Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 5 • Number 18 • 14th October 2005
UN to Back High Seas Bottom Trawling Ban?
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Political momentum in favour of a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling appears to be building as negotiations on a UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution to ban on deep-sea bottom trawling started on 12 October and are set to continue until 13 November. Palau, supported by Costa Rica and Brazil, is expected to propose an immediate moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawl fishing on the high seas until legally-binding regimes for the effective conservation and management of fisheries and the protection of biodiversity on the high seas can be developed, implemented and enforced by the global community. Over the past two years, the General Assembly has issued Oceans and Law of the Sea Resolutions calling on the international community to “take urgent measures to manage the risks to vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems”. According to a number of conservation groups, the international community faces a crisis of illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. The high seas make up the majority of the world’s oceans and large parts of the high seas are both outside of national sovereignty and devoid of effective internationally agreed controls for activities such as high seas bottom trawling, a fishing practice that uses nets with steel plates and heavy rollers that devastate entire ecosystems while capturing only a few commercially valuable species. However, the previous resolutions leave it upon individual states as well as Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMO) to take such action. According to Kelly Rigg from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (CSCC), some states, following informal backroom discussions at a conference on the governance of the deep seas organised by Canada in May this year, signed a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” according to which states would wait until next year in order to determine whether RFMOs indeed took effective action before they would decide on stronger measures such as a moratorium. A moratorium would require governments to impose an immediate halt on any bottom trawling on the high seas involving either their nationals or vessels flying their flag or licensed by them and should enter into force within six to twelve months following adoption of the UNGA resolution.
ICTSD Reporting; “Call to ban destructive fishing,” BBC NEWS, 4 October 2005.
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