Highly subsidized industrial fishing fleets in the Indian Ocean jeopardize nutrient security

Our paper published in npj Ocean Sustainability, led by Marine Future Lab’s PhD candidate Vania Andreoli, assessed the provision and spatial distribution of fisheries subsidies in the Indian Ocean. The authors found that 60 percent of all subsidies provided by governments in this ocean basin are harmful, capacity-enhancing subsidies paid to large-scale industrial fishing fleets by a small number of highly subsidizing countries. Thailand, India, Malaysia and Indonesia were the major subsidizers in the region. However, not only Indian Ocean Rim countries provided their fleets with subsidies. Distant-water fishing fleets from countries outside the Indian Ocean received $260 million in subsidies These foreign fleets target mostly the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of Somalia, Iran, Indonesia, Myanmar and India, as well as High Seas waters.

Harmful subsidies are direct or indirect financial transfers from public entities to fishing companies. They include fuel subsidies, non-fuel tax exemptions, access deals that allow one country to fish in the waters of another, boat construction, renewal and modernization support, and the provision of market and storage infrastructure, among others. Such harmful subsidies enable fishing capacity to increase to a point where the exploitation of fish stocks exceeds the highest catch they can support long-term, effectively resulting in overfishing. In essence, these subsidies allow fleets to keep fishing when it otherwise would not be financially profitable to do so. In the Indian Ocean these harmful subsidies were predicted by the quantity of seafood exported.

These results highlight the urgency of reducing and eliminating harmful subsidies for industrial fisheries operating in the Indian Ocean in order to ensure equitable access to ocean-derived nutrients.