Source: Green Answers
Greenpeace recently announced a new campaign to decrease the number of tuna fishing boats allowed in the industry. The environmental group argued that, even though tuna populations are threatened by overfishing, the International Sustainable Seafood Foundation (ISSF) isn’t doing its job of protecting the fish.
Greenpeace said, “Too many big tuna fishing boats are chasing declining tuna populations. Environmentalists know this; the tuna industry knows it and governments, scientists and fishermen know that if we want fish tomorrow, we need fewer boats today. Tuna fishing fleets, however, have continued to expand.â€
Overfishing has severely depleted populations of tuna such as bluefin tuna, and countries like Japan have been accused of fishing more than three times the amount of the allowed 6,000 tons of tuna per year. Some experts estimate that the bluefin tuna population will be wiped out in a matter of just a few years. The tuna industry continually comes under fire for harming dolphins, who swim near tuna, in the process of tuna fishing; many brands now sell dolphin safe tuna to ensure that the fishery practiced responsible fishing methods that did not affect dolphins.
Greenpeace believes that the ISSF has the capacity and clout to reduce the number of boats used for tuna fishing, but that the organization – whose membership is composed of 80 percent of the largest tuna fisheries in the world – will not take action unless it is urged to do so. Despite claims that the industry is indeed committed to sustainable seafood, the ISSF announced that it plans to commission more boats to be constructed by June 2015.
Greenpeace also is skeptical of the ISSF because of its inaction on regulating or banning Fish Aggregating Devices. These devices, which are commonly used by tuna purse seine fisheries, increase the capacity of catchable tuna, but also increase the amount of by-catch – including young tuna, sea turtles, sharks, and other fish – produced on each fishing trip.
Purse seine fishing uses a weighted net that drifts in the water and stays afloat with buoys secured to the top. A purse seine has a line running through a series of rings; the net surrounds a school of fish and captures them by pulling the drawstring-like line through the rings to close the net. Greenpeace is not inherently against purse seine fishing as a practice, because the method is among the most effective in the fishing industry, but because the practice catches large amounts of fish in one trip, the environmental organization believes that it shouldn’t be used on fish populations that are suffering from overfishing or when the risk of by-catch is high. Because both of these exemptions apply to tuna populations, Greenpeace does not believe that purse seine fishing is an appropriate method of catching tuna.
While the ISSF claims to be taking action on reducing the number of fishing vessels available in the industry, its lack of transparency and concrete upsets Greenpeace, who has called the ISSF’s promises meaningless. Greenpeace believes that the public should be made aware of how and when the ISSF plans to reach the sustainable goals that it has set. “We have yet to see a plan with a timeline that actually begins to reduce the number of vessels ISSF membership collectively owns and a roadmap to make FADs history in tuna purse seine fishing. This is despite the fact some individual companies in ISSF have already committed to ditching FAD use in purse seine fisheries by 2016,†said Greenpeace.