Goundar Shipping Limited's (GSL) Director, George Goundar, is outraged that not all his vessels will not be able to sail out today, as ordered by the Maritime Safety Authority of Fiji (MSAF). 

Speaking to Fiji Sun from Japan, Mr Goundar said he was not pleased that MSAF had singled them out from the other shipping companies. 

MSAF has ordered that GSL will not operate from today until it complies with the Maritime (Safe Ships Management) Regulations 2014. The regulation was introduced in 2014, and comes into effect today. The order means that hundreds of employees, and business operations will be affected and passengers who love to travel with GSL will need to make new arrangements with other local shipping companies. 

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Posted on - 2019-06-30

Roberto Azevêdo, Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), recently went on record about the importance of completing by year-end the WTO negotiations for the elimination of fisheries subsidies that contribute to illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing, overfishing and the overcapacity of fishing fleets and infrastructures. I could not agree with him more.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), 33% of the world’s fish populations are overfished, 60% are being fished to their sustainable limit, and there is a margin for growth in catches of only 7% of the entire world’s fish populations (the so-called “underfished stocks”). And fisheries subsidies are considered to be the main driver of overfishing. For example, economists have shown that some fisheries in the high seas (the area beyond the 200-mile national jurisdiction) simply would not be economically feasible in the absence of government support, given the high fuel costs for long distance travel.

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Posted on - 2019-06-30

The Bonn Climate Change Conference was expected to advance work on several issues to facilitate implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Paris Agreement, due for completion at the Santiago Climate Change Conference in December 2019. Delegates made progress on a number of issues, including:

• Paris Agreement Article 6 (market and non-market cooperative approaches): On the only outstanding issue from the Katowice Climate Package, the rulebook of the Paris Agreement, parties brought forward the work undertaken in Katowice and worked to ensure that all views were reflected in the draft texts produced by the Co-Facilitators. Parties agreed to work in Santiago on the basis the Co-Facilitators’ texts;
• Terms of Reference (ToR) for the review of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts (WIM): The ToR were adopted, setting out the scope, inputs, and other aspects of the review of the WIM, a mechanism important to developing countries;
• Reporting tables and other issues related to the transparency framework under the Paris Agreement: Parties agreed to intersessional work, and to forward informal notes developed by the Co-Facilitators to advance discussions in Santiago; and
• Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture: Countries welcomed and set the themes for an upcoming intersessional workshop on sustainable land and water management, and strategies and modalities to scale up practices and technologies to increase resilience and sustainable production.

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Posted on - 2019-06-30