EU Ministers Agree That Tuna Fishing Must Be Cutff

From AFP

EU fisheries ministers meeting in Luxembourg were close to agreement Monday on the measures needed to protect bluefin tuna stocks ahead of a key international meeting next month, the French EU presidency said.

The EU nations are set to reduce fishing quotas for the threatened species as well as more effective controls on the whole industry, including fish farms and markets, said Michel Barnier, agriculture minister for France which holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

”We are all agreed that we must reduce production and preserve this resource, to better control the whole chain, not just the fishing,” he said.

Barnier voiced confidence that “a political agreement” would be reached later in the day on a common European Union position for the European Commission to take to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on November 17-24.

”It is important that this rigor and collective discipline should be respected throughout the world,” he said.

”A European fishing industry which upholds this discipline has the right to ask that fishermen everywhere apply the same rules and the same discipline.”

Environmental group Greenpeace slammed the EU position and ICCAT alike.

”The ministers of France, Italy and Spain have shown they are incapable of keeping illegal fishing for bluefin tuna under control. Only a suspension of fishing can bring the bluefin tuna back from the brink of collapse,” said Saskia Richartz, Greenpeace EU oceans policy director.

Earlier this month the Worldwide Fund for Nature called the Italian bluefin tuna industry “totally out of control”.

In mid-June the European Commission ordered a halt to industrial fishing of bluefin tuna two weeks early, because quotas for 2008 had already been reached.

Both France and Italy opposed that decision, questioning the commission’s figures and asserting that their fishing industries had not reached even half their quotas.

More than 50,000 tons of bluefin tuna are caught every year in the Mediterranean. To prevent stocks from collapsing, that figure should be limited to 15,000 tons in the short term, according to ICCAT.