Fish stocks 'close to extinction'
May 21 2006 at 04:17PM
By Ian Herbert
iol.co.za
London - Fish stocks in international waters are being plundered to the point of extinction because Governments are failing to protect them, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has warned.
Species including the tuna and the orange roughy are among those under threat by illegal fishing and the notorious practice of bottom-trawling, by which heavy rollers are dragged over the ocean floor, trapping fish and mammals and destroying entire eco-systems.
The most emperilled species are within international waters, away from the protection of national government control. These waters account for more than half the world's surface, yet many governments are ignoring controls on them and allowing pirate fishing to go unchecked, said Simon Cripps of WWF's marine programme. Countries such as Australia, Britain and Canada should be taking more responsibility, setting examples and putting pressure on other states, he said.
Tuna under threat due to illegal fishing
The WWF report, co-written with the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic, was released before a meeting next week in New York in which governments will review the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, the legal framework for management of fish populations in the high seas.
The environmental devastation being caused by a global fishing industry whose catch has risen from 18 million tonnes to 95 million tonnes over the past half-century, has left 25 per cent of commercial species over-exploited and depleted, compared with 10 percent in the mid-1970s, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The Switzerland-based WWF found that some of the regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs), whose task it is to ensure waters are not overfished, lacked the "political will and commercial motivation" to enforce fishing limits.
Some regional agreements, such as the Antarctic Convention, do protect fish stocks, concluded the WWF. But some signatories to a North Atlantic agreement are ignoring fishing quotas altogether. Canada, for example, is committed to protecting stocks in its own national waters but allows overfishing on the Grand Banks, off its east coast, because they fall within international waters where vessels from other nations are at work. This is causing huge declines in cod stocks, devastating the income of coastal communities.
Some countries seem oblivious to the environmental damage being caused. The coastal states of east Africa do not form a part of their own region's RFMO - the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission - despite catching large amounts of tuna. Several east African states are being used as transshipment ports for illegally-caught toothfish, but do not seem to be aware of the criminality.
Environmental devastation
Graphic evidence of the consequences of such systemic failures arrived from Rome yesterday where, at the start of the commercial fishing season for the Mediterranean bluefin tuna, the Tuna Trap Producers Association (TTPA) said that their industry was on the verge of collapse. Catches by the traditional tuna-trap fishermen in Southern Spain are down 80 per cent on this time last year, according to the TTPA.
Tuna farming - the fattening of wild bluefin tuna in cages - has dramatically increased as a result of demand for sushi, driven mainly by the Japanese market. This has increased the amount of bluefin caught by burgeoning industrial fleets from an already overexploited stock in the Mediterranean.
WWF said the root of this crisis lay with the one of the RFMOs whose role is examined in the report - the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). WWF said ICCAT was allowing a increase in the Mediterranean tuna farming capacity, taking the total authorised capacity to 51 012 tonnes - 20 000 tonnes higher than a previously imposed limit.
"One of the most important fisheries in the world is showing strong signs of collapse," said Sergi Tudela, Fisheries Officer at the WWF Mediterranean Programme Office. "If an urgent recovery plan is not approved this year - including tighter quotas - it is highly likely that this fishery will disappear entirely in the very near future."
The report's authors called on the UN to review fishing on the high seas and strengthen the resolve of RFMOs to deal with states that flout agreements. "It's got to stop, we've got to do it quickly," Mr Cripps said. "There is hope, if we can get management put in place."
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