News | Sunday, 26 July 2009

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Malta downplays calls for bluefin tuna trade ban

Raphael Vassallo
Malta, the world’s largest tuna-penning nation, is resisting the growing international demand for a trade ban on the critically endangered bluefin tuna – a fish described as “too expensive to save,” and which is now threatened with extinction on account of rampant overfishing.
Calls for a global trade ban originated in the principality of Monaco, which proposes to have the fish listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) – a move that would effectively ban all international trade.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has since voiced his support for the initiative; as have the governments of the UK and the Netherlands. This week, Germany became the latest European nation to openly back Monaco’s proposal.
Conservation agencies such as the World Wildlife Fund warn that unless such action is taken soon, fish stocks will collapse by 2010.
However, a spokesperson for Resources and Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino has downplayed the French, British, Dutch, German and Monagesque initiatives as “mono lateral measures taken for different reasons.”
“The management of bluefin tuna is the responsibility of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT),” the official said this week. “A large number of countries including the EU have been working within this Commission for a large number of years to manage the bluefin tuna fishery on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Mediterranean.”
The ministry official pointed out how the Scientific Committee for Research and Statistics (SCRS) has every year come up with recommendations, but these have never to date included a ban.
“It is not always necessary to apply a total ban to trade or fishery to recover stocks. The advice of the SCRS has always been to match fishing effort with available stocks. Listing in CITES-I will definitely increase the administrative costs of trade of the species, but will not necessarily contribute to its controlled catches and therefore recovery.”
Despite the ministry’s confidence in ICCAT, the growing demands for listing under the CITES convention have in part been fuelled by a perceived failure of the Commission to adequately protect the lucrative fish from commercial interests.
ICCAT has repeatedly been accused of ignoring its own scientific advice, including an independent report which described the Mediterranean situation as a “travesty of fisheries management”.
EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg in particular has been scathingly criticised over his role in the last ICCAT meeting in Marrakech, where he was accused of representing only the interests of European fisheries at the expense of conservation issues.
After the 2008 Marrakech summit, ICCAT once again adopted quotas which were markedly higher than those recommended by the SCRS.
Malta’s rural affairs ministry nonetheless defends ICCAT’s recovery plan as “the right way forward”.
“The bluefin tuna recovery plan, developed in 2006, has been revisited every year and major changes were applied to it in 2008 in Marrakech, Morocco. This recovery plan includes drastic decreases in catch quotas, seasonal closures, minimum size restrictions and controls at all levels from catching to landing, to trade and marketing. It is the strict compliance with and adherence to these measures that will ensure a decrease in catches and therefore contribute to the recovery of the stocks. Applying further paperwork and including more authorities in the approval of this paperwork will only make the bluefin cost more.”
The bluefin tuna fattening industry generates an estimated €100 million a year for the government of Malta.

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