France unwilling to ban bluefin tuna fishing
"I do indeed want us to take decisions on supervising the fisheries and banning trade (in bluefin tuna) -- but not banning the fishing of it," Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Bruno Le Maire said on television.
France has a large bluefin fishing fleet and fishermen there have urged the government to resist pressure from green groups when it decides whether to back adding bluefin to a list by CITES, the convention to protect threatened species.
Curbing just the trading "will ban 90 percent of exports from the European Union to outside countries, so I think that in itself will be substantial progress" in protecting bluefin tuna stocks, Le Maire said.
(Isn't this position like saying you want to stop smoking, but you still want to be able put a lit cigarette between your lips and just not inhale any of the smoke coming from it? Please.)
[European] Commission still at war over tuna ban
The EU has to take a common position on whether bluefin tuna should be included on an international list of hundreds of endangered species that require protection.
The college of commissioners was meant to take a final decision yesterday (13 January), but the item was dropped because Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner, who favours a temporary ban, is at loggerheads with Joe Borg [no kidding], the fisheries commissioner, who opposes it. Neither of the commissioners has signalled any willingness to compromise.
A meeting between Borg and Dimas broke up yesterday (13 January) with no apparent progress.
The Commission is running out of time to end its divisions as the EU must prepare a common position ahead of a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) on 13-25 March.
Too scared of fishermen to protect tuna (a hard-hitting article)
Even though experience ought to teach him [Borg] otherwise, he appears to believe that reduced catch allowances will be complied with and that the reporting of catches will be improved. This is naivety bordering on recklessness: under-reporting or non-reporting is endemic. The EU's own auditors have pointed out that the real levels of fisheries catches are unknown.
The conclusion that Borg should be drawing from the ICCAT's deliberations is that the prospects for the bluefin tuna are so dire that even the ICCAT, which has a record of setting catch-levels far above the recommendations of scientists, knew it had to do something. The ICCAT restrictions are perhaps an attempt to pre-empt more painful measures, such as a trade ban, but that does not mean that Borg should be taken in.
The bluefin tuna is hurtling towards elimination from EU waters at such a speed that the ICCAT's fishing restrictions should be reinforced by a CITES trade ban. Of course, that position will not be palatable to the EU's Mediterranean member states; Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain have all previously opposed such a ban. But that does not mean the Commission should back down. The Commission's duty is to stick to the unpalatable facts: stocks of bluefin tuna are being run down at an unsustainable rate.
Let's finish with this from the same article:
The Commission should consider the balance of probabilities and work out that bluefin tuna is in danger of extinction. The Commission should ask itself whether, when it arrives at that point, it will want to look back and say that it did nothing, or look back and say that it at least made an attempt to stop the destruction. ...Ironically, the Commission is about to launch a paper about halting the loss of biodiversity. The Commission describes biodiversity loss as the major global environmental problem alongside climate change.
It is not too difficult to read across from the biodiversity issue to the fate of the bluefin tuna. The loss from the oceans of these huge fish, which can grow to 800kg in size, would be a scandal. The Commission should unite behind support for a trade ban.
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