» Greenpeace delegation at ICCAT meeting: Meeting opens

November 10th, 2009

Greenpeace delegation at ICCAT meeting: Meeting opens

Sarah King

Francois, a member of the Greenpeace delegation attending the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) meeting in Brazil, has these thoughts as the meeting that could seal the fate for the bluefin tuna opens……………..

Yet again, Greenpeace is attending the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas – ICCAT – the body that we unfortunately had to dub the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.

Indeed, the mighty bluefin tuna, which falls under the management responsibility of 48 ICCAT fishing member states has become the very icon of Man’s greed to carelessly deplete a marine species to extinction, on the grounds it can be profitable in the short term for a happy few.

Bluefin tuna means big money, as the species represents the most highly prized sushi flesh in Japan, and elsewhere the sushi food trend spread out worldwide in the past few years. As a result, the bluefin tuna fishing industry developed beyond control in the past decade, notably in the most important breeding grounds of the species, the Mediterranean Sea. There, bluefin tuna is mainly caught alive by purse seine fishing vessels, and transferred at sea in cages that are then further dragged to coastal tuna ranches where the fish gets fattened for a few months to render a tastier flesh for the sushi market.

The problem here being that all fishing countries over-developed their fishing fleets to benefit from the profitable sushi frenzy and consequently over shot the allocated quotas of ICCAT, which anyway blatantly disregarded the catch level recommendations of its very own scientists over the years. In 2007 for example, the fishing fleet caught 4 times more the maximum level of what was scientifically advised to give the bluefin population any chance to recover…

Since 2006, Greenpeace has documented at sea, and compiled numerous cases of illegal fishing in the Mediterranean, including fishing during closed seasons, catches of undersized tuna, illegal reflagging of fishing vessels, illegal use of spotter planes, unlicensed fishing vessels and tuna farms, unregulated transshipments, illegal landings and false declarations, substantial unreported over-catches and further increase of fishing fleets and farming capacity.

In September 2008, an independent performance review of ICCAT noted that the management of the bluefin tuna fishery in the Mediterranean is “widely seen as an international disgrace.”

There’s been a recent glimmer of hope. While ICCAT has continued to fail fulfilling its obligations to protect bluefin tuna, the international community is now considering strong action by declaring a ban of all international trade in the species in March next year, through its listing under the Convention on international Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) as it is currently the case for Rhinos, gorillas and tigers.

Today, according to latest scientific data, it is now demonstrated that bluefin tuna does meet the criteria to ban all international trade ; moreover, if there was absolutely no fishing for the next ten years, it wouldn’t even be guaranteed the bluefin tuna stock would sufficiently recover to sustainably resume its trade and fishing…

So this the context of the opening of this year’s ICCAT meeting in Recife, Brazil, where Greenpeace and all other participating NGOs will try to convince fishing countries that the only sensible thing to do now is to stop fishing if we want to give the mighty king of oceans – bluefin tuna – a chance to escape extinction.

Otherwise, the countries who are members of ICCAT will be remembered for managing the collapse of one of the most important and profitable fisheries of our time, the decimation of one of the oceans’ champion species, and the disintegration of a way of life for the fishermen of the region dependent on this ecosystem for their livelihoods.

Greenpeace advocates the creation of a network of no-take marine reserves, protecting 40 per cent of the world’s oceans, as the long term solution to the overfishing of tuna and other species, and the recovery of our overexploited oceans.