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Tough Action Urged to Protect Bluefin Tuna

A. D. McKenzie

PARIS, Nov 19 2010 (IPS) - With the Atlantic bluefin tuna being fished to extinction, environment groups have increased their pressure on governments to take action to protect the species.

Organisations such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Pew Environment Group and Greenpeace have mounted a strong campaign at the start of a 10- day meeting here of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the much-maligned agency charged with managing bluefin stocks.

The groups want ICCAT’s 48 members to suspend industrial fishing of the eastern Atlantic Bluefin, the world’s favourite marine delicacy, until sustainable measures are in place and the species shows signs of recovery. Or, at a minimum, they would like to see a reduction in annual fishing quotas from the current 13,500 tonnes to 6,000.

“Our position is anchored in science,” said Gemma Parkes, spokesperson for WWF Mediterranean. “We are not against sustainable fishing. ICCAT’s own scientists have said that reduction gives a strong chance of recovery for the species.”

Since 1970, bluefin stocks have plunged by 80 percent, according to scientists. The fall has been attributed to the over-exploitation that seeks to satisfy some developed nations’ voracious appetite for fish, particularly as used in sushi.

Around 80 percent of bluefin caught in the Mediterranean is exported to Japan. The Asian country, the United States and the European Union account for 70 percent of the international bluefin tuna market.

Parkes told IPS that the main problems affecting the bluefin were the lack of respect for rules and the use of large, high-tech industrial vessels known as purse seine fleets that “encircle shoals of spawning tunas, scooping them up in vast purse-like nets.”

Some of these “destructive” vessels are involved in illegal fishing and their activities are hard to trace, she said.

“The common ground that we all have is that the industrial purse seine fleets should be ended,” Parkes said. WWF has warned that if current fishing rates continue, the Mediterranean could lose the bluefin that spawn in its waters by 2012.

The Pew Environment Group has meanwhile called for creating spawning ground sanctuaries in the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, the fish’s only known breeding areas. This would mean prohibiting the catch of bluefin in these grounds.

“It’s logical – you don’t kill the fish as they’re breeding,” said Dr. Susan Lieberman, head of the group’s delegation to the ICCAT meeting and director of its international policy.

While Pew, too, is in favour of a total suspension of bluefin fishery, Lieberman told IPS that environmentalists were “not encouraged” by the positions of the EU, Japan or the U.S. (which hasn’t clearly outlined its stance besides supporting a reduction in quotas).

“We don’t think governments have the courage to do this,” she said.

Pew and other groups said that ICCAT needed to take urgent action to stop the “massive fraud” taking place in the bluefin fishery sector.

A recent report by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) put the amount gained from illegal Bluefin fishing activities between 1998 and 2007 at 4 billion dollars. This includes fleets’ underreporting of fish caught, providing fish farms with illegally caught fish, and governments giving lower figures for their fishermen’s catch.

“There is a lot of cheating when it comes to bluefin tuna,” Lieberman told IPS. “Every country has an equal responsibility.”

Governments involved in the current talks seem unlikely to accept all the demands or recommendations by environmentalists. Pierre Amilhat, head of the EU delegation who opened the official start of the talks on Friday, said that the negotiations were going to be “difficult”.

He told IPS, however, that he was “fairly optimistic” that solid solutions would be found. But he declined to give journalists an exact figure for the new quotas which the ICCAT meeting is seeking to establish, saying that it would be “between 0 and 13,500 tonnes”.

“There are too many boats fishing and too few fish,” Amilhat acknowledged.

ICCAT’s chairman, Dr. Fabio Hazin, said that the current meeting would “inaugurate a new era of sustainability and responsibility in fulfilling” the agency’s mandate as a regional fisheries management organisation. He said that the “dark ages of ignoring scientific advice” is hopefully being left behind for good.

ICCAT has been slammed in the past for ignoring the counsel of its own environmental experts. But at a meeting in Doha last March, countries involved in Atlantic tuna fishing and trade including Japan, the U.S., the EU, Canada and Norway pledged that they would use the Paris meeting to show their commitment to following scientific advice.

“They should take into account the findings of experts much more than they do at present,” said Jorge Luis Valdes, head of ocean science at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) at UNESCO, the UN’s cultural and scientific agency.

“The fish have reached a level of real risk, and my recommendation would be for the policy makers to listen to the scientific experts,” he told IPS.