NEWS | Wednesday, 19 November 2008

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What’s it got to do w ith the price of fish?

As tuna-fishing nations this week gather in Morocco to decide the fate of the endangered bluefin tuna at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna summit, RAPHAEL VASSALLO outlines the basics of Malta’s involvement in the multi-million euro industry

The bluefin tuna controversy
Over the last decade, scientists have warned that the Northern bluefin tuna is being over fished to the brink of total stocks collapse: a biological point of no return, when the species would no longer be able to replenish its numbers in the wild.
The main reason for commercial interest in this fish is the often extraordinary prices it can fetch on the international market. Last year’s negotiated price was €20 a kilo: considering that a single adult specimen can weigh more than 500 kg, it is easy to understand why there is such pressure, by fisheries and conservationists alike, on governments and the international regulatory body, ICCAT, over fishing regulations.

Quotas and fishing methods
The two main tuna fishing techniques in the Mediterranean are long-line (traditional, used by most Maltese fishermen) and purse-seine nets (industrial, used by the large fleets of Spain, Italy, France, etc.)
The tuna season for purse-seiners is between June and July, while in the case of long-liners fishing is also allowed at other times of the year, which vary from country to country.
Because the species has been so drastically over-fished, all nations have been given a national quota, depending on the size of their (declared) fleet. Europe’s quotas are decided by the European Commission for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs. However, the last quotas set by the Commission were almost double the amount recommended by scientists in view of the population crisis.
Malta rarely, if ever, comes close to exhausting its national quota. In fact, Maltese long-liners (which account for over 95% of the local fleet) last year declared only 143 tonnes – a negligible amount, compared to the much larger quantities declared by purse-seiners.

Farming
Fattening live tuna in ranches is a relatively new industry, tracing its origins to the mid-1980s. Tuna caught by fishermen are transported in mobile pens to the farming destination, where they are inputted into cages, usually of 50 metres in diameter (of the kind visible in the Comino channel – see pic opposite).
Malta currently has eight operational tuna farms for a total declared capacity of 11,500 tonnes – making it by far the largest tuna ranching nation in Europe. Nearly all the locally fattened fish is caught by foreign purse-seiners under contract with local farming companies.
Over 90% of locally farmed tuna is eventually bought up by Japanese traders such as the Mitsubishi Corporation.

Harvesting and export
Once fattened, the fish are slaughtered, then loaded onto vessels and instantly frozen at -60 degrees Centigrade: more than three times lower than the average freezer temperature. It is then airlifted to Japan, where the paperwork provided by traders is recorded by the fisheries department of the government of Japan, and (like all other imports) the Japanese customs authorities.
If all transactions have been entirely above board, there should be no difference between the Japanese trade records (published bi-annually), customs declarations and the documentation supplied by the exporting country’s fisheries authorities to the European Commission, and hence to ICCAT.

Paperwork
The European Commission is the contracting party to ICCAT, so Malta, as an EU state, is required to submit its data to the Commission on a regular basis.
Data includes an annual report on the size and capacity of national fishing fleets and ranching facilities; and for each individual fish that passes through the country, a set of documentation specifying the flag state of the fishing vessel, the date and place of catch, and other details.
If the tuna is trans-loaded from the original destination via another country, this information also has to be recorded. All these documents have to be validated by the Malta Fisheries Control Division, which falls under the Ministry for Resources and Rural Affairs.

Laundering
As all overpriced commodities, the bluefin tuna has attracted its fair share of interest by criminal individuals and organisations.
In spite of various monitoring exercises, many countries routinely overshoot their (already high) national quotas. France last year admitted to an overcatch, while Italy has been accused by the World Wildlife Fund of under-declaring both catch and the size of its purse-seiner fleet. Other countries like Spain, Tunisia and Turkey face similar accusations.
The situation creates a lucrative market for illicit “laundering” of illegally caught tuna, whereby countries which have not exhausted their quota pass off the overcatch of other countries as part of their own annual catch.
In most cases, the tuna allegedly re-exported via the laundering country would not have been physically exported from that country at all: it is only the State-validated paperwork that would have been illicitly modified.

The allegations concerning Malta

Malta has been implicated in the illegal “paper tuna trade” by conservationist groups such as Greenpeace International and the World Wildlife Fund, who base their claims in part on intelligence reports compiled by the consultancy firm ATRT/SL.
In the 2007/2008 season, Japanese trade and customs records showed a total of almost 12,000 tonnes in tuna imports from Malta, for a total market value of €240 million.
However, independent estimates by ATRT and also Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbum suggest that Malta did not have more than 6,800 tonnes at most. The discrepancy works out at around €100 million.
Defending its documentation, the Fisheries Division claimed that the 12,000 tonnes also included transhipments from third countries. However, industry sources insist that transhipments can only be recorded as “re-exports” if: a) the fish has been imported into Malta, and; b) there has been added value to the product before re-export.
This would apply to locally farmed tuna, which would have been imported from the flag state of the fishing country and fattened (hence added value) before re-export. But in the case of the transhipments mentioned by the Ministry, Malta’s import stats for the same period do not record these shipments as having been imported, and the product was not modified before being transloaded to final destination.
Furthermore, MaltaToday has pointed out various inconsistencies and anomalies in the Ministry’s claims. These include:
Carry-over: the Ministry claims that Malta carried over 1,300 tonnes of live tuna from 2007: including 210 tonnes (€4.2 million), allegedly caught by a Moroccan purse-seiner, but not listed in a report submitted to the European Commission. But in Marrakech this week, conservation groups have openly challenged Malta’s claimed 1,300-tonne carry-over, arguing that this figure is being used to conceal quantities which have already been illicitly traded.
Double registration: another individual transhipment involves tuna harvested on board a reefer named “Tuna Pro 1” and sold to a Spanish company “Tuna Pro Co. Ltd”. The reefer is double registered, and the Spanish company does not even exist.
Despite these and other allegations, based largely on discrepancies in the Ministry’s own statistics, there has to date been no investigation by the local authorities.

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt

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