A/HRC/55/49 traditional and Indigenous knowledge of coastal and riparian communities, 81 which is well recognized as crucial to adapting to climate change. In so doing, a member State or regional fisheries management organization or association can more easily determine small-scale fishing sustainability. 3. Overcapacity and overfishing 71. Overcapacity and overfishing are the most important issues regarding fishery subsidies and remain the subject of future WTO Agreement negotiations. Of all subsidies in 2018, approximately 63 per cent ($22.2 billion) supported programmes that encouraged, or had the potential to encourage, overcapacity and overfishing, 30 per cent were beneficial and 7 per cent had the potential to lead to either sustainable yields or overexploitation of fish stocks.82 Overcapacity generally refers to the ability of a fleet to fish at levels that exceed the sustainable catch level in a fishery, often leading to overfishing.83 72. States should use future Agreement negotiations as an opportunity to reintroduce language that explicitly enables States to support small-scale fisheries more readily by repurposing subsidies away from large-scale operations that have overfished, thereby meeting the State obligation to progressively realize the right to food. 84 IV. Commodification and financialization of the oceans and aquatic life Blue economy A. 73. The terms “blue economy” and “blue growth” are gaining popularity; they conceptualize the oceans and coasts as economic assets (leaving out fresh water). The idea of “blue” (like “green”) is that businesses and governments must now consider issues of oceanic ecosystem degradation and climate change when calculating profit margins and economic growth. 74. The World Bank has defined “blue economy” as “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and job creation while preserving the health of ocean ecosystems”.85 It includes renewable energy, fisheries, maritime transport, waste management and tourism. In blue economy initiatives, human rights are usually ignored or treated as tertiary concerns, with the main focus on economic growth and sustainability. Moreover, in such initiatives, food security is usually overlooked or poorly addressed. In many international and national blue economy agendas, small-scale fishers are marginalized or excluded and social and cultural objectives are undervalued. 75. In blue economy initiatives, the problem is framed to be that the world’s oceans are experiencing an environmental crisis but still offer an “untapped economic frontier”.86 The purported source of the problem is that the oceans are treated as public goods and governed through traditional systems of communal or common property resource management. The offered solution is to expand the transformation of the oceans into private property. 87 76. How the problem and solution are framed highlights the empirical limitations of the notion of “blue economy”. The incentive to overfish and pollute has not been driven by treating oceans as a public good or commons. Overfishing, pollution and aquatic habitat 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 GE.23-26071 Convention on Biological Diversity, art. 8 (j); Voluntary Guidelines, paras. 11.4, 11.6, 11.7 and 11.9; United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, arts. 18 (3), 19 (2), 20 (2) and 26; and United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, art. 31. Sumaila and others, “Updated estimates and analysis of global fisheries subsidies”. See https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/glossary_e/overfishing_overfished_stocks_e.htm. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, arts. 2 (1) and 11. “Riding the blue wave: applying the blue economy approach to World Bank operations” (2021), p. 8. Cohen and others, “Securing a just space”. World Bank, “Riding the blue wave”, p. 8. 15