Commissioner Borg Comments On Wrongly Classified Tuna Exportsff

Written by Raphael Vassallo, MaltaToday

European Commissioner for Fisheries Joe Borg confirmed this week that the Commission has requested further clarifications regarding Malta’s claims to have “re-exported” over 5,000 tons of bluefin tuna to Japan last year, suggesting that this quantity might have been erroneously classified as Maltese “re-exports”, when it should really have been registered as goods in transit.

Malta officially claims to have exported 11,900 tons of bluefin tuna – a critically endangered species – to Japan in 2007-2008.

Of these, 6,700 tons consisted in locally ranched fish, but the remaining 5,000 tons took the form of transshipped tuna from third countries including Italy, France, Libya and Morocco.

And yet all 11,900 tons are listed in Japanese trade records as having originated from Malta.

In comments to MaltaToday, Joe Borg raised the selfsame question this newspaper has been asking since July 2008: were these 5,000 tons of tuna (worth an estimated €100 million on the international market) legitimately registered as Maltese re-exports? Or should they have been recorded as transshipments, and therefore not Maltese exports at all?

“As regards the re-export figure, it is possible that the 5,000-tonne figure includes fish which would be defined from a customs standpoint as being ‘in transit’, and which would therefore not qualify as being re-exported in customs records,” a spokesperson for Dr Borg told MaltaToday this week.

“The Commission is currently seeking to clarify this question with the Maltese authorities.”

Comments clarified

Borg’s comment appears to directly contradict claims made on the TVM news bulletin of Tuesday, 23 December, which – allegedly also quoting Borg – reported that the Commission had dismissed all media questions regarding Malta’s tuna exports for 2007-2008.

TVM claimed that the Commissioner had said he had evaluated all the data, but saw nothing wrong with the statistics.

But when asked to account for the difference between his comments to MaltaToday and to the national station in December, Borg’s spokesperson explained that his earlier comments were limited only to the quantity of tuna allegedly carried over from 2007 to 2008, and as such had nothing to do with the alleged 5,000 tons worth of re-exports to Japan in the first place.

Even so, these comments were based only on a preliminary assessment of the available data: “The Commissioner made it clear when questioned by PBS that any judgment he was able to form on the carry-over figures was preliminary, and concerned only the general order of the total volume involved.”

For reasons which are at best unclear, TVM applied these comments to the re-export issue – which is entirely unrelated to the carry-over figures – and interpreted them to mean that (in the news bulletin’s own words): “the figures supplied by the government were correct.”

And yet, it is now apparent that the European Commission is officially still awaiting further clarifications from the Malta government over these selfsame figures.
Nor are the 5,000 “re-exported” toes the only aspects of Malta’s tuna industry to have been questioned by the Commission. Borg this week also confirmed that he has requested more information regarding individual transshipments cited by the government of Malta in defense of its “re-export” claims – in particular, a single consignment of over 1,000 tons of tuna originating from Libya and Turkey in January 2008.

“The data in the possession of the Commission does not permit us to identify what proportion of the shipments came from which countries,” Dr Borg explained. “As mentioned, the Commission has requested further clarification on this matter from the Maltese authorities.”

The provenance of this tuna is significant, as by the end of 2007 Turkey had already exhausted over 95% of its allocated quota, and could not therefore have supplied more than a maximum of 50 out of the total 1,000 tons.