalance corporate interests by voicing their concerns to policy-makers, including members of Congress, local and state elected officials, fisheries management agencies, and the media before it’s too late.
No decision will have more impact on Pacific Coast fishing communities more quickly than the pending US - Chile Free Trade Agreement. US imports of Chilean farmed salmon have increased tenfold in the past ten years. Monitoring groups in Chile report that the Chilean government has 122 licenses for new salmon farms pending, with investors waiting for the implementation of the bilateral trade agreement that seeks to remove all remaining barriers to the US market. Because the US government refuses to make public the final agreement, the most detailed information available to date is a summary of the agreement prepared by the Chilean Trade Ministry for the Chilean Parliament, which seems more detailed than anything the US Congress has in hand. The document indicates that “all (barriers to) fresh, frozen, and smoked fish products will be eliminated immediately, while the majority for canned or processed fish will be eliminated immediately or within four years.”
Trade negotiators finalized the agreement in late 2002. But US President George W. Bush and Chilean President Lagos still need to sign the agreements, as well as submit “implementing legislation” to their respective legislatures for approval. New “fast track” rules will make the Congressional vote difficult to influence. Pressure from both Democrats and Republicans in salmon states has been slow, so coastal communities need to apply more direct pressure quickly to be heard. Pulling salmon issues out of the agreement could be a deal-breaker for the Chileans, the world’s biggest salmon exporter.
Fishing community and conservation leaders in both the US and Chile have developed a common position around four key points:
Pacific coast fishing communities have been reeling from the increasing volumes of Chilean farmed salmon imports, which are driving prices below the point at which America’s fishing men and women can make a living. The stability of many fishing communities depends on their selling local wild-caught salmon, yet unfair Chilean subsidies have made this impossible. Increasing market access for farmed imports could drive under what remains of the Pacific coast’s commercial salmon fleet, as Alaska is now experiencing by having to declare an economic disaster in the state’s second largest employment sector. We should first address these unbalanced terms of competition before skewing them further.
The San Francisco Chronicle noted on April 1, 2002, that Chilean salmon farms use at least 75 times more antibiotics and hormones to treat diseased fish than their next largest competitors in Norway. Known carcinogens now banned in the US, such as malachite green, are reportedly still being used as fungicides by Chile’s largest exporters. Any new market access agreement with Chile should first assess the health impacts on consumers, and enact precautionary measures to mitigate unknown health risks.
Despite Chilean salmon exporters’ great increases of US market share, salmon farm workers are not benefiting from the gains of trade, and Chile’s traditional artesenal fishing communities are being displaced. Profits go to foreign investors (e.g., large Norwegian farmed salmon corporations) and a handful of Chilean businessmen while workers are still required to work 10 hours days, six days a week, paid only about $100 a month (below a living wage in Chile). Workers suffer unfair and unsafe conditions and are denied core labor rights, which artificially depresses the costs of Chile’s salmon. Chile’s artesenal fishing communities are threatened by expanding salmon farms that destroy their traditional fishing grounds and their access to them. Expanding salmon farms in Chile would displace more people and create more poverty. Chile should guarantee that its workers will measurably benefit from any more market access, and that artesenal fishing communities are guaranteed the restoration of, and preferred access rights to, their traditional fishing grounds.
As the world’s second leading exporter of farmed salmon, industrial aquaculture is destroying Chile’s coastal habitat and native biodiversity. In addition to polluting chemicals and excrement, a recent study shows that the current level of waste generated in Chile’s salmon farming region is equivalent to the amount generated by the nation’s capitol city, Santiago. Having already damaged the unique Lakes Region of Chile, which has one of the world’s last remaining temperate coastal rainforests, the industry is now moving into Patagonia. More market access would predictably trigger an expansion of salmon farms into this rare ecosystem. Opposed by conservationists, artesanal fishermen, tourism businesses, and indigenous peoples, Chile should first implement adequate protections for coastal ecosystems before receiving any wider market access.
Finally, the U.S. Trade Representative’s request that Chile lift its phytosanitary barriers on the import of US salmon eggs could put Chile’s coastal environment at even greater risk. Chile maintains a de facto ban on U.S. exports of Northwest salmon eggs because of what marine biologists consider to be important sanitary measures against the import of documented illnesses carried by salmon eggs. The threat of imported diseases is increasing worldwide. In the face of serious known risks and inconclusive science, nations must be permitted to exercise their rights to maintain precautionary protective measures that safeguard natural systems and human health.
Salmon should be “taken out” of the trade agreement, instead addressing these issues in a new bilateral dialogue that aims to reach a broader set of objectives between the two nations. Such an agreement would first establish and enforce a system of regulation for Chilean salmon farmers, financed in part by the US. Chilean artesenal fishing communities, salmon farm workers, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists would set limits on existing farms. American assistance in monitoring and providing testing equipment could advance that industry’s reparations of the ecological damage it has already done. Resolving questions of displacement of small-scale fishermen from coastal resources and the protection of labor rights and indigenous rights must also be addressed first.
Indeed, it should be U.S. policy to promote alternatives to salmon farming for Chile – alternatives that are both fishermen and environmentally friendly. As for trade policy, the first rule must be “do no harm.”
Global trade negotiators via the World Trade Organization (WTO) are trying to expand new rights for multi-national corporate industrial fishing operations while threatening to class as “trade barriers” some of the key proposals being advocated to protect fisheries resources. This coming September 10-14th, the WTO will meet in Cancun, Mexico, where local fishing communities are working with the WFF to invite fishing men and women from around the world to provide an international voice for the working men and women in the commercial fishing fleet. The WTO’s broad, aggressive agenda (See FN, April 2002, “Not Fish Friendly: The WTO's New Doha Agenda for Fisheries,” at: www.pcffa.org/fn-apr02.htm) to transform the global industry is uniting fishing communities across borders. WTO is in no way an appropriate forum to become a new global fisheries management agency. Consider some of these issues currently under negotiation:
The WTO’s biggest decision in Cancun will be whether governments should reduce their ability to regulate foreign investment in their own fisheries. Trade bureaucrats consider Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs) or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) to be a form of foreign investment, so these talks could directly impact the terms by which ITQs are bought and sold. National regulations, such as restricting quotas to only fishing men and women (such as those in place for the North Pacific halibut and sablefish fishery) could thus become “discriminatory” and effectively banned under proposed new WTO rules.
As more and more nations implement the “privatization of fisheries resources” via ITQs, what is emerging is a global agenda by fish products traders to manage the oceans as a single fishery. Quotas could be bought and sold on speculation and timed so that when stocks go down in one region of the world, fleets and crew could be shifted shifted to another. The WTO’s proposed investment agenda would view any nation’s own restrictions on ownership of quotas to be in violation of WTO rules and thus subject to its penalties.
The danger is that once quota systems are established in key fishing nations, and implemented under WTO disciplines requiring non-discrimination against foreign ownership, then access to and control of all nation’s fisheries would become ever more concentrated in the hands of large, distant financial institutions and multi-national corporations. This is the very opposite direction of demands by fishing communities worldwide to recognize rights to traditional access to fisheries, and to put their management under the control of communities for local markets first.
Cancun negotiations could also threaten efforts to inform consumers about their seafood choices via labeling. For instance, language such as that in the new US Farm Bill, requiring country-of-origin labeling and labeling distinguishing farmed salmon from wild, could soon be deemed “unfair and discriminatory” under current trade rules. Some exporters claim that labeling puts undue burdens on exporters, especially from poor nations. This could deal a blow to marketing assistance programs that the States of California and Alaska use to distinguish its own wild caught salmon from farmed salmon. It also means farmed salmon would continue to compete with wild and consumers could never be told the difference.
Governments gave the WTO a specific mandate as part of the so-called Doha Development Agenda that empowers the WTO to undertake a “search and destroy” mission to identify so-called Non Tariff Measures (NTMs) that have the potential to impact trade. Major farm fish producers like Chile want to do away with consumer labeling laws under this rubric so they can continue to flood world markets.
One of the most contentious issues is the fate of eco-labels, such as the one issued by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) (see the March 2003 issue of FN, “Going Beyond Ecolabeling,” at: www.pcffa.org/fn-mar03.htm) which oversees the third-party certification of sustainably harvested fish products. Similar labeling programs also exist for forest and farm products. Alaska’s salmon fisheries recently attained the right to carry the MSC seal as a sign of a sustainably managed fishery. California salmon fishermen have also just begun certification process, and the North Pacific halibut and sablefish fishery, the Oregon Dungeness crab fishery and, perhaps, the Mexico/California spiny lobster fishery are planning to pursue MSC certification for their fisheries.
Trade bureaucrats have said that under current trade rules, eco-labels do not distort trade because of their small volume. But they are clear to note that growth in popularity of certified fish products has been a concern among some fish exporting nations, and that labeling has the potential to become “distorting on trade,” which could make it prohibited under WTO rules. The WTO Commission on Trade & Environment is to deliver a report in Cancun making recommendations about whether or not new rules are needed for eco-labeling and what those rules should be.
The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and its global lobbying counterpart, the International Coalition of Fisheries Associations (ICFA), are claiming that conflicting eco-labeling programs are non-scientific and based on purely subjective criteria. Therefore, says NFI, international standard setting should become the job of the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) and not private certification bodies. The FAO would then become the global body to which the WTO defers for standards on the sustainability of fish products. Japan has already submitted to the WTO a formal proposal suggesting this very idea. The WTO currently does this with pesticide standards via the FAO’s Codex Alimentarius, a pesticide industry-dominated body (see: www.tradewatch.org).
Pacific Coast fishermen and all fishing communities involved in certification need to voice their concerns on these WTO negotiations to ensure that independent seafood labeling does NOT come under WTO control. The danger, of course, is that fisheries that are being conducted in a truly sustainable manner, not simply complying with often minimal national fishing regulations, would have their products undervalued if just about any fishery could get certified, sustainable or not, just by complying with some minimal regulation. At the point nearly any fishery could be certified, certification becomes useless and consumer confidence in the certification program itself is destroyed.
At the same time fishermen on the Pacific coast, already certified or seeking MSC certification, will need to be sensitive to the views of fishing communities around the world, from Europe to India, who criticize eco-labeling as “greenwashing” of destructive industrial fisheries operations, or as “eco-imperialism” that imposes unfair standards on poor nations. Clearly, informed dialogue among the world’s fishing communities is the first necessary step to arriving at a common position on this complex issue.
If we do not speak up, efforts to stop the introduction of genetically modified (GM), or “transgenic,” salmon could also violate WTO rules as an illegal barrier to trade that lacks “sound science.” The EU has maintained its embargo on GM food exports from the US, even as the US threatens to take the EU to the WTO’s dispute resolution process to force open EU markets. The EU knows it would likely lose such a challenge, and the US is waiting for the right political moment (probably at the conclusion of the war with Iraq) to proceed with an official WTO challenge.
This means that the FDA’s current review process of an application to approve GM salmon for consumption in the US market could ultimately become a decision made in the international trade policy arena. It would be inconsistent for the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to reject GM foods when the US Trade Representative is also pushing them on other nations. If the FDA does not approve GM salmon, Canada (where the patent holder resides) could challenge that decision before the WTO, or even demand cash compensation via NAFTA for US efforts to protect its own native fisheries. Of course, once approved by the FDA, Chile salmon farms would be likely to quickly accept it and begin farming GM salmon for export back into the US market, salmon that would inevitably also escape back into the wild. Closer to home, British Columbia salmon farms would surely follow.
While Pacific Coast salmon fishing communities may be feeling the brunt of cheap imports, so too are small-scale fishing communities around the world. In India, the National Forum of Fishers is calling for an embargo on fish imports from industrial trawlers because cheap imports displace the smallest producers from the marketplace. WTO rules on anti-dumping prevent nations from being able to protect fisheries resources or the livelihoods that depend on them. Trade rules need to allow nations to protect these values, especially if they harm coastal ecosystems and marginalized peoples who survive from them. Dumping has also reached crises proportions in the farming and forest sectors as well. These three natural resource sectors are natural allies, together with environmentalists, to get WTO out of controlling natural resources.
The WTO also has a negotiating mandate to unilaterally clarify the relationship of its own trade rules to the emerging body of international environmental laws, such as the UN Migratory Fish Stocks Treaty, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and many others. These so-called Multilateral Environmental Agreements, or MEAs, provide legal protections for communities’ access to their traditional fisheries resources, especially when being pillaged by foreign fleets.
Recently, fishing communities in the north of Chile blocked their ports (pursuant to the UN Fish Stocks Agreement) to Spanish ships that Chilean fishermen believed were seriously depleting coastal swordfish stocks. The European Union threatened action in the WTO on the grounds of blocking “free transit of goods” (Article 5). Chile backed off and today allows Spanish ships to continue landing swordfish, mostly for transshipment on to the lucrative US market. WTO rights of global corporations must not be allowed to trump the traditional access rights of small fishing communities nor the fundamental biological requirements of sustainable fisheries management. Leaders of Chile’s traditional fishing communities also plan to be in Cancun to raise these issues.
The Multilateral Environmental Agreements negotiations could also raise the question of the consistency of the US “Pelly Amendment,” which authorizes US trade embargoes on fish products from foreign vessels that damage US fish conservation programs. While Pelly stipulates that it must be done in accordance with WTO rules, Pelly itself could be challenged as violating WTO requirements. This is yet another front where fishing men and women and fishing communities have to be alert to deals cut between nations and multi-corporations that would destroy our livelihoods.
WHAT WE WANT IN CANCUN
Fishing communities could take the position that many natural-resource based communities and conservation organizations are taking:
These issues are of vital interest to the world’s fishing-dependent communities and there is much that can be done to impact these decisions – except silence. To get involved in these debates, go to the IFR website at: www.ifrfish.org for more information.
Victor Menotti is with the International Forum on Globalization and an IFR Associate working on international trade issues; Pietro Parravano is a commercial fisherman and President of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) as well as a U.S. delegate to the World Forum of Fish-Harvesters & Fishworkers and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission; Zeke Grader is Executive Director of PCFFA, which can be reached at: Southwest Regional Office: PO Box 29370, SF, CA USA 94129-0370, (415)561-5080; Northwest Regional Office: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR USA 97440-3370, (541)689-2000; or by email to: fish1ifr@aol.com. PCFFA’s web site is at: www.pcffa.org.
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