Information on NCMC's conservation efforts for sailfish, marlin, swordfish, tuna, and sharks.

NCMC BRIEFS CONGRESS ON BLUEFIN CRISIS

Testimony of Ken Hinman, President, National Coalition for Marine Conservation
at a briefing on bluefin tuna, October 22, 2007, before the
House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans

After last November’s ICCAT meeting in Croatia, I wrote an article I called The Two Faces of ICCAT, about how the breakdown over bluefin tuna overshadowed progress on other species, in particular swordfish:

It was Sunday morning, November 26th, the last of 10 days of meetings for delegates from the 42 nations who make up the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). The hotel’s canned music system was piping in the theme from the movie “Titanic.” Which was appropriate, since ICCAT was about to adjourn without doing much of anything to save the bluefin tuna fisheries from sinking towards what its own scientists warn could be imminent demise.

Moored outside in the bay was the Greenpeace vessel “Rainbow Warrior,” flying a banner that evoked a song from another era - “Where Have All the Tuna Gone?” – bringing to mind the Sixties protest song’s mournful refrain, “When will they ever learn?” When indeed.

In 2006, in Croatia, on the Mediterranean coast, the international tuna commission was celebrating its 40th Anniversary. As incoming Chairman Bill Hogarth of the United States noted in his remarks opening the meeting more than a week earlier, ICCAT this year could celebrate its “first-ever successful international rebuilding program” for North Atlantic swordfish. He challenged all members to do the same for all species.

Unfortunately, the majority of the celebrants hadn’t learned much in 40 years. Confronted this year with “alarming news” about the impending collapse of bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea and the need to drastically cut back on fishing that Hogarth termed “completely out of control,” ICCAT reverted to form and did almost nothing.

In a perfect world, ICCAT would not be like the Titanic, but like Noah’s Ark, which everyone would get onboard in order to save every species of big fish in the Atlantic from overfishing. Actually, in much different words, of course, that’s ICCAT’s charter. But as it is, the only thing ICCAT has in common with Noah’s Ark is that everything seems to come in twos.

There are two populations of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic, eastern and western, with separate and discrete spawning stocks, which means that they must be treated individually. But mixing between the two on feeding and fishing grounds means that eastern and western nations must work cooperatively to protect both.

Protecting fish populations and fisheries at ICCAT requires two things, without one of which there is no chance of success: conservation agreements that follow the best available science, and full compliance with those agreements by all contracting parties.

Compliance, too, is made up of two essential elements: a means to enforce conservation measures, and a means to hold nations accountable if they don’t.

Finally, two things are at stake in how we manage bluefin tuna in the coming years: preventing a disastrous collapse of the stocks and the fisheries that depend on them; and, no less important, for bluefin and all the other species under ICCAT’s jurisdiction, the integrity of ICCAT itself as a management institution. In other words, as goes bluefin, so goes ICCAT.

In the case of bluefin tuna, ICCAT has not achieved any of its twin objectives, not by half.

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I fully support an Atlantic-wide moratorium to save bluefin tuna. I believe a halt to fishing on both eastern and western stocks is supported by the science and needed to avoid catastrophic collapses that may never be reversed – we lost the northern European bluefin fishery years ago, as recently reported by the EU and the Census for Marine Life, and it’s not coming back.

I want to stress, however, that I do not believe the answer to our problems here in the west lies in the east. The recent collapse of our New England fishery for giant tunas, if it has anything to do with overfishing in the east, underscores the fact that our fishery has been relying more and more on eastern migrants and that without them, the western population is too small to support a viable fishery on its own.

The U.S. should push for a total moratorium at ICCAT, as the right thing to do and the time to do it. But recognizing the odds of that happening, we must be prepared to take action here in the west, at home, to save our own population.

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What should we do in the east? The science says the catch should be no more than 15,000 tons a year. The quota was set at twice that. The actual catch is twice the quota. When it comes to eastern Atlantic bluefin, ICCAT is not following the science nor complying with the quotas. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Dealing with both these problems requires negotiation, which is uncertain at best. Dr. Hogarth is right to take a hard line going into these negotiations. If we are successful in bringing the quotas down – which I think is possible – we are still faced with a history of rampant non-compliance; catches seem to be unrelated to where the catch level is set.

That, I believe, is our biggest challenge. Congress may be able to help in this. ICCAT has a process for imposing sanctions on non-compliant parties, but uses it only against the small and the weak, or non-members. The big powers that are members of the club, like the EC, are immune. We need to change that. Congress must tell the Administration to elevate this issue to a level of international importance, and give it the weapons – trade sanctions, e.g. – the get the attention of those who flout ICCAT’s rules.

In addition to lower quotas, we should be seeking time-area closures:

1. the bluefin spawning grounds in the western Mediterranean in June; and,
   
   
2. the central Atlantic, where the highest rate of mixing between the stocks occurs. The problem here is not that we manage as two stocks, but the arbitrary line drawn between them. There should be a buffer, a no-fishing zone, on both sides of that line.

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What should we do in the west? Even a moratorium in the east will not rebuild western Atlantic bluefin. The spawning stock is at only 18 percent of the 1975 level, which was the original proxy for MSY because it was already a heavily fished population at that time.

The U.S. is in compliance, but it’s not working. Quotas in the west have hovered around 2,000 tons – the current catch limit – for the last 25 years. Meanwhile, the breeding population’s declined and remains extremely low, with no signs of improvement. The danger in the west is reducing the breeding stock below a critical mass and getting a stock failure that’s irreversible, like was seen in northern Europe. The danger persists because we are still taking too many of the remaining few western spawners.

We can and should do more in the west. At the top of the list is a time-area closure in the Gulf of Mexico – the one place we can be assured of giving full protection to the remnant western spawning population. In the Gulf, in the spring, every fish we kill is a rare western breeder. We’re killing hundreds each year, as bycatch; that may not sound like many, but it’s out of a total population of 8- 10,000. Closing the gulf to longlining, where and when the bluefin spawn, would do more than anything else to protect what’s left of the western bluefin spawning stock and preserve a U.S. fishery for the future.

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