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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are now generally accepted as important tools in the protection of coastal biodiversity. It is also likely that they play a positive role in enhancing fisheries. Yet currently, less than 1% of the global oceans are protected, although international agreements have targets ranging from 10-30% coverage. Despite its minuscule size, we consider the current MPA "network" to be beneficial to fisheries, and its running or maintenance cost, therefore, to be a positive contribution to the sustainability of fisheries, or a "beneficial" subsidy ("harmful" subsidies enhance fishing capacity and effort). A method was derived from data in Balmford et al. (PNAS, to estimate the annual cost of maintaining MPAs as a function of their size, and of the degree of development of the country in question. We provide national costs of the 53 countries that jointly contribute 95% of global fisheries catch and, assuming that this type of subsidy, in a given country, cannot exceed 15% of the exvessel value of its fisheries catches, estimated a global MPA subsidy to fisheries of 870 million US$. Given that total subsidies to fisheries currently range from 30-34 billion US$ annually (without MPA costs), this amounts to only 2.5-2.8% of total subsidies to fisheries being devoted explicitly to the maintenance of the biodiversity that sustains them.

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