The World Trade Organization (WTO) continues to advance negotiations on the Fisheries Subsidies Agreement. The issue of fisheries subsidies cannot be separated from the structural realities of global fisheries governance, particularly the practices of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, the dominance of large-scale industrial fishing fleets, and the unequal distribution and utilization of marine resources.
Accordingly, these negotiations are intended to discipline subsidies that contribute to overfishing and overcapacity. At the same time, there are concerns that overly restrictive subsidy rules could narrow the policy space available to governments to protect and empower small-scale fishers and may further deepen inequalities between large-scale and small-scale fisheries operators, particularly in developing and least-developed countries where the fisheries sector is predominantly composed of small-scale and traditional fishers.
Negotiations on the Fisheries Subsidies Agreement have been underway at the WTO since the Doha Round and reached a significant milestone at the Twelfth WTO Ministerial Conference (MC12) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2022. At MC12, WTO Members adopted the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, which entered into force on 15 September 2025 following ratification by two-thirds of WTO Members. The agreed provisions correspond to Pillar 1 (Fish 1), which addresses overfished stocks. Indonesia is among the countries that have not yet ratified Pillar 1 (Fish 1) on overfished stocks, whereas several developed countries—including those that are not dependent on small-scale and traditional fishers and even those without maritime territories—have already ratified the agreement.
Negotiations on Pillar 2 (Fish 2), which focuses on overcapacity and overfishing, continued through the Fourteenth WTO Ministerial Conference (MC14) held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in March 2026.
However, the negotiations reached a significant impasse and will continue through regular negotiations leading up to the Fifteenth WTO Ministerial Conference (MC15). This situation reflects a fundamental divergence between developed and developing countries. Developed countries generally advocate for broader and more binding disciplines, while developing countries emphasize that the root causes of overfishing lie not solely in subsidies but also in asymmetries in global fishing capacity and the dominance of large industrial fleets. In this context, developing countries insist that WTO rules must preserve sufficient policy space to support small-scale fishers and the development of domestic fisheries sectors.
In light of these developments, there is a need for further critical discussion, particularly by amplifying the voices of Indonesia’s small-scale and traditional fishers, in order to better understand the implications of this agreement for national policies and the livelihoods of traditional fishing communities, and to formulate advocacy positions and strategies that are more firmly grounded in social justice and ecological sustainability.
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