A bottom-up re-estimation of global fisheries subsidies

By U. R. Sumaila, Ahmed S. Khan, Andrew Dyck, R. Watson, Gordon R. Munro, Peter Tydemers, Daniel Pauly. 2010

336 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a recently developed database of fisheries subsidies for 148 maritime countries spanning 1989 to the present, total fisheries subsidies for the year 2003 is computed. A key feature of our estimation approach is that it explicitly deals with missing data from official sources, and includes estimates of subsidies to developing country fisheries. Our analysis suggests that global fisheries subsidies for 2003 are between US$ 25 and 29 billion, which is higher than an earlier World Bank estimate of between US$ 14–20 billion. This new estimate is lower than our 2000 global subsidies estimate of US$ 30–34 billion. We find that fuel subsidies compose about 15–30% of total global fishing subsidies, and that capacity enhancing subsidies sum to US$ 16 billion or about 60% of the total. These results imply that the global community is paying the fishing industry billions each year to continue fishing even when it would not be profitable otherwise—effectively funding the over-exploitation of marine resources.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e197495e9afa9f1a07a9f1c2a2879c6b06fa74f

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Citations in the corpus

Updated estimates and analysis of global fisheries subsidies (2019, background): “The common thread throughout each definition, as applied to the fisheries sector, is that a subsidy is a direct or indirect financial transfer from public entities that creates a benefit for the fisheries sector, which enable enterprises to make more profit than they would have otherwise [9].”
The future of food from the sea (2019, background): “Capacity-enhancing subsidies contribute to overcapitalisation and incentivise overfishing (Sumaila et al. 2010).”
Climate change impacts on the biophysics and economics of world fisheries (2011, background): “Paradoxically, this situation could worsen if governments use climate change as a cover for increasing harmful subsidies to the fisheries secto”