/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ UNITED STATES: Dolphin Bill Faces Struggle

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 10 1996 (IPS) - An international agreement on the protection of dolphins that has badly split U.S. environmental groups now threatens to tie up the business of the U.S. Congress.

Trawler operators in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela stand to gain from the bill that would end an embargo against imported tuna caught with nets that kill dolphins.

Mexican fisheries undersecretary Carlos Camacho said recently that the five-year-old embargo has already caused the loss of 27,000 jobs in Mexico and reduced catches by more than 45 percent.

But in the United States, Senate foes of the legislation vow they will block its approval.

“I will use all the tools at my disposal to fight this misguided and misleading policy change,” Senator Barbara Boxer of California said in a statement last week. She is backed by fellow Democratic Senator Joe Biden.

Their threat comes in the wake of a 316-108 vote in the House of Representatives in favour of the bill, which is also backed by the administration of President Bill Clinton.

The bill permits cans of tuna caught in purse-seines to be labelled “dolphin-safe,” so long as independent shipboard observers certify that the number of dolphins killed using the nets every year does not exceed 5,000.

Major groups like Greenpeace support the bill, while others like the Earth Island Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane society, oppose the measure. Both sides have taken out full page advertisements in major newspapers to defend their positions.

In 1990, the Marine Mammal Protection Act banned the use of the label ‘dolphin-safe’ for tuna caught by purse-seine nets. These nets, which are normally cast over an area more than two kms wide, trap — not just tuna — but all other marine life in the vicinity.

By Earth Island estimates, some seven million dolphins have been killed by the trawler industry since the 1950s. Trawler captains discovered that schools of yellowfin tuna often swim below these dolphins in the Pacific and took to casting their kilometre-long, purse-seines under the dolphins to catch the tuna.

Supporters of the revised measure say that it would provide a legal basis for a voluntary agreement signed last October to limit dolphin kills. The agreement was signed by Latin American countries, France, Spain, and the United States.

Greenpeace says the fact that the new bill allows the killing of up to 5,000 dolphins a year is a vast improvement on the situation five years ago, when some 300,000 dolphins were killed in purse- seines.

“Greenpeace’s position is that there should be an end to the killing of dolphins in all tuna fishing,” said campaigner Clifton Curtis. “The ‘dolphin-safe’ label did what was necessary at the time of its passage: it brought much needed attention to this issue.”

“But failure to redefine ‘dolphin-safe’ will preclude any effort to negotiate a new, multilateral, legally binding instrument,” argues Curtis. “In turn, it will serve only to encourage the leading fishing countries, Mexico and Venezuela, to walk away from the voluntary agreements and to fish without restriction.”

Greenpeace says better nets and different fishing techniques now allow most dolphins to escape.

But Mark Palmer, a lobbyist at Earth Island, says claims by the fishing industry that the new techniques have prevented dolphin deaths are not necessarily true.

“Observers say that the dolphin kill is down to 5,000, but dolphin populations have not recovered significantly,” says Palmer. “It’s possi1le that the dolphins that are released from the nets later die from the trauma of being trapped.”

Palmer cites a 1995 study, conducted by Alejandro Anganuzzi of Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission in La Jolla, California, and Stephen Buckland of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which shows that dolphin stocks have not improved in the last five years, despite the new practices.

David Phillips, director of Earth Island, criticised the recent vote in the House on what his group has dubbed the “dolphin death act.”

“Greedy foreign interests are undoing years of work,” he says. “Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Clinton administration have achieved a victory for free trade, but dolphins, American consumers and U.S. tuna processors will be the losers.”