- Delegates at a recent World Trade Organization summit in Cameroon agreed to continue “Fish Two” negotiations aimed at a deal to curb government subsidies that support unsustainable fishing, but progress remains limited, with just three countries blocking consensus despite broad support.
- The first phase of the deal, “Fish One,” entered into force in September 2025 and now has 116 ratifications; but key fishing nations, including India and Indonesia, have not joined.
- Disputes over Fish Two center on fairness: Developing countries argue the draft text disadvantages them, particularly through sustainability-based exemptions that favor wealthier nations with better scientific capacity.
- A four-year “sunset clause” triggered by Fish One’s entry into force now puts pressure on talks: If a full agreement is not reached by 2029, the entire deal, including Fish One, risks collapsing.
Governments across the world have pledged to re-ignite stalled “Fish Two” negotiations and finalize the second part of a long-sought agreement to curb harmful fishing subsidies by mid-2028. The commitment came at the World Trade Organization’s recently concluded 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where little progress was made on the long-running issue.
“It’s important that WTO members have agreed to continue negotiating. But the prospects of reaching a deal remain dim,” Kristen Hopewell, global policy specialist at the University of British Columbia, Canada, told Mongabay. “Just a handful of states are blocking an agreement supported by the vast majority of the WTO membership.”
These comprise the U.S., India and Indonesia, according to a Marine Policy paper Hopewell authored earlier this year.
WTO members became deadlocked trying to decide how to ban nations from subsidizing their fishing industries in ways that contribute to overfishing and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, as mandated by U.N. Sustainable Development Target 14.6. Negotiations began in 2001 and dragged out over 21 years. In 2022, WTO members decided to split the elusive agreement in two. This unlocked a deal dubbed “Fish One,” curtailing subsidies that enable IUU fishing and the continued fishing of overfished stocks.
Fish One came into force on Sept. 15, 2025, but left the thorny question of how to ban all overfishing and capacity-enhancing subsidies, which enable fleets to operate unsustainably, for ongoing “Fish Two” negotiations. These have progressed little since 2022.
Three more states ratified Fish One at MC14: Samoa, Paraguay, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. But some big fish have yet to join the 116 of 166 WTO member states already on board with Fish One, let alone agree on Fish Two.
“These holdouts include some of the world’s biggest fishing countries, such as Indonesia, India, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand,” Hopewell said. “Together they account for over 25% of global marine catch.”
India and Indonesia are the only two countries among the 10 highest-producing fishing nations that have not yet ratified Fish One.
India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry and Indonesia’s Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment by publication time.
The new WTO declaration states that recommendations for amendments to the Fish Two draft text should be made in time for MC15 in 2028. This, Hopewell said, “is essentially just kicking the can down the road another two years.”
What are harmful fisheries subsidies?
More than one-third of the world’s fish stocks are already overfished and another half are pushed to their maximum sustainable limit, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Yet each year governments worldwide hand out grants and tax breaks worth an estimated $35 billion to their fishing industries, boosting harvests and profits by inflating revenues or slashing costs.
More than $22 billion of this is classed as “harmful,” according to a 2019 Marine Policy study. Such subsidies, especially for fuel and equipment, enable fishing in otherwise unprofitable areas, and they’ve helped some states build and equip distant-water fishing fleets that operate far from their home waters. This spurs on unsustainable fishing, which damages marine ecosystems, threatening local communities that rely on seafood for jobs and the 3 billion people the U.N. says depend on the ocean for their primary protein source.
The top five spenders are China, the EU, the U.S., South Korea and Japan, which collectively provide more than 58% of harmful subsidies, the 2019 Marine Policy study said.
A faster deal or a fairer deal?
Special and differential treatment for developing and least-developed countries is written into WTO deal requirements. While many states maintain that the transition periods and exemptions included in the current Fish Two draft text do not go far enough to bridge wealth disparity or protect biodiversity, only Indonesia and India are actively blocking the draft on this basis.
Indonesia has also claimed that the Fish Two draft violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by compromising the sovereign right of a state to determine what occurs in its exclusive economic zone.
The draft text has also been criticized for perpetuating disadvantages to small-scale fishers. “A relatively small number of countries provide the vast majority of harmful subsidies, which primarily go to large-scale industrial fishing fleets,” Hopewell said. Low-subsidy developing countries with many small-scale fishers are forced to compete with these heavily subsidized foreign fleets, so “reining in the harmful subsidies that fuel overcapacity and overfishing is a major priority for many developing countries,” she said.
A key objection to the Fish Two draft text is over its allowing a state to continue to subsidize if it can demonstrate the biological sustainability of targeted fish stocks. This depends on scientific assessments that are often incomplete or contested, and, crucially, disproportionately available in wealthier countries with advanced monitoring systems.
“Demonstration of sustainability of fish resources will be much easier for the developed countries … as these countries have also invested in fisheries conservation and management measures,” Mukesh Bhatnagar, an international trade issues specialist with the Centre for WTO Studies at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi, told Mongabay in an email.
India opposes this sustainability-based flexibility, “as this will continue ‘business as usual’ for the traditional big subsidizers,” while cutting subsidies for small-scale fishers who depend on them, according to a paper Bhatnagar co-authored that was published by the New Delhi-based think tank Research and Information System for Developing Countries.
Instead, India proposed in 2024 that, rather than sustainability-based flexibility, the amount of subsidy per fisher should be used to work out which exemptions a country qualifies for. This, the proposal states, “more accurately represents the intensity of subsidies.”
The proposal compared India’s reported average subsidization per fisher per year, of $35, with some developed nations’ spend of up to $79,000 per fisher per year, based on fisher figures from the FAO and estimated subsidies per state from the 2019 Marine Policy study.
Despite these concerns over equity, all but three WTO members are ready to adopt Fish Two. “Most members are of the view (not India) that it is better to have a low ambition outcome, than to prolong the conclusion,” Bhatnagar said.
What now?
Because WTO agreements are consensus-based, if a state doesn’t agree and neither side will compromise, the entire negotiation stalls. Therefore India, Indonesia and the U.S. must either agree to the draft text, or the draft text must be revised until all members support it.
India and Indonesia’s positions have “been widely criticized by other WTO members as short-termist and self-serving,” Hopewell said.
The U.S. delegation announced that it’s “not in a position to agree to the latest version of the draft text … and will not consider it as the basis for moving forward,” in a statement delivered to the WTO’s Trade Negotiations Committee on Sept. 30, 2025.
The statement calls for a different approach to the negotiation, but doesn’t withdraw U.S. support for it entirely. (The country ratified Fish One, but under President Donald Trump has retreated from multilateral cooperation at numerous forums.) Neither has the U.S. specified its objections to the draft text content in this or other public statements.
“The United States continues to support a meaningful outcome to the Fish II negotiations and full implementation of the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Mongabay via email.
Fish Two negotiations are also now under pressure from Fish One’s Article 12, a “sunset clause” kick-started by the agreement coming into force. It stipulates that WTO members have four years from that point to finalize the rest of the deal, or else the whole thing, including Fish One, will be scrapped.
“The clock is ticking — if WTO members can’t reach agreement on Fish Two by September 2029, we are at risk of losing Fish One and wiping out the gains made in that agreement,” Hopewell said in an email.
Banner image: Loading and unloading activities at the Tegalsari fishing port in Tegal, a city on Central Java’s north coast in Indonesia. Image by Asad Asnawi for Mongabay.
Citations:
Sumaila, U. R., Ebrahim, N., Schuhbauer, A., Skerritt, D., Li, Y., Kim, H. S., … Pauly, D. (2019). Updated estimates and analysis of global fisheries subsidies. Marine Policy, 109, 103695. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103695
Schuhbauer, A., Skerritt, D. J., Ebrahim, N., Le Manach, F., & Sumaila, U. R. (2020). The global fisheries subsidies divide between small- and large-scale fisheries. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7. doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.539214
Hopewell, K. (2026). Efforts to secure landmark WTO fisheries subsidies agreement blocked. Marine Policy, 188, 107091. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2026.107091
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