ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
This article is part of the Research TopicSmartization and Resilience of Ports and ShippingView all 8 articles
Promoting Sustainable Fishing: From the Perspective of Fisheries Funding Mechanism Under the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nankai University, Tianjin, China
- 2Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
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With widespread depletion of the world's marine resources, the sustainable fishing has risen more and more concern on a global scale. After rounds of hard negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) adopted the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS) on June 17, 2022. This agreement came into force on September 15, 2025. It aims to promote ocean sustainability by prohibiting harmful fisheries subsidies. However, for some developing country Members, the implementation may present substantial both economic and technological challenges. These countries rely heavily on fisheries for development, but often lack the capacity to comply with new disciplines. Recognizing their development needs, the AFS provides Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) for them. According to Article 7 of the AFS, the WTO established a Fisheries Funding Mechanism to provide developing and least developed country (LDC) Members with targeted technical assistance and capacity building for the purpose of implementing the disciplines under the Agreement. This Funding Mechanism has become operational and has already received donations. Nevertheless, there still remains some problems that could pose potential operational challenges, including unpredictable financing, administrative and technical access barriers, vague prioritization and allocation procedures, monitoring, evaluation and learning gaps, and coordination risks. Thus, it is essential to refine this Funding Mechanism to promote and guarantee its practical efficiency. A well-functioning assistance system will offer technical and financial aid to support countries in need, enable them to build their national capacity, therefore better complying with the fisheries subsidy disciplines while ensuring their sufficient development space, ultimately helping to achieve the goal of marine sustainable development.
Keywords: World Trade Organization, Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies, Fisheries Funding Mechanism, Marine sustainability, The right to development
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 14 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bai, Guo and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jiayu Bai, gracefulgl@hotmail.com
Min Zhao, yc47043@um.edu.mo
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