U.S. Accuses Europe of Overfishing Tuna in Atlantic

The NYTimes reports:

Europeans may claim a leadership role in fighting global warming, but they get black marks from environmentalists — and even from Washington — for failing to control their fishing fleets in the Mediterranean and other coastal waters.

In particular, United States officials want the European Union to do more to stop the overfishing of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a highly migratory, warm-blooded species that can grow to nearly a ton. A single fish can fetch tens of thousands of dollars as demand grows for dishes like sushi.

Europeans must “get control of their fleets, and if they reach their quotas they’ve got to shut down the fisheries,” said William Hogarth, the director of the fisheries service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We don’t have that from Europe yet,” he said. “We don’t even have the basics.”

Bluefin tuna spawn both in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mediterranean. The fish do not interbreed, but they mix extensively in the North Atlantic. So European catches may consist of significant numbers of bluefin tuna originating in waters around the United States.

How much mixing of fish takes place is still a disputed matter. But Mr. Hogarth said the mixing was an important factor in the decline of fish stocks around the United States.

“It’s a great injustice,” he said of European overfishing. “Unless you can get control of the eastern stock then the western stock can’t recover due to the mixing.”

The United States also has a poor record on fish stocks; it has allowed cod to become overfished and perhaps irreparably depleted.

Tuna experts like Carl Safina, the president of the Blue Ocean Institute, a nonprofit conservation group based in New York, places much of the blame for the collapse in west Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks on the United States, which, he said, continues to allow fishing in spawning areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The U.S. is delighting in shifting the blame to Europe,” he said.

He said that there were areas around Scandinavia and in waters off Brazil where bluefin tuna were already commercially extinct, and that the west Atlantic, where American fleets work the seas, was headed that way, too.

Yet he and other conservationists reserve their harshest criticism for the Europeans.

As part of a so-called recovery plan approved this month, European Union governments decided to put expert observers on 20 percent of each country’s vessels over 15 meters, or about 49 feet, to check catches and spot vessels using illegal fishing practices. European Union governments also pledged to ban the use of aircraft to locate shoals of tuna.

But conservationists sharply criticized that plan, largely because the bluefin tuna quota shared between Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain was set at about 17,000 tons. That is the maximum amount recommended by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, an international organization with more than 40 member countries. But it is roughly twice the limit stipulated by the commission’s own scientific advisers.

“This is not a recovery plan,” said Sergi Tudela, who is in charge of the fisheries program for the World Wide Fund for Nature in the Mediterranean. “It is a collapse plan.”

Ireland and Britain also criticized the European Union plan because it failed to penalize fleets in countries like France and Italy that already had overfished, and because drift-net fishing, banned since 2002, was still going on in some European Union fleets.

Conservationists like Mr. Safina are calling for an Atlantic-wide, five-year moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing and the closing of spawning areas in the Gulf of Mexico to fishing techniques that could kill bluefin.

Mr. Hogarth, the United States fisheries official, said that American fleets hauled only a small fraction of their quota last year because of low stocks, and that any measures taken by Europe looked as though they would be too little, too late for global stocks of bluefin tuna.

“We’re catching only about 12 to 14 percent of our quota,” Mr. Hogarth said. “There are just no fish here.”