Oceans treaty vital for global food security

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2022 (1059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After a nearly yearlong global food crisis stemming from a trifecta of war, extreme weather and runaway inflation, World Food Day 2022 (Oct. 16) marked a somewhat harrowing milestone. However, an under-the-radar development from August signals a more complex and enduring global food crisis may be coming down the line.

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates around one-tenth of the global population depends on the oceans for its protein and livelihoods, some 800 million people. But two weeks of UN talks in New York aimed at producing a global treaty to protect marine life in international waters ended on Aug. 27 without an agreement — the fifth failed attempt to do so since 2018.

Negotiations sought to create legally binding rules to govern the 60 per cent of the world’s oceans that lay beyond national jurisdictions. The main objective is to place one-third of the high seas off-limits for human activity by 2030 — a vast expansion of the approximately one per cent of international waters currently designated as protected areas.

According to environmental group Greenpeace, rich countries — including Canada and the U.S. — were among the holdouts, fearing a treaty might hurt the profitability of their lucrative pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food-processing industries. Each relies heavily on using the biochemical compounds found in marine life to develop new consumer products.

Threats, including mass pollution, temperature rises and over-fishing by gargantuan foreign trawling vessels — the bulk of them from China, which is responsible for one-third of the world’s consumption of fish — have already pushed the world’s oceans to the brink. In 2018, the FAO estimated almost 90 per cent of global fish stocks were “fully exploited, overexploited or depleted.”

New threats to marine life are also emerging, particularly around the controversial field of deep-sea mining.

Numerous companies, including Vancouver-based firm the Metals Company, are jockeying to harvest small polymetallic “nodules” from the deepest parts of the ocean, thousands of metres below sea level. The rock-like objects contain major concentrations of such minerals as copper, cobalt, manganese and nickel that are critical to the production of electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and high-capacity batteries.

Just one area within the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, is estimated to hold several times as much cobalt and nickel as all the land-based reserves on Earth combined.

Proponents of deep-sea mining claim the practice is fundamental to solving the climate crisis by enabling the proliferation of green technology on a scale and timeline unachievable otherwise.

Critics, including famed British environmentalist David Attenborough, say the practice should be banned, given how the heavy machinery and processes necessary to gather the nodules could have dire impacts on deep-water ecosystems that themselves remain barely understood.

The International Seabed Authority, the body mandated by the UN to regulate mining activity in international waters, is currently facing a deadline to create rules around deep-sea mining by July 2023.

The interdependent nature of marine life is what makes its protection paramount. One study released in January suggests that by 2030, nearly one-quarter of “transboundary” fish stocks will have shifted due to climate change, negatively affecting 78 per cent of all countries’ exclusive economic zones — sovereign extensions of coastal territory stretching outward into the ocean.

The collapse of life in one section of the ocean would therefore have drastic consequences for economies and populations elsewhere.

Unlike this year’s food crisis — which was not so much born of actual food shortages but instead one of unaffordability, owing to inflationary price increases being exacerbated by supply-chain issues thanks to Ukrainian ports being blockaded and trade with Russia disrupted by sanctions — the widespread collapse of fish stocks would represent a lasting blow to global food supplies.

Should this come true, it would raise the risk of severe social unrest and irregular migration pressures.

The populations most dependent on the seas for their food and livelihoods reside in developing countries that can’t afford to subsidize the cost of alternative food imports or different ways for citizens to earn an income.

Many experts have argued that alongside technological advances and innovations in land-based agriculture, better management of the world’s oceans will be absolutely vital for feeding a global population expected to grow by 25 per cent — roughly two billion people — by 2050. The good news is that fish stocks rebound quite quickly when they are actually protected.

Barring a surprise UN meeting being scheduled, talks on an international treaty to protect seas won’t resume again until next year. Hopefully, the sixth time is the charm.

» Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.