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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 5
January 2006
ICCAT meeting leaves industry reps unsettled
SEVILLE, SPAIN - The 2005 meeting of the International Commision for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) concluded with the election of National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Director Bill Hogarth as ICCAT chairman for the next two years.
That and a set of somewhat watered-down sanctions against Taiwan for egregious bigeye tuna infractions were just about the only significant actions to come out of the Nov. 14-20 meeting, and US commercial fishing representatives were left more concerned than ever about the future of the bluefin and swordfish fisheries.
“Normally, you’ve got a sense of the go-forward direction at the end of the meeting, but we didn’t have that this year for swordfish and the US must take substantive action to revitalize this important fishery,” said Nelson Beideman, executive director of Blue Water Fishermen’s Association and a member of the US delegation to ICCAT.
ICCAT is the international body that governs the management of Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS), including bluefin and other tunas, swordfish, marlin, and sharks.
Established in 1969, the commission is made up of 41 member nations and is responsible for collecting scientific information, assessing stock status, and establishing management programs for 30 species.
Hogarth’s election as chair brings with it the opportunity for the US to influence ICCAT’s agenda and gives the US a bully pulpit from which to promote the American marine conservation ethic, which, arguably, is one of the strictest in the world.
“It’s important that we take advantage of the situation and push for a more biologically based bluefin plan next year,” said Rich Ruais, executive director of East Coast Tuna Association and a member of the US delegation. “If the chair wants to be aggressive, he can make demands and have serious influence in that role.”
Next year
The 2006 ICCAT meeting, which will take place less than one year from now, will be both a critical and daunting one. The commission is scheduled to conduct stock assessments and address management and allocation issues for its most important species – eastern and western bluefin tuna, northern and southern swordfish, and blue and white marlin.
The demands on scientists participating in the assessments will be tremendous during the coming months and the ICCAT meeting will be intense.
“There’s just an incredible amount of work that needs to be done,” Ruais said.
Beideman is also concerned that the return to opening up negotiations on management plans and allocation schemes for multiple species during a single ICCAT meeting could result in diplomatic trade-offs not in the best interest of US fishermen.
“We didn’t want a situation where bluefin, swordfish, billfish, and albacore were all under reassessment and reallocation discussions at the same time. We’re concerned it’ll be a horse trade, with arbitrary trade-offs across species,” he said. “That’s what ICCAT used to do and that’s what we’ve tried to move ICCAT away from doing.”
Beideman added that he had especially supported the US objective to move the swordfish and billfish stock assessments out of the mix for the 2006 meeting – swordfish because it is a recovered, healthy resource, making a new assessment a lesser priority during an already busy year; and billfish because the recently implemented ICCAT recovery plan may not have adequate data yet to produce an accurate assessment.
Reallocation fears
Both Ruais and Beideman were also concerned that the US bluefin tuna and swordfish fisheries will be vulnerable as ICCAT re-evaluates quota allocations in 2006. That’s because both fisheries have had trouble taking their ICCAT-sanctioned quotas in recent years.
For the bluefin fishery, the problem appears to be one of availability. While the Canadians have had highly successful fisheries with rapid catches and the fish have been plentiful off the Carolinas during the winter months these last few years, the bluefin have basically bypassed New England. As a result, overall US landings have come in short of the ICCAT quota allocation.
The US swordfish fishery is a shadow of its former self. From 350-500 active vessels in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, only about 40-45 pelagic longliners were actively fishing as of November 2005.
Beideman attributed the dramatic fleet contraction to tremendously over-restrictive measures, especially closures in US waters implemented during the swordfish recovery phase that have not yet been relaxed even though the swordfish stock is fully recovered.
“The pendulum has swung too far and recreational and environmental opposition is preventing the revitalization necessary for the US to utilize its swordfish quota,” Beideman said.
Additional problems for US swordfish fishermen include the impacts of hurricanes last summer and fall on the Gulf of Mexico fleet and low swordfish prices caused by a decline in demand due to misinformation about mercury, misinformation about the health of the swordfish resource, and a steady volume of imports.
According to NMFS statistics released on Dec. 2, the North Atlantic directed swordfish fishery took only 37 percent of its first season quota. The first season runs June 1-Nov. 30 with a 1,468.8-metric-ton (mt) quota.
The second season ends on May 31, 2006.
Beideman said, “The further reduced winter fleet is not expected to even harvest this percentage of the second season quota, not counting the under-harvest from recent years.”
And while US swordfish fishermen are moving to more accommodating foreign lands or converting their boats to target scallops, monkfish, and other species, other countries associated with ICCAT are itching to get a hold of unused US quota. The same is true for bluefin.
Concerns over direction
One of the more troubling issues to come out of this year’s ICCAT meeting was an abrupt change in the person filling the US commercial commissioner’s seat.
Each year, the US delegation to ICCAT is led by three presidentially appointed commissioners – one representing the US government, one representing the recreational fishery, and one representing the commercial fishery.
Mike Genovese, a bluefin tuna industry member, had been serving as acting commercial commissioner for nearly two years.
Weeks before the delegation was set to head to Seville in November, Genovese was replaced by Randi Parks Thomas of the US Tuna Foundation.
According to its web site, the US Tuna Foundation represents the interests of the US canned tuna industry, including the US distant water tuna purse seine fleet and the US canned tuna brand processors, including Star-Kist Foods, Bumble Bee Seafood, and Chicken of the Sea International.
While Thomas is a respected professional, serious questions were raised about the appropriateness of her appointment since the US Tuna Foundation doesn’t have anything directly to do with the US Atlantic swordfish or tuna industries and handles only foreign-caught Atlantic HMS.
Those concerns were intensified when the US backed a weaker package of sanctions against Taiwan, a supplier of tuna to the canning industry, even though the US ICCAT advisory committee reportedly endorsed much stiffer penalties proposed by Japan.
The advisers had backed immediate trade sanctions, no directed bigeye fishery, and a 1,300 mt bigeye bycatch for the albacore tuna fishery.
In the end, ICCAT agreed to cut the 2006 Taiwan bigeye quota from 16,500 mt to 4,600 mt – 3,300 mt for a directed fishery and 1,300 mt to cover bycatch in the albacore fishery. ICCAT also reduced Taiwanese participation from 100 boats down to a maximum of 15.
Geoff Regan, Canadian minister of fisheries and oceans, said this was the largest sanction for overfishing ever imposed by a regional fisheries management organization.
Ruais wasn’t convinced.
“It was a soft landing for Taiwan,” he said.
Accomplishment
NMFS listed a number of US accomplishments at the November meeting, including convincing ICCAT to adopt a process for analyzing data collection and reporting issues, which have interfered with the commission’s ability to conduct stock assessments on some species, including eastern bluefin tuna.
ICCAT also adopted a number of measures aimed at permitting the development of bluefin tuna farming “in a responsible and sustainable manner in relation to the management of bluefin tuna.”
Among those measures is a requirement that vessel captains carrying out transfer operations of wild-caught bluefin into cages maintain vessel logs and report the number of fish they transfer. ICCAT also agreed to establish and maintain a record of farming facilities.
A nonbinding resolution was adopted to encourage research on circle hooks in the swordfish fishery, which US fishermen are already required to use.
The next full ICCAT meeting will be held in the fall of 2006 in Croatia. An intercessional meeting of the bluefin working group, which eventually is expected to take up the issue of east-west Atlantic bluefin tuna mixing, will likely take place before then.
Lorelei Stevens
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