In a Statement at the Thirty-fifth Session of the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Collective in. Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) said that a legal and institutional framework to protect the access rights of artisanal small-scale fishers (SSF) to marine resources remains a major challenge and needs concerted action from FAO Member States, especially to develop effective legal and policy frameworks with the active participation of SSF organizations to ensure that SSF are not displaced from their fishing grounds and that small-scale fishing communities are not denied their legitimate living spaces adjacent to marine and inland waterbodies.
The Statement, made in relation to Agenda Item 5 (The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), noted as follows:
We agree with the observation that the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies with the current focus on overfished stocks and IUU fishing will have a global positive impact on the SDG indicator 14.6.1. The impact, in our view, can be far more positive if the overfishing and overcapacity pillar is further developed and also balanced by special and differential treatment of low income, resource poor and livelihood fishing in developing countries—a proxy for small-scale artisanal fishers and fishworkers as we understand it. FAO should provide technical assistance to WTO in matters related to dealing with overcapacity and overfishing issues and in determining appropriate treatment of small-scale fisheries in developing countries.
Towards increasing the share of sustainable fisheries as a percentage of GDP in SIDS, LDCs and other countries in relation to SDG indicator 14.7.1, it will be good to know if there is data to show if Members who seriously implement CCRF and the SSF Guidelines indeed have increased their share of sustainable fisheries as a percentage of GDP.
When it comes to legal and institutional framework to protect access rights of small-scale artisanal fishers to marine resources, it may be noticed that it remains a major challenge and needs a concerted action from FAO Member States, especially to develop effective legal and policy frameworks with the active participation of small-scale fisheries organizations to ensure that small-scale fishers are not displaced from their fishing grounds and that small-scale fishing communities are not denied their legitimate living spaces adjacent to marine and inland waterbodies. We fully support the observation that we need robust, effective, participatory and integrated monitoring and reporting frameworks to track the progress in implementing the 2030 Agenda.