I can offer a brief response from my part, and maybe just a follow-up to your earlier question as well.
As I understand it, the way these negotiations have gone over the past five or six years, even before a chairs text was introduced, there has been a lot of debate about what is a small-scale versus an artisanal fishing program, and how do you ring-fence that concept for the purposes of these negotiations?
I think most of the discussion was focusing around trying to ring-fence the concept as desired to be applied by developing countries. So you might hear some developing countries say, well, we have small-scale fisheries for vessels that operate on the high seas that are x metres and so many tonnes. From our perspective, it's really difficult to call those small-scale fisheries.
That's something that we think does need to be looked at in these negotiations. After all, as I've mentioned before, developing countries account for half of world fisheries exports now. There are major developing country fishing powers out there now that are considered some of the heavy subsidizers--and to quote one of your previous expert witnesses from last week, the heavy “bad” subsidizers. So we think that should be covered in these negotiations.
The debate was never really resolved. I don't think there was ever really a consensus on what the concept of small-scale fisheries should be. That also means that in the ongoing discussions, developed countries, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, could have similar ground to occupy with developing countries, depending on what you define as a small-scale fishery, or an inshore fishery, or a fishery within an exclusive economic zone.
That's my best answer to that question.
I just want to clarify, you mentioned article 4 in your first question, but it might be instructive if we read the entire first sentence of that article so that you can get a sense of what I think the theme of that particular article is intended to address. If I could beg your indulgence, I'll just read it to you:
No Member shall cause, through the use of any subsidy referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article 1, depletion of or harm to, or creation of overcapacity in respect of, (a) straddling or highly migratory fish stocks whose range extends into the EEZ of another Member; or (b) stocks in which another Member has identifiable fishing interests, including through user-specific quota allocations to individuals and groups under limited access privileges and other exclusive quota programmes.
When I read that sentence, I think it's a little bit more oriented to high-seas shared fisheries and the responsibility of fishing countries to not provide subsidies to their fishing fleets in situations where that can lead to overcapacity or overfishing by those fleets that detrimentally affects other fishing countries. I think that's the theme of what that article is intended to address.
I hope that's helpful.