ICCAT meeting in Morocco will consider how much bluefin tuna should be caught in the Atlantic and Mediterranean next year. But it may lack crucial data. The group, called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), meets every year to argue over quotas, of which the European Union’s is the biggest. The EU divides this among its members in December (when the big row will be about plans to slash cod quotas).
It is fact that the population of bluefin tuna is crashing after decades of overfishing, mainly by Europeans. This year a European body, the Community Fisheries Control Agency (CFCA), has gathered data on bluefin and conducted inspections. But nothing materialised until Philippe Morillon, the French chairman of the parliament’s fisheries committee, got the CFCA to produce a ten-page summary on November 6th. It concludes that “it has not been a priority of most operators in the fishery to comply with ICCAT legal requirements”.
According to Raül Romeva, a green MEP from Spain, this summary is a “sanitised” version. He explained that the full report has been suppressed by the commission at the request of national governments because its contents are so embarrassing. It is said that the report contain details about the scale of infringements, including which countries are responsible. He opined that one-third of inspections led to an apparent infringement, such as inadequate catch documentation. The commission, he says, is covering this up.
Mielgo Bregazzi, a fisheries consultant, informed that he saw a copy of the full report in August, just before it went to the commission. He confirms that it contains the detailed data that the greens and the fisheries committee have been asking for. A spokesman for the UN agency that regulates trade in endangered species, CITES, confirms that “some countries” want to put bluefin tuna forward for CITES protection if the results of the ICCAT meeting are unsatisfactory.
