High time to save the Mediterranean bluefin
When Gemma Parkes, a communications officer for WWF, an environmental advocacy group, was attending an international meeting on fish conservation a few years ago, an unknown delegate left a bunch of white lilies and white chrysanthemums for her. They were not, she presumes, a kindness. They were a warning from an opponent of her prominent campaign against tuna fishing: in
Another person Ms Parkes knows in the fish-conservation business has received a bullet in the post. Tuna fishing is big business. Few of those involved like the suggestion that they ought to rein in their catches in order preserve it.
Tuna is a pelagic species, which means that it lives in the open waters, far beyond the reach (and governance) of individual nations. Agreements about how and how much to fish must therefore be hammered out amongst many parties. This, in a nutshell, is what the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is supposed to do. But it has failed so badly that conservationists have dubbed it the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.
ICCAT recently (and rather bravely) commissioned an independent performance review of itself. The reviewers noted that ICCAT’s management of the bluefin tuna population is “widely regarded as an international disgraceâ€.
Each year the organization allocates unsupportably large bluefin quotas, in the full knowledge that they will be massively exceeded because there are no effective real-time monitoring mechanisms. ICCAT’s own scientific committee reckons that 61,000 tons of tuna were taken from the
WWF, which has been lobbying on this issue for some time, calls bluefin-fishing in the
There are further fears that a great deal of fish is caught illegally and never recorded. Ms Parkes says that there are several ports that registered for the landing of tuna that have links with organized crime, at which not a single tuna has been recorded as having been landed.
Worse still, in the last decade there has been an explosion of something called “tuna ranching†in many European nations. Here tuna are rounded up and penned rather than being landed (hence they do not count against the quota), becoming a form of aquaculture to be fattened up and sold on a few years later. They don’t breed, and no fish are added back to the wild population. As aquaculture, they may even be able to qualify for European subsidies.
The spawning stock of tuna is only 36% of its level 30 years ago, and ICCAT’s scientists warned in September that the Mediterranean bluefin was on the brink of collapse. At the World Conservation Congress in
While such action is obviously long overdue, it is far from clear whether ICCAT’s roughly 40 member countries will actually vote to do the right thing. The nations at ICCAT meetings are typically represented by fisheries’ ministers or their representatives, not the sorts of well meaning conservationists that usually attend green congresses.
Letting the bluefin collapse would be a terrible, unnecessary and massive gamble. Even if the tuna were to be left alone afterward, there is no guarantee it would recover. Experience with other fisheries has shown that ecosystem dynamics can change when a top predator is completely removed. So something needs to be done urgently if the fishery is to be saved.
Although Europe only has one vote at the ICCAT meeting at the end of the year, what it says-particularly what
Source: The Economist