Fish & Fishing

From: Animal People May 1997

Big fish eat little fish

	The cynical might believe fisheries negotiations are about who gets to kill the last fish––after starving, bludgeoning, shooting, or drowning marine mammals and sea birds to extinction––on purpose if their remains can be sold or they are considered competitors, by accident if not.
Scientists repeatedly warn governments and international rule-makers that as former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration science chief Sylvia Earle puts it, “The ocean cannot sustain the massive removal of wildlife needed to keep nations supplied with the present levels of food taken from the sea.” Caught between the bedeviling verity that cancelling fishing jobs costs elections, and the biological fact of a depleted deep, public officials tend to acknowledge harm done by other nations, denying harm done by their own. Thus the object of fish treaties, time and again, becomes not conservation but rather grabbing the most of what fish are left. The World Conservation Union now includes a record 120 marine fish as “threatened,” including 100 commercially sought species added just last year at Earle’s insistence, as a WCU board member. Oregon State University ecologist Jane Lubchenco told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February that saving such species requires putting 20% of the world’s oceans into natural marine reserves within the next 25 years. More than 30% of major fish stocks are overfished, Lubshenco said, while 69% show signs of serious depletion.
Following Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who commenced confronting high seas driftnetters on behalf of fish in 1987, after 15 years of undertaking similar actions for whales, many major conservation groups now prominently talk about saving fish, including the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and the Cousteau Society––still headed by Jacques Cousteau, who pushed oceans as a boundless food resource in the 1950s and 1960s.
	Photograph of dolphin caught in driftnet courtesy of Greenpeace
“We have to reduce the catches substantially,” agrees Carl Safina, director of the National Audubon Society’s Living Oceans Program, stating a now conservative position. Alternatives are to either do nothing, or campaign against eating fish. Why no boycott Earle and Watson don’t eat fish, but most conservation group heads do––and know an anti-fish-eating crusade would throw them into conflict with coastal politicians, sport fishers, and fishing associations long wooed as allies against inshore polluters. The Pacific Northwest environmental struggle, for instance, pits fishers who want clean salmon streams against silt-producing loggers. Pushing the two resource-based traditional industries together would seem politically suicidal, as wise-users avidly court both, in opposition to endangered species protection and other environmental safeguards. The Pacific Northwest situation is paralleled wherever fisheries are in trouble. Constants are the crunch caused by the collapse of fish stocks and a dearth of other jobs for people of little education. Governments have already set aside 1,200 protected marine habitats around the world, but together they encompass less than one quarter of one percent of the ocean surface. At that, fishers are striving to dismantle protections, such as they are, from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary to the Great Australian Bight. The results were clear last December when a week-long United Nations debate on the state of the oceans brought only token resolutions that WWF coordinator for international treaties Joy Hyvarienen called “some of the worst examples I’ve seen of decision-making by the lowest common denominator.” The 185-nation U.N. took no action to pressure members to comply with the 1995 U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement, which has not been signed by 10 of the 20 nations that bring in 80% of the global oceanic catch. Among the holdouts are Chile, Mexico, Peru, Thailand, and Vietnam. Britain and the U.S. haven’t ratified the predecessor Convention on the Law of the Sea, either, because of Parliamentary and Congressional opposition to accepting U.N. regulation of the oceans. Such agreements can be risky, not because the U.N. or any other body has enforcement powers, but because they establish a legal framework that domestic organizations might use to sue the governments of their own nations. The U.N. debate convened shortly after the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, formed under the North American Free Trade Agreement, commenced a probe of Canadian compliance with its Fisheries Act and Environmental Assessment Act, in response to a complaint from the Alberta group Friends of the Old Man River. The failure of the U.N. to act mirrored the outcome of the second World Fisheries Congress, held in August 1996. There, WWF distributed documentation that the Australian Fisheries Management Authority hadn’t done impact studies on even one of its 21 regulated marine fisheries. Australian live fish exports to Japan and China from the Great Barrier Reef meanwhile rose from zero in 1993 to 409 metric tons last year. Similar reef fishing has successively devastated reefs off Hong Kong, the Philippines, Palau, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Maldives, and the Solomon Islands, and also recently commenced in the Marshall Islands. The Australian response was to open 16 of 500 protected and previously unfished reef sections to “experimental” line fishing for one year to see what might happen. About 2,200 reef sections are already fished. North Sea cod crash Disappointment also came in October from the European Fisheries Commission, whose members dumped a proposal to cut fleet catch capacity by 40% over the next six years. Fisheries Commissioner Emma Bonino asked a month later for a 15% cut, to be achieved mainly by better enforcement of existing regulations. She didn’t get that, either, and on January 1 saw the European Union gavel pass to The Netherlands. The Dutch are committed to slowing the phase-in of catch reductions.
Scientists from the Robert Gordon, Aberdeen, and Warwick Universities meanwhile warned that the North Sea has suffered a 30% drop in the amount of sand eels and pout in the North Sea cod, haddock, and whiting diet over the past decade––but still make up 60% of their diet.
	Haddock
If unable to find sand eels and pout, cod and similar species resort to cannibalism. Overall, the British scientists found, fishers take about 60% of all the fishable cod from the North Sea each year, reducing the potential spawning stock from an estimated 350,000 metric tons 30 years ago to perhaps 75,000 metric tons now. The Britons also reported that about one third of the total North Sea catch is landed illegally––two-thirds in certain areas. The European Commission acknowledged on March 25 that Spanish fishers may underreport their catches by up to 1,000%, after Ireland intercepted seven Spanish vessels in 10 days to inspect their logs. The interceptions came after a Spanish stern trawler rammed the British gillnetter Holly Jane off Fastnet Rock, five days after an Irish fisher drowned when a British-registered Spanish steel-hulled trawler ran over his much smaller wooden boat 10 miles off Dursey Island, County Cork. But Spaniards are not the only offenders. In November 1996, Ireland fined the owners of two Japanese longline tuna vessels $500,000 for alleged poaching last August. The Norwegian Fishing Vessel Owners Association meanwhile in January accused Irish boats of overfishing mackerel quotas by 100%, by misreporting mackerel as horse mackerel, a similar species not under quota. Norway, a non-EU nation, shares North Sea mackerel with EU nations by treaty, and has sought to increase its share by 30%. Norway unilaterally imposed relatively stiff catch quotas in coastal waters in 1988, cutting fulltime fishing industry employment by 25%, and as other North Sea stocks drop, anticipated its biggest cod catch in 20 years this year. Bonino tried again for stricter fishing quotas in March, refusing to commit the EU to accept the recommendations of the environment and fisheries ministers of the North Sea nations, who earlier agreed that the best way to cut the catch of vulnerable species would be to chase out the fleets of Spain, France, Denmark, and The Netherlands. This time she won a weak agreement to ban dragnetting and other environmentally destructive fishing methods within sight of salmon rivers and major bird colonies along the British coast. “The text is as slippery as a fish,” warned Greenpeace campaigner Malcolm MacGarvin. “Experience shows it will mean nothing.”
	As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, most EU fisheries ministers were reportedly ready to accept fishing quota cuts of up to 30% at a mid-April meeting––but British fisheries minister Tony Baldry, on the eve of a Parliamentary election, said his government wouldn’t accept any cuts until the EU moves to prevent about 160 foreign-owned vessels from registering “British” so as to take British fish quota to Spain and The Netherlands. Baldry spoke the same day that salmon researchers announced the 1996 North Sea salmon catch was only 25% of the catch landed 20 years earlier.
Salmon
Irish minister of state for marine affairs Eamon Gilmore argued in December 1996 for the repeal of an “unenforceable” ban on nylon filament salmon nets, and instead sought a shorter salmon season, with no night fishing and no driftnetting more than six miles from shore. Gilmore also unilaterally reduced the number of driftnet permits from 847 to 773.
	Photograph of sealion trapped in gill net courtesy Sacramento Bee/Erhardt E. Krause
Bluefin hoax The strongest-sounding yet perhaps most misleading recent international fisheries action came at the November 1996 meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, in San Sebastian, Spain, where 24 nations led by the U.S. agreed to ban bluefin tuna imports from Belize, Honduras, and Panama. But Japan buys about 90% of world bluefin catch, paying up to $40,000 per tuna. The penalty in effect punished the prostitutes but not the patron. ICCAT also agreed to penalize members who exceed tuna quotas by subtracting the excess from their next annual quotas––but increased the allowable catch for western bluefin by 150 metric tons, including a 33-metric-ton increase for the U.S., where politicians heard for months about the August 1996 cancellation of recreational bluefin fishing from Maine to New Jersey because southern fishers had already caught the U.S. limit.
U.S. ICCAT commissioner Will Martin said the actions showed “ICCAT is adding teeth to its conservation programs.” ICCAT did impose slight reductions in swordfish quotas over the next three years, obliging the U.S. to close the winter Atlantic swordfishing season six weeks early––the second early closure in six months.
	Bluefin tuna
The National Marine Fisheries Service reports that the North Atlantic swordfish population is at 58% of optimum. The average weight of swordfish landed is down from 266 pounds in the 1960s to 90 pounds today. Fishery regulation at the national level hasn’t been any braver, nor more successful. The 104th Congress reauthorized the 1976 Magnuson Conservation and Management Act, which was billed as conserving U.S. waters by extending the territorial limits 200 miles out to sea. Foreign fleets took an estimated 77% of the 5.4 billion pound 1977 catch within the 200 mile limit, but now get none. The total catch, however, rose to 6.32 billion pounds by 1993. The reauthorization requires the regional fishery councils formed by the Magnuson Act to protect “essential fish habitat.” Among the first actions of the councils since the reauthorization, however, was the Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council decision to allow the catch of egg-bearing female lobsters off Hawaii. Canadian federal fisheries minister Fred Mifflin in October 1996 proposed the first major revision of Canadian fisheries law since 1868. Mifflin described it as emphasizing “self-regulation and self-reliance,” by delegating some management responsibilities over freshwater fish to the provinces, and some responsibilities concerning regional fisheries to interprovincial industry groups. Already Canada relies heavily on industry-gathered data to regulate fisheries, as the federal budget for fish research has been cut 30% in six years. Much of the recent cod-counting has been done by unemployed cod fishers. Arthur Bogason, chair of the Icelandic National Association of Small Boat Owners, said a similar system used in Iceland “is destructive for the coastal fleet, inshore fisherman, and coastal communities,” and has encouraged rather than restrained overfishing.