International & Trade

The following was released by Pew Environment:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Jeff Wise, director of the Pew Environment Group's Global Campaign to End Illegal Fishing, issued this statement today in response to the Obama Administration's formal transmittal for ratification by the U.S. Senate of the Port States Measures Agreement, a major international treaty to combat pirate fishing.

"A result of the work of the Obama and Bush administrations, this treaty provides a rare opportunity to crack down on illegal fishing and advance the priorities of a wide variety of interests—from conservation to commercial fishing.

"The United States was a leader during the treaty's negotiation and is already one of the world's top enforcers when it comes to combating illegal fishing. The agreement requires other nations to match our efforts by monitoring and stopping the flow of illegal fish through their ports and into commercial markets.

"With 80 percent of global fisheries fully or over-exploited, pirate fishing is devastating healthy ocean ecosystems and hurting responsible fishermen in America and around the world. Representing as much as one-fifth of the globally reported fish catch, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing steals $23 billion a year from the pockets of hardworking fishermen and their families.

"In light of the fact that Republican and Democratic presidents have worked hard to end illegal fishing, we urge senators on both sides of the aisle to build on that progress by ratifying this treaty."

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LONDON, Nov. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — The 30th annual meeting of the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) ended today, with countries agreeing to prohibit fishing for deep-sea sharks but failing to agree on significant, additional measures to safeguard vulnerable deep-sea species and ecosystems. While NEAFC has made considerable progress since 2006 in closing areas on the high seas south of Iceland to bottom fishing, it is has yet to establish effective regulations to ensure sustainable deep-sea fisheries.

"While we commend NEAFC for prohibiting fishing for deep-sea sharks, we are disappointed that those some protections were not extended to other deep-sea species and ecosystems that continue to be seriously threatened by deep-sea bottom fishing," said Andrea Kavanagh, director of deep-sea conservation for the Pew Environment Group.

The NEAFC meeting took place two months after the United Nations General Assembly began debating actions taken by NEAFC and other regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to protect the deep sea. The UN adopted a series of resolutions over the past seven years, committing high-seas fishing countries and RFMOs to urgently protect such species and ecosystems from the harmful impacts of deep-sea fishing, in particular bottom trawl fishing.

This week, the European Union put forward proposals to prohibit fishing for orange roughy and 17 species of deep-sea sharks. The proposal to prohibit fisheries targeting deep-sea sharks, amongst the most vulnerable deep-sea species, was adopted. The proposal to ban fishing for orange roughy, based on a recommendation from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, was supported by Iceland and Norway, but was not adopted by NEAFC because of opposition from Denmark (the Faroe Islands) and Russia.

Read the complete story from The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch

 

 

 

 

 

WASHINGTON — Far out on the Pacific Ocean, the world's industrial fishing fleets pursue one of the last huge wild hunts — for the tuna eaten by millions of people around the world.

Yet tuna still aren't fished sustainably, something that conservationists and big U.S. tuna companies are trying to fix. This illustrates one part of the pressure on the world's oceans to feed a growing global population, now 7 billion. It also underscores the difficulties people have in balancing what they take against what must be left in order to have enough supplies of healthy wild fish.

"It's serious. On a global basis, we've pretty much found all the fish we're going to find," said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at the advocacy group Oceana. "There's not a lot of hidden fish out there. And we're still heading in the wrong direction, taken as a whole."

Some 32 percent of the world's fish are overfished, up from 10 percent in the 1970s and 25 percent in the early 1990s, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Read the complete story from The Bellingham Herald

 

 

 

 

 

The Pew Environment Group said it is “guardedly optimistic” the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) will adopt its proposals this year to crack down on illegal fishing in their upcoming meeting in İstanbul.

The Pew Environmental Group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., will push ICCAT’s 48 member governments during its 22nd regular meeting to strengthen its controls against illegal fishing and work toward sustainable fishing.

Lieberman said the group will urge ICCAT members to tighten controls to prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing of Atlantic bluefin tuna and other species, to stop overfishing and support sustainable fishing methods and to conserve porbeagle, silky and other threatened sharks.

The group recently released a report that found illegal and fraudulent fishing of bluefin tuna on the rise. According to the report, the amount of bluefin tuna traded globally last year exceeded the official quota by 141 percent. Two years prior, that gap was 31 percent.

Read the complete story from Today's Zaman

 

 

 

 

 

When Rick Mears catches swordfish, he abides by a complex set of regulations designed to preserve stocks and save other marine life.

That's the way swordfishing is done in the United States. It has led to stocks going from a low in 1999 — when a rebuilding plan was adopted — to being fully restored today.

But that is not the way it's done in other countries.

Smith's job is to preserve the U.S. quota by arguing it is not being caught because of conservation measures that rebuild the stocks. He also will try to convince other nations to adopt similar conservation measures.

“I think other countries recognize the U.S. sacrificed a lot to rebuild this fishery, and it's not fair to penalize our fleet for doing this,” Smith said.

The worldwide allocation was 15,345 metric tons in 2010. The U.S. got 3,907 metric tons but only caught 2,845 metric tons.

U.S. catches have risen by 40 percent since 2006 because stocks have been rebuilt, but U.S. fishermen still are not catching the full quota.

Read the complete story from Press of Atlantic City on SeafoodNews.com

 

 

 

 

 

An international scientific study says well over twice as much of the rare eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna is traded than catch quotas allow for, further threatening the survival of the dinnertime favorite at sushi bars across the globe.

The Pew Environment Group said Tuesday that the 141 percent gap between the two last year does not even take into account the black market, which would further highlight the pressure the stocks of one of the world’s most expensive fish are under in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.

Pew bluefin tuna expert Lee Crockett that “the bluefin trade is rife with fraud and misinformation,’’ and called for a change from a corruption-prone paper trail of documents to full electronic boat-to-chopsticks surveillance of the trade by the time the 2012 season opens.

Read the story from the Associated Press

 

 

 

 

News outlets have been hammered by cutbacks in recent years and oceans have been devastated by a wide range of stresses, including pollution, warming induced by climate change, ocean acidification (another insidious impact of greenhouse gas emissions), tourism in fragile marine environments and, perhaps most dramatically, overfishing.

So perhaps that old saying "Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat the rest of his life" needs a corollary: Teach people how to manage fisheries—and journalists how to cover them—and we’ll continue to have a sustainable source of protein and delicious seafood for future generations to enjoy.

As it stands, it seems unlikely we’ll be able to count on this resource in the future. About 25 percent of the world’s fisheries are over-exploited, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and another 52 percent are fully exploited. These estimates are based on officially reported figures from the seafood industry, which are notoriously unreliable, but the more targeted studies—it’s now estimated that up to 90 percent of the world’s big fish have been fished out—suggest the situation may be even worse than it appears.

Read the complete story from The Columbia Journal Review.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 5 October, Mayor Scott Lang called on President Obama "to replace NOAA Administrator Dr Jane Lubchenco with an individual who will work with fishing communities around the country.”

“We need a leader in NOAA who understands that the welfare of communities is a priority and that there can be a balance between economic sustainability and conservation”, Mr Lang, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, America's financially top-producing seaport, said, reports Menakhem Ben-Yami.

Mr Lang's statement followed the hearing of the Senate Oceans Subcommittee, at which Senator John Kerry reminded Ms Lubchenco that the Massachusetts Fisheries Institute reported that "80% of the revenues went to 20% of the boats". Ms Lubchenco, according to several witnesses, answered evasively and with equivocation question after question from the Subcommittee members – three Senators and three Congressmen. Also, she and her deputy for fisheries Mr Schwaab didn't stay for the whole hearing, missing, among others, the testimony of Professor Brian Rothschild, one of the most respected American fishery scientists and one of the most credible critics of NOAA/NMFS's fisheries management policies.

The hearing was very important, Professor Rothschild told WF, because it set the stage for reviewing and modifying the catch share program which has not been working well in the US Northeast.

Ms Lubchenco came to NOAA directly from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an NGO financed by large corporations, and made its agenda the US national policy, said Robert Jones, Executive Director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, and her policies have caused significant pain among fishermen and fishing communities.

Read the complete story from World Fishing & Aquaculture

 

 

 

 

(AP)  JUNEAU, Alaska — The recent seizure of a stateless ship in international waters 2,600 miles off Alaska's coast has spotlighted the challenge that the U.S. and other nations face in trying to crackdown on illegal fishing, an activity that accounts for up to $23.5 billion a year in global economic losses.

Finding rogue vessels in the vast, open ocean can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But U.S. officials and some environmentalists say progress is being made, including multinational patrol and enforcement agreements and the potential for sanctions against countries that engage in illegal, unreported and unregulated (or IUU) fishing.

More countries are joining the efforts and there is greater awareness of the illegal fishing issue in the U.S. and Europe, where patrons ask restaurants and shops for the source of their product. There are efforts to better track high-value products like bluefin tuna to ensure they were obtained legally, and to keep illegal product out, said Rebecca Lent, director of the Office of International Affairs for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries.

Read the complete story from CBS News.

 

 

 

 

 

A BAN on scallop fishing could threaten jobs in Kirkcudbright.

The warning came from the boss of one of the town’s largest employers.

John King, managing director of West Coast Sea Products, was stunned at the extent of the ban which was introduced by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) on Sunday.

It covers fishing area seven which extends from the Irish Sea to the south coast of England as far as Dover. Mr King said: “I have never seen a ban this big before, not in my 35 years as a fisherman. It was a shock when we found out.”

West Coast Sea Products, which employs 183 people, depends on the waters for much of its business. And Mr King fears that jobs could be under threat if the decision to halt scallop fishing carries on for a long time.

He added: “If the ban is not lifted by the end of the month then it will have a hard impact on the industry.

Read the complete article from The Dumfries & Galloway Standard