I been going on on the issues of transshipments for a while now, and in particularly as we headed into the technical consultation FAO Voluntary Guidelines on Transshipment that took place in Rome at the last week of June first week of July.
Needles to say, transshipment is port is fundamental to our work in RMI and transshipments in the HS in the WCPFC is our biggest headache. So we had a lot riding on this as a country but also as a region, so we had a few preliminarily meetings with FFA membership as to harmonise positions and when usually any FFA member takes the floor during negotiations, it talks on behalf the 17 nations, not just themselves.
In reality as RMI we were involved already in the expert consultation that developed the draft guidelines that were discussed by the technical consultation… while I wasn’t invited as an expert I was supporting technically on skype my friend Sam Lanwi that was the Deputy Director of MIMRA before becoming the Deputy Ambassador of RMI to UN bodies, (as well as other 2 participants that want to remain anonymous)
I thought the draft guidelines themselves looked fine to start with, and look just as fine now even after being pulled apart for 5 days. There were some good wins in there for us in terms of tightening some of the gaps in transhipment, which we had incorporated already in the draft, and then expanded in the consultation.
In any case the 5 days allocated to the technical consultation weren’t enough and we had to finish on a resumed session last Thursday.
I’m very happy with results since we got all the issues we wanted to see reflected in the final text, among others clear definitions of landing and transshipment, the presence of containers in the definition of landing, the observer or EM presence in carriers in HS transshipments, some further data fields in the developed forms, the acknowledgements in the process of partial Transhipments and landings, and some bits more.
Yet this is not to say the the process of setting the guidelines is very frustrating for me at least. Right from scratch (normally article one) is that this are “voluntary” ergo non binding… so for me this is the opportunity to be ambitious and try to close loopholes and have “vision”, something I know the Secretariat also wants, but cannot say.
Yet for many times, it seem that many countries just nitpick the text trying soften everything as to get their own operations exempted or getting into really technical discussion on things that are not really specific to the guidelines (a long discussion on the basics of VMS, which is a technical MCS issue on a technology that has almost 3pm years of maturity) which is infuriating, particularly as the meeting was happening in the comfort of the FAO HQ in Rome while we where on zoom from 8pm till 3 am.
So yeah, I have the same experience in term of lawyers type nitpicking the working text (which is always in English, and therefore give lots of advantage to native speakers) in many other meetings at FAO and the like the WCPFC. I know is part of the game, but one that operational people like me doesn’t like… I look for the objectives of the paragraph, they are trying to find traps in every word.
Anyway, even if we got all what we wanted (and more) there some lessons we learn and things we will not support again as we eloquently agree with my colleague Kerrie from the Cook Islands
I think the bigger issue though is that this was a test of how the hybrid setting would work. We are all acutely aware of the limitations of zoom, but I think it was a very noticeable shift in power and opportunity with some participants there in person and others virtually.
It is much harder to intervene. It’s a very strange sense of watching a negotiation happening in front of you that you struggle to participate in.
We didn’t get to participate in margins discussions. Compromises and new text were developed without us and then put in front of us to accept.
It was obviously difficult to stick it out for 7 hours a day, over 5 days. Particularly when we are forced to deal with their two-hour lunch break (11 pm to 1 am for me!)
Little care or courtesy afforded to those online. I could see in-person delegates becoming very impatient with virtual delegates. A distinct feeling that while they were perfectly within their rights to take time, but we weren’t.
I have the sense that hybrid sort of works when there is a general consensus, but it doesn’t work when there isn’t, and it particularly doesn’t work if people online have a different view to people who are in the room.
I don’t think it is in RMI's interests to support continued hybrid FAO meetings. Particularly not when it is an issue we care about. I think we will find ourselves increasingly unable to defend ourselves or prosecute our views, and we will be at the mercy of the people in the room.
I don’t see it being an effective platform for any sub-committee on fisheries management for example. I think in many situations we could almost certainly find the text dominated by a Eurocentric perspective leaving us in the Pacific with our innovative or different approaches in the awkward position of taking it or leaving it, or increasingly needing to narrow our interests down.
In any case, I really want to acknowledge the amazing role of the people in FAO secretariat that deals with these type of events, (many of then are my friends and colleagues) here and they are always in difficult positions in between the really high expertise in the way they work at that level (and cannot include), the wishes of the members participating (that may not really know much) and the frustration of operational people like me that sometimes get short-fused.