Greenpeace Condemns Princes, Criticises ISSF On Lack Of Actionff

By Atuna

According to Greenpeace, UK’s  leading canned tuna brand, Princes, is not taking any steps on making its canned tuna more sustainable. The action group states that the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF)- which unites the main part of tinned tuna traders and of which Princes is cofounder- is just encouraging the existing, unsustainable situation without cleaning up the tuna industry fishing methods of large by-catch of other species.

This is stated by Greenpeace in a reaction after Princes sent out a response message to 18.000 web protesters. The protesters had sent an e-mail to the company asking it to stop using fishing methods that kill large quantities of sharks, turtles and dolphins as by-catch in tuna fishing.

Princes this week agreed to remove a text of its cans that states that it’s “fully committed to fishing methods that protect marine environment and marine life”  after threats of a court case for misleading consumers. The Greenpeace reaction was published Friday on its website. It states that Princes only removed the text but did not alter its practices of production of tuna into a more sustainable way.

In its message to the protesters Princes states that “all fishing methods result in some level of by-catch and we therefore support the need to develop and implement ways of mitigating the impact of commercial fishing on non-target species”. Princes advocates a joined force of the tuna industry to commitments to improve best practice and mentions the ISSF as a initiative consistent with this view.

According to Greenpeace, ISSF “has said some encouraging things” and is funding some scientific research. But: “even the best scientific research should not be used simply as a delay tactic to dealing with the obvious problems that we already know about.” According to Greenpeace, ISSF is not tackling the problem of the Fish Aggregating Devices (FAD’s) which causes the main amount of by-catch in tuna fishing. Greenpeace: “The ISSF’s raison d'etre should be cleaning up the industry, not encouraging the status quo.”