Daily Archives: August 3, 2017

And so, the negotiations need to answer critical questions. How will marine protected areas be chosen? How much of the ocean will be set aside as sanctuaries? Will extraction of all marine resources be prohibited from those reserves as so-called no-take areas or will some human activity be allowed? Not least, how will the new reserve protections be enforced?

Russia, for instance, objected to using the phrase long term conservation efforts in the document that came out of the latest negotiations in July, instead preferring time-bound measures. The Maldives, speaking for island nations, argued that new treaty negotiations were urgent to protect biodiversity.

Several countries, especially those that have made deals with their marine neighbors about what is allowed in their shared international waters, want regional fishing management bodies to take the lead in determining marine protected areas on the high seas. Others say a patchwork of regional bodies, usually dominated by powerful countries, is insufficient, because they tend to agree only on the least restrictive standards. (The United States Mission to the United Nations declined to comment.)

The new treaty negotiations could begin as early as 2018. The General Assembly, made up of 193 countries, will ultimately make the decision.

A hint of the tough diplomacy that lies ahead came last year over the creation of the worlds largest marine protected area in the international waters of the Ross Sea. Countries that belong to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a regional organization, agreed by consensus to designate a 600,000-square-mile area as a no-fishing zone. It took months of pressure on Moscow, including an intervention by John F. Kerry, then the United States secretary of state.

The discussions around marine protected areas on the high seas may also offer the planet a way to guard against some of the effects of global warming. There is growing scientific evidence that creating large, undisturbed sanctuaries can help marine ecosystems and coastal populations cope with climate change effects, like sea-level rise, more intense storms, shifts in the distribution of species and ocean acidification.

Not least, creating protected areas can also allow vulnerable species to spawn and migrate, including to areas where fishing is allowed.

Fishing on the high seas, often with generous government subsidies, is a multibillion-dollar industry, particularly for high-value fish like the Chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna served in luxury restaurants around the world. Ending fishing in some vulnerable parts of the high seas is more likely to affect large, well-financed trawlers. It is less likely to affect fishermen who do not have the resources to venture into the high seas, said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In fact, Mr. Lundin said, marine reserves could help to restore dwindling fish stocks.

High-seas fishing is not nearly as productive as it used to be. Its not worth the effort, he said. Weve knocked out most of the catches.

Currently, a small but growing portion of the ocean is set aside as reserves. Most of them have been designated by individual countries the latest is off the coast of the Cook Islands, called Marae Moana or as in the case of the Ross Sea, by groups of countries. A treaty, if and when it goes into effect, would scale up those efforts: Advocates want 30 percent of the high seas to be set aside, while the United Nations development goals, which the nations of the world have already agreed to, propose to protect at least 10 percent of international waters.

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Nations Will Start Talks to Protect Fish of the High Seas - The New ... - New York Times

The United Nations has advanced a step closer to an international treaty to protect marine life on the high seas, with an aim of setting up a mechanism for creating marine protected areas in areas beyond national jurisdictions.

International waters outside countries exclusive economic zones make up 60 percent of the ocean and cover almost half of the surface of the earth. The waters are rife with marine life, including many threatened species, but are subject to little governance.

The new treaty would update the 35-year-old United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by adding provisions for marine conservation.

In the last several decades, the array of human-caused threats to the ocean has surged. Fishing pressures have increased, noise from heavy ships disrupts marine mammals, gyres of plastic waste swirl and oil spills slick the waters. Additionally, rising ocean temperatures and higher acidity resulting from humanitys carbon emissions threaten whole ecosystems.

UNCLOS was negotiated at a time when we could not foresee the human footprint stretching into the deep ocean or the high seas, and so it left this vast expanse of ocean unprotected, Peggy Kalas, the coordinator of the High Seas Alliance, told SeafoodSource. We need the new treaty to close this gap.

Passing a treaty update is a long and complicated process, Kalas said. In July, a preparatory committee recommended advancing to an Intergovernmental Conference, which is the body that would debate the actual treaty text. The United Nations General Assembly needs to approve the Intergovernmental Conference, which could convene as soon as 2018. A couple of years of negotiations would follow, and the U.N. could finalize a new treaty as soon as the end of 2019.

Though the decades-old UNCLOS treaty addresses deep-sea mining and freedom of the high seas in areas beyond national jurisdictions, it doesnt address biodiversity. At the time, scientists had barely discovered some of the most exotic deep-sea habitats and creatures, such as undersea vents and organisms that dont depend on sunlight.

Human pressures on marine life have since ramped up, with technology enabling fishing farther and deeper than previously imagined. When the UNCLOS treaty was first enacted in 1982, humanity was catching roughly two million metric tons of fish per year, according to Douglas McCauley, an ecologist and conservation biologist at University of California, Santa Barbara. Today, catches are closer to five million MT.

We are fishing on the high seas with more tech and more power than ever before, McCauley told SeafoodSource. The biggest trawler today is a vessel of about 14,000 gross MT. There was nothing like that on the sea several decades ago.

Climate change threatens fisheries, and the seafood they provide; the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from man-made climate change. The cost of rising temperatures and more acidic waters could be dire: one study pegged the cost to global fisheries under a high carbon dioxide emissions scenario at USD 10 billion (EUR 8.5 billion) in annual revenue, McCauley said.

Advocates say that marine protected areas and a mechanism for creating them in the new treaty are needed to allow fish and other organisms a protected space to adapt to fast-changing marine conditions.

By increasing the productivity of marine life, large reserves would reduce the risk of localized extinction and increase population sizes, thereby increasing resilience to stress and promoting adaptation, Gladys Martinez, an attorney with the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, a pan-American advocacy group, told SeafoodSource.

Like the international Paris Climate Accord that most of the worlds nations agreed to in November 2015, an updated high seas treaty would demonstrate collective commitment to tackling an environmental threat to the global commons, Martinez said. But unlike the Paris agreement, the high seas treaty would not specifically address climate change-causing carbon emissions.

The road to an updated high seas treaty will be long, with potential opposition from the fishing industry and deep-sea energy developers, Martinez said.

These industries have greatly benefited from the lack of international regulations, so it is in their interest to preserve the status quo as much as possible, she said.

Negotiators will also have to overcome ignorance about the importance and value of the high seas and the risks of failing to act, Kristina Gjerde, the senior high seas advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told SeafoodSource. But international collaboration on marine science will help overcome that, Gjerde added.

Marine protected areas, a more standardized process for assessing environmental impacts and scientific capacity building and sharing will all be needed to address the gaps left in the UNCLOS, Gjerde said.

What the (UNCLOS) drafters did not envisage was the cascade of cumulative impacts now assaulting our ocean that requires a more coherent, comprehensive and coordinated response, Gjerde said.

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Treaty to enable high seas marine protected areas takes step forward - SeafoodSource (blog)

It will be levied at the time of Customs clearance

New Delhi, August 2:

High-sea sale transactions or imports will attract Integrated Goods and Services Tax (IGST) only once at the hands of last importer on the final price of the item, said the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC).

The clarity was need as it was impacting imports in many crucial sectors such as power and telecom.

The GST Council has already decided that IGST on high-sea sale transactions of imported goods, whether one or multiple, shall be levied and collected only at the time of importation that is when the import declarations are filed before the Customs authorities for the customs clearance purposes for the first time, said the CBEC, adding that the IGST would be levied on the final value of the product.

However, the importer or the last buyer in the chain would be required to furnish the entire chain of documents such as original invoice, high-seas-sales-contract, details of service charges and commission paid to establish a link between the first contracted price of the goods and the last transaction, it added.

High-sea sales of imported goods are akin to inter-State transactions, stressed the CBEC. Under GST laws, IGST, which is refundable, is levied on imports and exports.

The confusion had arisen as high-sea sale transactions or such imports go through multiple buyers, where in the original importer sells the goods to a third person before the goods are entered for customs clearance.

Questions had arisen both within industry and tax officials whether IGST would be levied for each transaction, which would make it cumbersome and expensive.

Tax experts welcomed the move but said that the government also needs to clarify whether such sales would exempt on the hands of the high-seas seller and consequently trigger the reversal of input credit.

There was lot of confusion in the industry on the taxability of high-seas sale i.e. whether it is taxable twice or only once in the hands of the ultimate importer, said Abhishek Jain, Tax Partner, EY.

According to Pratik Jain, Partner and Leader Indirect Tax, PwC: It states that IGST would only apply in the hands of ultimate importer and the sales made by intermediary company would not be liable.

(This article was published on August 2, 2017)

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High-sea sales to attract IGST only once, clarifies CBEC | Business ... - Hindu Business Line