| Scientists Demand an End to 'Green' Longline Fishing November 29th, 2004 By David Harrison, Environment Correspondent, London Telegraph, 11/21/2004 Catching fish with long lines, which was hailed as the "green" solution for the fishing industry, is responsible for the death of almost 4.5 million fish, dolphins and birds in the Pacific Ocean every year, a study has found. Sharks, marlin, sea turtles, albatross, whales and dolphins are caught unintentionally on the lines, which are up to 60 miles long and bear thousands of hooks just below the surface. Some of the species are listed as endangered, and some of those are at critically low numbers. More than 600 scientists from 54 countries have now signed a petition urging the United Nations to impose a moratorium on longline fishing in the Pacific. Longline fishing was introduced because it was expected to reduce the number of unnecessary catches produced by the alternative method of dragging large nets through the ocean. The latest research shows, however, that millions of fish die or are seriously wounded after being caught on the hooks, either when taking the bait or, in the case of many seabirds, when feeding on fish caught on the line. Many species found in the longline "bycatch" have been seriously depleted and some pushed towards extinction, according to a report by the American Sea Turtle Restoration Trust. Robert Ovetz, the author of the report, said that an immediate moratorium should be imposed on longline fishing in the Pacific. "Longlines are wiping out the lions and tigers of the ocean - sharks, billfish and tunas, as well as sea turtles. Catches are indiscriminate and therefore uncontrollable," he said. "Contrary to its reputation as a clean fishing technology, industrial, pelagic longline fishing in the Pacific annually captures and kills about 4.4 million non-targeted marine species." The report, entitled Pillaging the Pacific, says that 3.3 million sharks, one million marlin, 59,000 sea turtles, up to 76,000 black-footed and laysan albatross and almost 20,000 dolphins, including the bottlenose, spotted and spinner, are captured or killed by longline fishing. Among the whales killed by longlines are the beaked, humpback and sperm varieties. The critically endangered leatherback turtle is expected to become extinct within the next few decades if the decline of the adult population is not halted. The number of adult nesting females has fallen by 95 per cent since 1980, the report says. Bycatch represents about a third of all Pacific hauls. Sharks, seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals are particularly vulnerable to extinction as they have low reproductive rates. Longlining is also having a damaging effect in the Atlantic Ocean where a recent study found that populations of sharks, and some tunas, had declined markedly. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that up to 40 million tons of bycatch and "discards", worth an estimated £2.4 billion, are wasted annually. "With little control over what is captured and killed, fishery managers can only regulate what fishermen keep and land," the report says. "As a result massive amounts of unwanted or illegal fish (and other species) are thrown back into the sea as overcatch." The report highlights another disturbing trend: with fish stocks falling, longline companies are turning to "top-of-the-food-chain" bycatch species, such as sharks, to increase their profits. The fishermen cut off the sharks' fins and these are sold to markets in the Far East, the United States and Europe. The report condemns the practice as a "senseless waste of entire sharks for the fibres of their fins which are an insignificant additive to so-called shark's fin soup, a luxury item with no nutritional value". Attempts to control longline fishing have failed because commercial operators are now using longer lines and more hooks. The most commonly caught species in the Pacific, bigeye tuna, and the most valuable commercial species, Southern Bluefish tuna, are listed as "vulnerable" and "critically endangered" respectively. Sarah Duffy, the oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, called for more marine reserves to control fishing in sensitive areas. "If industrial fishing continues at this rate then many species will be wiped out," she said. |
| Sustainable Oceans Radio Interview October 20th, 2004 This real audio link connects you to an interview that took place on October 13th, 2004 on NPR station KALW in San Francisco. The show, hosted by Farai Chideya, focuses on sustainable oceans and mercury in seafood. |
| Mercury Warnings for Marin Reservoirs October 18th, 2004 By Jim Welte Marin Independent Journal Saturday, October 16, 2004 - Fish in three Marin Municipal Water District reservoirs have tested positive for high levels of mercury and other contaminants, but district officials emphasized the test results had no impact on the district's drinking water. District rangers yesterday posted fish advisory signs at the three reservoirs. The move came after a three-year study by scientists at the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board found persistent pollutants such as mercury have built up in the food chains of the Bon Tempe reservoir in central Marin and the Nicasio and Soulajule reservoirs in West Marin. Those pollutants, the study found, have accumulated over decades in some fish species to levels that exceed state and federal health guidelines. Results of the study were announced this week. The study found that two largemouth bass in Bon Tempe, two of three largemouth bass tested in Nicasio and nine largemouth bass and three black crappie in Soulajule exceeded the mercury limit. In addition, three carp and three bluegill in Nicasio tested positive for mercury but did not exceed the limit. Two channel catfish at Soulajule exceeded the limit for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), an industrial chemical banned in 1977. No trout tested positive for contaminants. State and county officials said residents have no reason to be concerned about their drinking water, and stressed that drinking water is tested frequently. "We test for all these contaminants and they have never been detected in either MMWD's reservoir water or the treated drinking water," said Paul Helliker, the district's general manager. Bruce Wolfe, the executive officer of the regional water board, noted that "although these chemicals have been found in fish in some of our drinking water reservoirs, they do not concentrate in the water." According to the study, the contaminants tend to bind or absorb into sediment, where they can enter the aquatic food chain. They accumulate in the sediment over long periods of time and enter organisms eaten by fish that live in or on the sediment. The level of contamination is amplified as it moves up the food chain, so the fish that derive their food from the sediment and the most active predators accumulate the highest level of contaminant. The mercury pollution comes mostly from high levels of mercury that occur naturally in the soil, although some washes into the water from air pollution. PCBs and pesticides are left from prior industrial and farming practices, water board officials said. The study looked at fish from 10 reservoirs in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and Santa Clara counties. Some fish in every reservoir exceeded health levels for mercury and PCBs. Similar health warnings have been in effect for the past 10 years for fish in San Francisco Bay. This week's advisory represents the widest study of such contamination in Bay Area lakes. Women of childbearing age and children were urged to limit their consumption of largemouth bass, carp, channel catfish and black crappie from the relevant reservoirs to one per month, and of bluegill at Nicasio to four per month. Women beyond childbearing age and men were urged to limit consumption of largemouth bass from Bon Tempe and Soulajule to one per month, largemouth bass and carp from Nicasio and black crappie and channel catfish to four per month and the rest to 12 per month. Some advocates said more needs to be done on the wider issue of mercury contaminants in fish throughout the Bay Area. "The fish that we expect to be safe in our grocery store is not safe," said Andy Peri, a spokesman for the Sea Turtle Restoration Project in the West Marin. Peri's group has been lobbying local and state legislators to force grocery stores to provide consumers with more information about the level of mercury in the fish they buy at the point of their purchase. Currently, consumers must go to sites provided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and at www.gotmercury.org, a project of the Turtle Island Restoration Network. |
| Swordfish Bought in California Show Mercury at Dangerous Level October 1st, 2004 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/29/MNG5B90MPE1.DTL Jane Kay, San FranciscoChronicle Environment Writer Wednesday, September 29, 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In more unwelcome news for swordfish lovers, a new study found that more than two-thirds of the popular fish sampled contained mercury at levels high enough to trigger Food and Drug Administration enforcement action. The new results, released Tuesday, showed that 17 out of a random sample of 25 packages of frozen swordfish bought in California supermarkets were contaminated with toxic mercury above the FDA's "action level.'' The FDA action level of 1 part per million represents the limit at or above which the agency may take legal action to remove products from the market. Michael Herndon, an FDA spokesman, said no one was available at the agency who could talk about its record on pulling fish with high levels of mercury from boats, wholesalers or retailers. The action level "is a guideline that the agency can use,'' Herndon said. Already, the FDA advises pregnant women, nursing mothers and young children not to eat swordfish, shark, king mackerel and tilefish -- the species with some of the highest mercury levels -- and cautions against albacore tuna. Andy Peri, a spokesman for the Sea Turtle Restoration Project in the west Marin County hamlet of Forestville, which gathered the samples, said the FDA, the agency with federal authority for regulating dangerous substances in fish, wasn't doing enough to protect the public. "There's a law on the books that says the FDA has an action level, but no one's looking to see if anyone's exceeding it," Peri said. "They should call it the FDA 'inaction level.' '' The group is calling for removal from stores of any swordfish above the action level and a broad education program about mercury in fish. The new findings compound concerns over mercury and other contaminants in large fish feeding at the top of the aquatic food chain. Sources of mercury are rock formations and discharges by coal-burning plants and other industrial emissions. Even at low levels, mercury can impair the development of a fetus and a young child, causing neurological and other damage. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mercury experts have estimated that 630,000 infants are born a year with unsafe levels of mercury. The FDA's own lab tests of some 600 swordfish from 1990 to 2002 found that about one-third exceeded its action level. The Sea Turtle Restoration Project collected the swordfish samples in March, April and May of this year at stores in Petaluma, Novato, Sacramento, Carmichael and 10 cities in Southern California. The stores include Safeway, Albertsons and Kroger. Frontier Geosciences Inc. in Seattle, which conducted the analysis, confirmed that the samples were in good condition when received. The average of the 25 samples was 1.38 parts per million. The samples exceeding the FDA's action level ranged from 1.02 parts per million to a high of 4.15. Four of the samples exceeded 2 parts per million. At 2 parts per million of mercury, a 120-pound person eating 3 ounces a week would exceed by four times the EPA's safety guideline devised for sport and subsistence fishers. Brian Dowling, Safeway spokesman in San Leandro, said in light of the new findings, the company would "alert our suppliers to what they've found.'' The company buys from reputable major suppliers, he said. "Those suppliers operate under a federal seafood plan to assure the safety of their product at various points in the distribution chain," Dowling said. "We require all of our seafood suppliers to sign a commodity guarantee that warrants their product as being safe and wholesome.'' Michael Bender, executive director of the Mercury Policy Project in Montpelier, Vt., said the new California findings affirmed that the FDA wasn't doing its job. The FDA's action level "gives the public a false sense of food security, '' Bender said. But the agency uses it only as a discretionary tool, and "more often than not, the FDA doesn't take action to protect the public from mercury exposure." The Sea Turtle Restoration Project focuses on saving endangered sea turtles from long-line hooks, nets and beach harassment. In 2002, the group sued several grocery stores and restaurants under Proposition 65, the anti-toxics law, alleging that they failed to warn of unsafe levels of mercury in fish. The California attorney general took over the suit, and negotiations are continuing with the businesses. E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com. |
| Longliners face new rules over dolphin kin August 12th, 2004 Associated Press Thursday, August 12, 2004 Hawaii's longline fishing industry is facing new restrictions aimed at protecting false killer whales because of a reclassification by federal wildlife officials. The National Marine Fisheries Service has reclassified the isles' longline fleet from Category III to Category I, which will allow the agency to convene a committee to draft a management plan aimed at reducing the number of incidental killings of the marine mammals, a member of the dolphin family. By changing the designation, the federal agency was "finally acknowledging the devastating toll that the Hawaii-based longline fishing fleet inflicts on the Hawaii population of false killer whales," the environmental law firm Earthjustice said in a statement. In November, Earthjustice had filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the National Marine Fisheries Service of failing to protect false killer whales from the Hawaii-based longline fishing fleet. The suit was filed on behalf of the community group Hui Malama i Kohola, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Turtle Island Restoration Network. "If we don't act quickly, we may lose forever not only Hawaii's false killer whales, but also many other marine mammals, turtles and seabirds," said Todd Steiner, director of Turtle Island Restoration Network. Earthjustice said Hawaii's longline industry kills or seriously injures an average of about four false killer whales annually, nearly four times the level of death and injury that the National Marine Fisheries Service has determined the Hawaii population can sustain. "It is high time for NMFS finally to comply with the law by developing and putting in place a take reduction plan that will ensure the false killer whale's survival," said Earthjustice attorney David Henkin. Jim Cook, co-owner of the fishery supply firm Pacific Ocean Producers and legal liaison to the Hawaii Longline Association, said he questions the data upon which the federal agency based its decision. Bill Robinson, regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service's Pacific Islands Regional Office, said it was too early to speculate on what regulatory effect reclassifying the Hawaii longline fishery in the 2004 List of Fisheries will have on the fishery. "In the meantime we are hopeful that the new regulatory measures recently put into place to reduce encounters with endangered sea turtles will also benefit marine mammals," he said. |
| Enviromental groups may sue over turtle protection June 23rd, 2004 By VIRGINIA SMITH Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida) Staff Writer 23 June 2004 Three environmental groups announced plans Tuesday to sue the federal government for not curbing the use of longline fishing, a practice they say drowns thousands of sea turtles every year. The National Marine Fisheries Service, the groups claim, is violating federal endangered species law by allowing longline fishermen to snag too many marine turtles as bycatch. The Turtle Island Restoration Project of Forest Knolls, Calif., along with the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity and the Florida Wildlife Federation, say they will soon file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. A fourth environmental group, Earthjustice, is representing the plaintiffs in the yet-to-be filed suit. Andre Shiromani, a Tallahassee spokesman for the group, said longline fisheries have in recent years "exceeded the legal incidental take limits (of marine turtles) by more than double," and that more regulation was necessary. A Marine Fisheries scientist who works on the longline issue strongly disputed the groups' claim that longlines --- baited hooks attached to fishing lines and dragged behind boats --- cause sea turtles to drown. The "J-hook" used by most longline fisherman, said harvesting specialist John Watson, can be ingested by sea turtles, causing them internal injury. But sea turtles drowning on the lines, Watson said, is "very rare," since the lines, by law, must be long enough for animals to surface. Watson said his team has tested an alternative hook, called an "O-hook," that cannot be ingested by marine turtles and allows for their safe release. The fisheries service, he said, is pushing for the new hooks to become standard on longlines. |
| US must end the race for the last turtle June 2nd, 2004 Ocean Commission Report Falls Short by Robert Ovetz, PhD UPI June 6, 2004 The recently released preliminary report of the US Commission on Ocean Policy, with all its flaws, got one thing right: we need to “end the race for the last fish.” But the commission didn’t go far enough. We need to radically reform our domestic regional fisheries management councils and cooperate with other nations through the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) if we are to save our ocean and fisheries. The first place we need to start is the US regional fishery management councils—the primary culprits behind the crisis of our domestic fisheries. It is a classic case of the fox being in charge of the hen house. The council system was devised by politicians from states with significant commercial fishing interests and given a blanket exemption from federal conflict of interest laws since it was formed in 1976. According to a recent joint Pew and Stanford University report, the councils are riddled with conflicts of interest, lack basic information about most of the species under their responsibility, ignore the impact on endangered species, and refuse to follow their own scientist’s recommendations. These fundamental flaws in the councils undermine their responsibility to manage and protect our publicly owned fisheries and ensure they still exist to feed future generations. Unfortunately, the council system is set up in a way that explicitly violates this fundamental principle. The same fishermen who exploit our fisheries also get to decide how much they can catch all the while ignoring the warnings of their own scientific advisory panels and the advice of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, which oversees the councils. The Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council’s (WESTPAC) failure to reign itself in order to prevent the extinction of the Pacific leatherback sea turtle is the poster child of what is wrong with the councils. A recent article in the scientific journal Nature found that the ancient leatherback’s Pacific female nesting population has collapsed by 95% in the last 22 years. Scientists warn that it could go extinct in the next 5-30 years if immediate action isn’t taken to reverse the freefall. The primary reason for the decline of the leatherbacks is longlining, a type of fishing which maims and kills about 4 million whales, dolphins, seabirds, sharks, sea lions and billfish each year throughout the Pacific. Rather than taking action on this important news, WESTPAC, which overseas the longlining that occurs in the leatherback’s migratory swimway, did nothing. Perhaps this is not surprising when one considers that the council members include among their ranks the very longline fishermen killing leatherbacks. This is no trivial matter in the Pacific where the corruption riddled council has been given free reign once again to let loose tuna and swordfish longliners subject to a time-area closure and a ban imposed by a federal court since 1999. In 1999, a federal court found that WESTPAC had not been protecting critically endangered leatherback sea turtles from being caught and killed by longlines and took the decision making out of its hands by mandating a time and area closure to protect the turtles. When the closure for swordfishing began, two current and future council members relocated their jointly owned longline business to California and Mexico to resupply vessels fishing in the same area who evading the court decision by landing their catch in California rather than Hawaii. When a lawsuit threatened to close this loophole, the longline industry took action. They funded and co-sponsored a NOAA Fisheries study in the Atlantic, which resulted in only preliminary data providing the questionable justification for NOAA Fisheries to reopen the fishery in the Pacific. This “race for the last turtle” in the Pacific is a fine illustration of why the council approach is fundamentally flawed and corrupt, and why we need a substantive “ecosystem” based approach proposed by the Ocean Commission that encourages international planning and collaboration. If there is one recommendation the Oceans Commission got right is the need for the US to rejoin the international community and participate in UN institutions that protect and conserve the ocean as a global common asset. The commission specifically urges the US to sign and ratify the 1982 UN Convention on Law of the Sea which the US helped negotiate but has never supported even though it continues to host its meetings in New York City. The Senate appears ready to do just that as soon as the treaty, which just unanimously sailed through the Foreign Relation Committee, awaits a floor debate. Law of the Seas, which meets again in June 7-11, is the place to us to start to reform the way we manage and share our fisheries. It would be an effective instrument for the US not only to encourage other longlining nations to protect the nearly extinct ancient leatherback sea turtle from oblivion but also to prevent an otherwise inevitable race for the last fish. [Robert Ovetz, PhD is the Save the Leatherback Campaign Coordinator with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. He can be reach at: robert[at]seaturtles.org] |
| Swordfish Ban Aim: Saving Turtles April 21st, 2004 Associated Press (AP) CBSNEWS.com March 12, 2004-- (AP) The federal government has banned commercial fishing for swordfish in a large swath of the Pacific Ocean in a move to protect endangered sea turtles that were being killed or injured by the hooks. The new rules, released Thursday by the National Marine Fisheries Service, mean that longline fishing for swordfish will be prohibited in a 1,600-mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean between the West Coast and Hawaii. The ban, scheduled to take effect on April 12, will affect about two dozen fishing boats based in California, Oregon and Washington. The fishermen, who are mostly Vietnamese American, have said that a ban on swordfish fishing would threaten their livelihood. The United States makes up only about 5 percent of the global swordfish fishing fleet, Steiner said. Japan, Korea and Taiwan all have large fleets. "It's an important step in protecting endangered sea turtles from going extinct," said Todd Steiner, director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network, which lobbied for the ban. "It won't save the sea turtles by itself, but when the U.S. takes proper action, it's in a better moral position to get other countries to also take action." Tim Price, the National Marine Fisheries Service's assistant regional administrator for protected resources, said Thursday that the agency issued the ban after its scientists determined that continued swordfish fishing would jeopardize the survival of the leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles — two species protected by the federal law. Longline fishermen use lines as long as 50 miles that carry thousands of baited hooks dangling within 100 feet of the ocean's surface to catch swordfish. But many sea turtles — as well as sharks, dolphins and seabirds — also get caught on the hooks, causing injury or death. Federal officials have estimated that "long-lining" kills 61 loggerheads and 15 leatherbacks each year. Biologists say that the leatherback could become extinct in 10 to 30 years if current trends continue. In 2002, environmental groups filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco-based federal appeals court after more than 30 swordfish boats moved to Southern California after they were barred by a 2001 federal ruling from operating out of Hawaii. |
| Swordfish Off Hawaii Are Again Fair Game April 21st, 2004 By Kenneth R. Weiss Los Angeles Times Staff Writer March 31, 2004-- After a three-year shutdown, federal officials Tuesday reopened commercial swordfish operations off Hawaii, providing all U.S.-flagged boats use experimental fishing gear designed to reduce the inadvertent catch of endangered sea turtles. The decision will allow dozens of boats to rejoin foreign vessels as part of the $300-million-a-year industry. Swordfish fishermen from California, who are facing an impending ban off the state's coastline, also will be eligible to fish Hawaiian waters as long as they use the new gear. Virtually all swordfish are caught with long lines that are strewn with hooks and unfurled for 50 miles or more from the stern of a boat. Besides swordfish, the hooks catch turtles, sea birds, marlin and sharks. Although they are thrown back, many do not survive. Under the new rules, the boats will have to use a different style of hooks and bait that have shown some promise in reducing the catch of leatherback and loggerhead turtles, both protected under the Endangered Species Act. "It's the ultimate experiment," said Sam Pooley, regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu. Pooley said that each boat would have to carry a federal observer to keep track of any hooked turtles. If the boats catch more than 16 leatherback or 17 loggerheads during the six-month season, federal managers will close the fishery for the remainder of the calendar year. Sea turtle conservationists, who forced the closure of the swordfish fishery with federal court decisions in Hawaii and California, said they would closely watch the experiment. They are skeptical that the initial test results of the fishing gear are sufficient to justify redeploying the Pacific fleet. "It's another example of the Bush administration manipulating science in favor of industry," said Todd Steiner, director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network. "These are hooks of mass destruction." For the last few years, the National Marine Fisheries Service has been testing different types of gear to reduce the number of turtles hooked. Preliminary results show that switching to larger, circular hooks rather than those shaped like a "J," can reduce by 92% the number of loggerhead turtles that swallow them. The hooks also resulted in 67% fewer leatherback turtles getting snagged. These curious giants of the sea, which can reach 9 feet in length and weigh up to a ton, date to the age of dinosaurs. But the Pacific leatherbacks are expected to go extinct in 10 or 20 years because of lost nesting beaches and the use of long-line gear. About 6,000 long-line boats operate in the Pacific, most of them from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China. The boats mostly target tuna but also catch swordfish. Federal officials point out that U.S.-flagged boats make up only a tiny fraction of the international fleet. They say other nations need to adopt turtle-friendly gear if the turtles are to survive. "The sooner we find out this gear works, the sooner all of the other countries will accept it," said Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council. Simonds expects that the two dozen remaining long-line vessels in San Pedro will be eligible to return to Hawaii — where they used to operate until the fishery was shut down by court order in 2001. |
| Reopening Hawaii Fishery May Harm April 21st, 2004 by Bijal P. Trivedi National Geographic On-Line April 1, 2004-- The Pacific leatherback is the largest turtle in the world. The grandest specimens weigh more than a ton and span 9 feet (2.7 meters) in length. It is the deepest-diving turtle—it can descend 3,000 feet (900 meters)—and one of the few species that can dine on jellyfish. The Pacific leatherback dates back a hundred million years to the time of the dinosaurs, but within ten years humans could wipe it out. In an effort to save both the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta)—listed as critically endangered and endangered, respectively, by the World Conservation Union—the U.S. federal government closed a California longline fishery, prohibiting swordfishing in a large swath of the Pacific. Yesterday, however, the U.S. reopened Hawaii's longline swordfish fishery after a three-year closure. A leatherback sea turtle nests in French Guiana. Most leatherbacks have some spots on their flippers and carapace, but this turtle's carapace was almost solid black. Photograph by Matthew Godfrey, courtesy Conservation International and Seaturtle.org "This is a setback for sea turtles," said Todd Steiner, director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network based in Forest Knolls, California. "There is conflicting science regarding the new hook-and-bait combination that will be required at the Hawaii fishery—opening this fishery is premature." The closure of the California fishery is effective on April 12. The Hawaii swordfish fishery is expected to reopen in May, according to Samual Pooley, director of the Honolulu-based Pacific Islands Regional Office of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The Hawaii swordfish fishery was originally closed in 2001 because too many turtles were caught by longline fleets between 1994 and 1999—112 leatherbacks and 418 loggerheads. To reduce the number of turtles caught, new rules will govern the Hawaii fishery. A new type of hook and mackerel bait, rather than the traditional J-hook and squid combo, are required for all swordfishing boats. De-hooking equipment is also mandatory to limit turtle bycatch. The amount of swordfishing has been restricted to a total of 2,120 sets per year. A set is roughly equivalent to one day of fishing on one boat. Observers will be required on every swordfishing boat. Once 16 leatherbacks or 17 loggerheads have been hooked, the fishery will close for the rest of the year. "I'm cautiously optimistic that that this fishery will be able to promote turtle conservation—and we have hard caps [quotas] to ensure that not too many turtles are harmed," Pooley said. Poaching and Longlines But some scientists are not so sure. "These species are on the verge of extinction—if you are going to open a fishery, then you must ensure there is as little impact as possible," said Roderic Mast, vice president of Washington D.C.-based Conservation International and president of the International Sea Turtle Society. For the leatherbacks, threats abound. In many parts of Latin America turtle eggs are considered a delicacy. Along some nesting beaches 100 percent of the eggs are poached. Beachfront development, with its artificial lighting, lures turtles astray as they mistake the lights for the moon causing them to get stranded. But longlining is widely considered to be the main cause of mortality, Mast said. Longlining is one of the most common forms of industrial fishing. It involves a single fishing line that can extend up to 60 miles (100 kilometers) and dangle thousands of hooks. It is the method of choice for catching swordfish and tuna in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. But longlines attract many nontarget species that swallow the hooks or get entangled in the line. This unintended catch—called bycatch—is a major cause of mortality for turtles, seabirds, and many other marine mammals. Two species frequently caught in the pelagic, or open-ocean, longlines are leatherbacks and loggerhead turtles. Swordfish longlines, which snare turtles at a rate ten times that of tuna longlines, tend to be set at night and in shallower water—increasing the chances of turtle encounters. Four Million Hooks Per Day A recent report published in Ecology Letters estimates that 1.4 billion hooks were set by longline fleets during 2000. That's 3.8 million hooks per day. "Globally, more than 200,000 loggerheads and 50,000 leatherbacks were likely taken as pelagic longline bycatch in 2000," said Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Crowder led the research. "There has been a 90 percent decline in Pacific leatherbacks over the last 20 years," Mast said. In 1980 more than 90,000 reproductive females could be found along the Pacific coast of North and South America. In 2002 that number had plummeted to fewer than 2,000. At the largest remaining nesting colony, in Costa Rica, numbers of nesting turtles have dropped from 1,400 in the late 1980s to 50 in recent years. In the Pacific, where the population of both loggerheads and leatherbacks hovers around 200,000, Crowder estimates that in 2000 about 30,000 loggerhead turtles and 20,000 leatherbacks were caught as bycatch. "Every year these turtles have about a fifty-fifty chance of running into longlines," Crowder said. Both the leatherback and loggerhead turtle could face extinction within 10 to 30 years if international fishing practices are not dramatically altered, he added. Modified gear is part of the solution, say many scientists. When the Hawaii swordfish fishery reopens, the fishermen will be required to use the new circle hook with a barb that is offset from the plane of the circle by 10 degrees. This will replace that J-hook that is traditionally used for swordfishing. Modified Hooks J-hooks are particularly dangerous for turtles because this style of hook tends to get caught in the throat, often causing life-threatening injuries. Nonoffset circle hooks, in which the barb is in the same plane as the circle, cause much less severe injuries, because the hook is "protected" and snagged animals tend to get caught in the jaw rather than the throat. "I have data that proves that nonoffset circle hooks (flat circle hooks) reduced turtle bycatch," said Alan Bolton, a marine biologist at the Archie Carr Center for Turtle Research at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Bolton ran a four-year experiment in the Azores studying fishing gear modifications to reduce turtle bycatch. "But I believe it is premature to recommend the offset circle hook," Bolton said. Intuitively, this hook appears to defeat the design advantage of the nonoffset circle hook. Crowder agrees with Bolton. "My goal is to have turtles coexist with fisheries. And I'm not opposed to the Hawaii longline swordfish fishery, as long as the new technology is proven, but I'm not sure that this technology is ready for primetime. It needs further testing in the Atlantic, where there are more turtles left." NMFS scientists, in collaboration with the New Jersey-based Bluewater Fisherman's Association, conducted experiments in the Atlantic testing both types of circle hooks—offset and nonoffset. They showed that both circle hooks significantly reduced the number of turtles caught, compared to the J-hooks. Loggerhead and leatherback catches were reduced by 92 and 67 percent, respectively, said Tim Price, the acting assistant administrator with the Southwest branch of the NMFS. "Reopening of the Hawaii fishery will not cancel the benefits of the California fishery closing." International Solution Required The data from the Atlantic experiment is preliminary. It has not been reviewed by other scientists, it involves a small sample size, and the results are not published in a peer reviewed journal, Steiner said. "We are going to see an increase in the number of turtles killed." U.S. longline fleets represent only about 6 percent of the global longline effort, Crowder said. Even if the entire U.S. longline fleet disappeared, the extinction trajectory for leatherbacks and loggerheads would be unchanged. The problem requires an international solution. "Our view is that if we are not killing sea turtles, then we are in a much stronger position to convince other countries to do the same," Steiner said. "The problem is that the U.S. isn't in a position to have any moral authority right now." |
| Seafood Diet for a Small Planet April 21st, 2004 This op-ed was published in Earth Island Journal, Summer 2004 (Vol. 19 No. 2) In May 2003, I had the great honor and privilege to meet and thank Harvard scientist Dr. Edward O. Wilson for signing our scientist letter calling on the UN to institute a moratorium on longline fishing in the Pacific to prevent the extinction of the Pacific leatherback and protect the ocean ecosystem on which we all depend. His reply was "It's a no-brainer." Marine biodiversity in all its glory is being destroyed by industrialized fishing fleets that will leave depauperate, unhealthy oceans for future generations. Industrial longline fishing on the high seas sets 5,000,000 baited hooks every day, more than 2 billion each year, to catch the great fish of the world - including swordfish, tuna, and sharks. These fish are the lions and tigers of the sea - the top predators of the marine food chain, the keystone species that maintain and regulate the oceans food webs. We shouldn't eat these species if we want to maintain healthy marine ecosystems, which the growing human race will continue to need in order to harvest protein. If we shouldn't be eating swordfish and tuna, what should we be eating from the sea? This is a difficult question, and various answers are being proposed by a growing number of environmental organizations, which have issued seafood guides (often wallet-size cards) based on criteria including: * Health of the specific targeted fish population; * Management measures in place to maintain or improve the health of the target fish species; * "By-catch" (collateral damage caused to other species) associated with fishing technology; and * Collateral damage caused by the technology to marine habitat (for instance, reef damage from trawl nets, and pollutions from fish farms). Research into these criteria for popular seafood choices are conducted and ranked with a recommendation as to whether a species is a best choice, a species to avoid, or somewhere in between. I think two very important criteria have been left out of the equation: What is the impact of ecosystem function from harvesting from the top of the food vs. low on the food chain; and is the species healthy for human consumption? For example, currently, some of these seafood guides don't place some populations of swordfish, tuna and shark in the "avoid" category. Yet, these fish are currently on the FDA and EPA list of species that children and women of reproductive age shouldn't eat because they contain high levels of poisonous mercury. Large top of the food chain fish concentrate mercury in their flesh. These same species are caught by industrial longlining fishing that has been identified as the primary cause for the declines of the critically endangered Pacific leatherback, and the 90 percent decline in giant fishes recently reported in Nature. Twenty years ago, Francis Moore Lappe wrote "Diet for a Small Planet," sellling three million copies and influencing an entire generation to understand the social and personal significance that our food consumption habits have every time we sit down to a meal or make a trip to the supermarket. She taught us that it takes 10 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef, and that if we eat more grains directly (i.e., lower on the food chain), we could improve our own health, as well as the health of our environment. If we are going to co-exist with healthy ocean ecosystems, we need a "seafood diet for a small planet". The seafood guides are some of the first attempts at moving seafood lovers in the right direction. But to date, no single list incorporates a holistic view that encourages consumers to eat lower on the sea-food chain (for example, small fish and shellfish harvested by acceptable methods), avoid fish with high levels of toxins, and also recognizes that our over-all seafood consumption must be reduced. As for not eating mercury-tainted swordfish, tuna, shark and king mackerel? That's a no-brainer. Todd Steiner is a biologist and the Director of Turtle Island Restoration Network (http://www.seaturtles.org, http://www.spawnusa.org, http://www.savetheleatherback.com which works to preserve and restore marine biodiversity. Mr. Steiner has been actively involved in many of the major fisheries issues of the past two decade including tuna/dolphin purse seining, sea turtles/shrimp trawling, the mercury in seafood issue and the impacts of the growing longlining fleet on a number of target and bycatch species. |
| Pressure on State for Mercury Drive April 8th, 2004 by Jane Kay San Francisco Chronicle December 11, 2003 A group of 12 environmental and public health organizations filed a petition Wednesday asking two California agencies for a high-profile, widespread campaign that warns the public of mercury contamination in commercially sold seafood. The Sierra Club California, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Environmental Working Group, among others, want the California Department of Health Services and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to establish advisories and distribute educational material. "We'd like to see a campaign that reaches the California public just like the smoking education campaign in recent years,'' said Gina Solomon, a physician and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. "The agency needs funding to get the message out to the broader population. Most people in California still aren't aware of the health risks from mercury in fish,'' said Solomon. Representatives of the groups said they have been told by state scientists that they don't have the money to design appropriate education materials, to translate them into the many languages necessary and to get them out to people who fish in San Francisco Bay or to consumers who buy fish in stores. The petition, filed under a section of the state Constitution that allows citizens to file grievances against public agencies, asks that the state launch an aggressive campaign of multimedia public service announcements, commercials and consumer alerts. It asks that the alerts be distributed in multiple languages at public health agencies, family planning centers, obstetricians, pediatricians, hospitals, medical schools, seafood retailers and restaurants. It asks for advisories on tuna, swordfish, tilefish, Chilean sea bass, king mackerel and shark, based on tests showing that those fish have the highest mercury levels. The advisories should follow the more stringent guidelines developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the groups said. Eleven states already have their own advisories for women and some children regarding mercury in commercially sold fish, the groups say. Neither of the state agencies had seen the petition on Wednesday. Although the health department and the hazard assessment office have completed a brochure, "Protecting Yourself and Your Family from Mercury in Fish,'' they haven't had the funds to publish it, said Leah Brooks, a health department spokeswoman. The information is geared toward pregnant and nursing women, women who might become pregnant and children six years and under, she said, and is posted at www.dhs.ca.gov/ps/deodc/ehib/EHIB2/topics/mercury_in_fish.html. Allan Hirsch, a spokesman for the hazard assessment office, said, "Generally, more information is better than less information. So we're certainly interested in seeing what the groups have in mind.'' As a result of Proposition 65, the state's anti-toxics law, many supermarkets have posted mercury warnings in their fresh and frozen seafood sections that contain good consumer information, Hirsch said. Fact sheets on methyl mercury are available at www.oehha.ca.gov. In a statement accompanying the petition, the groups said they are concerned that a new fish advisory under consideration by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates contaminants in commercial seafood, won't sufficiently warn about higher mercury levels in tuna, particularly in solid white "albacore" canned tuna. Although the first three drafts of that advisory contain little or no mention of tuna, the FDA announced on Wednesday that it would release a fourth draft today. The groups are also concerned that new regulations on coal-fired power plants due next week from the EPA will fail to control mercury emissions. According to federal scientists, these power plants are the largest source of mercury in the environment. Mercury in the environment transforms to methyl mercury, a potent neurotoxin that attacks the nervous system of developing fetuses and children as well as causing injury to adults. Andy Peri, an analyst with Sea Turtle Restoration Project in Forest Knolls (Marin County), said, "If the FDA and EPA were doing their jobs, we wouldn't need this petition. The state of California can fill the gap to protect the health of Californians.'' |
| Swordfish Fleet Must Stop Fishing to Save Turtles March 12th, 2004 U.S. orders boats operating out of San Pedro to cease long line practices that push endangered reptiles toward extinction. By Kenneth R. Weiss LA Times March 12, 2004 The federal government shut down California's swordfish fleet Thursday, ordering the two dozen boats to stop stringing more than a million baited hooks across a large swath of the Pacific Ocean because they are inadvertently snagging sea turtles and driving them toward extinction. Most of the San Pedro-based fleet, which began fishing off the California coast when the courts pushed the boats out of Hawaii with similar restrictions several years ago, is likely to return to those islands this spring to resume fishing when a federal court order is lifted. "We expect that most of these vessels will go back to Hawaii and target swordfish," said Tim Price, an assistant regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Price said the government had been forced to close a 1,200- to 1,700-mile-wide swath of the Pacific off the West Coast after biologists determined that the fleet was inadvertently catching — and killing — too many sea turtles protected by the federal Endangered Species Act. A growing number of marine biologists fear that, if this type of fishing is not curtailed, the leatherback sea turtle will go extinct within a decade and the loggerhead sea turtle will continue sliding toward a similar fate. Although the West Coast sword fishermen want to catch only swordfish, the 1.5 million hooks they release each year also snag or entangle seabirds, sharks, marlin and a variety of endangered sea turtles. Some of the air-breathing turtles drown, unable to reach the surface after getting hooked underwater. Most of the ones that are caught are released alive, but they often die later from internal injuries caused by being hoisted out of the water by hooks embedded in their stomach or flesh, government scientists say. "Based on the status of the population and the number of these interactions, we concluded that we are putting an endangered species in jeopardy," Price said. The ban announced Thursday focuses on one type of fishing in an expanse of the Pacific Ocean that begins 200 miles off the West Coast and extends another 1,200 to 1,700 miles westward. The crackdown forbids only "long lining" for swordfish, in which lines of baited hooks are unfurled as far as 50 miles off the stern of boats. The fleet sets these lines within 100 feet of the surface and marks them with submergible lights that attract curious turtles as well as swordfish. Federal officials are hoping that experimental fishing gear — using larger, circular hooks and a different type of bait — will reduce the chances of snagging turtles. Under a new plan proposed by federal officials, long lining for swordfish will resume in April in Hawaii, using this gear. Initial tests showed a reduction in the turtle catch of 60% to 90%. Lillo Augello, president of Western Fish Co., who has lobbied on behalf of the mostly Vietnamese American fishermen, said he was relieved that the boats would soon be able to operate out of Hawaii. He said he hoped the new gear would allow them next season to fish off California's coastline too. Thursday's ban will take effect April 12, after the end of the regular swordfish season. Augello expects that the 11 boats remaining at sea will have enough time to get back with their catches before the ban takes effect. So far this season, Western Fish has unloaded 1.5 million pounds of swordfish at its dockside warehouse on Terminal Island, sending fresh steaks to restaurants across the United States. "We had a good season, so I'm not so stressed about it," Augello said. Conservation groups, which forced the government crackdown on long line fishing by winning federal lawsuits in Hawaii and California, promise to keep up the pressure. Todd Steiner, director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network, said some scientists question whether the new fishing gear is as effective at saving turtles as the government says. "I want, as much as the next guy, to find a techno-fix for sea turtles to keep them from going extinct," Steiner said. "But I want to make sure it works." |
| STRP staff reviews Insurrection: Citizen Challenges March 12th, 2004 Book Review by Robert Ovetz, PhD Hope Dance March 2004 Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power by Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark Routledge, 2003 If the events of the past two years are a cause of alarm, there is also cause for both inspiration and celebration. Anti-corporate globalization movements have raked up impressive successes in the past few past years. Published soon after the WTO Cancun ministerial collapsed in September 2003, Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark’s new book Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power is an ode to movements against corporate domination that can inspire, energize and strategically inform the nascent anti-war movement. Victory in Cancun, a replication of the "battle of Seattle" when the 1999 WTO meeting also imploded, heralds not the birth of a new global movement, Danaher and Mark contend, but "a spectacular coming out party of a movement long in the making." Danaher and Mark offer thoroughly researched, blow by blow accounts of the anti-sweatshop, dolphin safe tuna, anti-Big Tobacco, Burma democracy, and anti-corporate globalization movements. Each account includes enough detail and critical insights into tactics and strategy to be required reading for any movement. The book complements the works of theorists Toni Negri and Harry Cleaver in helping fill a huge void in a field where nearly all other critical accounts of globalization emphasize the monolithic power of global capital. Danaher and Mark have an ambitious objective of setting out the tactical and strategic successes side by side with the inherent limitations of movements confined to national boundaries in an increasingly globalized world. Victories by the corporate accountability movement, as they call them, "have been half-wins, precarious victories vulnerable to reversal." While Danaher and Mark celebrate our ability to disrupt corporate rule, "the task must now be to dismantle corporate rule." Danaher and Mark’s extensive case study of the anti-tobacco movement nicely illustrates their mission. Building upon a local strategy of grassroots organizing, anti-Big Tobacco activists achieved impressive success in the 1990s. But this local success was a pyrrhic victory: while Big Tobacco was on the retreat in the US, it was expanding rapidly in the rest of the world. "Even the most important local success can be undermined by the forces of the global market," Danaher and Mark warn. "Local action is essential, but it does not replace the necessity for coordinated action with global allies. Without the first, victory is unlikely, and without the second, lasting triumph will prove elusive." Act locally, act globally may well be the new tactic that saw success in the mid 1990s in defeating Clinton’s bid for Fast Track negotiating power and the secretive Multilateral Agreement on Investments following a narrow defeat for opponents of NAFTA. The need for local-global linkages also underlines the book’s case studies of the anti-sweatshop, "dolphin safe" tuna and Free Burma movements. But Danaher and Mark’s critique applies equally so to the scope of their own book. Three of their four examples are strictly US movements that failed to develop successful global linkages. Far from even "half-wins," a couple of the movements they highlight are genuinely lacking any indicator of success and are a stretch to consider actual "insurrections." One that hardly qualifies is the anti-sweatshop movement which garners a lengthy chapter. Unfortunately, Danaher and Mark overstate its importance with excessive adjectives like "exploded" to describe what amounted at its height to no more than a few dozen campuses, protests no larger than a few hundred students and a mere hundred universities eventually signing onto credible sweatshop monitoring. Examples of real cooperation with the workers themselves are rare. The authors would have been better off leaving the anti-sweatshop chapter out and giving space to movements that have realized actual success in linking the local to the global in fighting corporations. The independent music movement, anti-dam, anti-GMO food, the fight to stop the James Bay power plant, and the immensely successful environmental justice movement against polluting industries have engendered some of the most powerful examples of an insurrection in the US against corporate globalization in the past two decades. A quick visit to the www.chij.org (aka Rachels’) website will dish up an impressively long list of victories by the environmental justice movement in 2003 alone. Eventually, the anti-sweatshop movement does seem to fit into the authors’ call for a "deep transformation of global corporate capitalism" rather than an actual "dismantling." This effort would include a colorful mix of revoking corporate charters, building alliances with small business, allying with the anti-corporate right and promoting what they call a "green/fair economy," which Danaher himself does via his annual Green Festival [he will be speaking at the GreenEarth Festival on June 5th in SLO]. Although sea-turtle-clad Seattle protestors adorn the cover of Insurrection, Danaher and Mark fumble an example of a successful movement to save sea turtles from shrimp nets that was threatened by a WTO ruling. A WTO appeals panel actually later upheld the US "turtle excluder device" law. Although the law was weakened, there has been a dramatic rebound of Ridley sea turtles that only a decade before were threatened with extinction. Despite its limitations, Insurrection is an invaluable new chapter in a long account of increasingly successful global grassroots resistance to corporate domination that is being written at this moment by people from Kettleman City, CA to Bolivia to Quebec to India and many places in between. Robert Ovetz, PhD, is a member of the graduate faculty of New College of California and on the staff of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. |
| 100,000,000 years old, the leatherback turtle may have as little as 10 years left to live. March 4th, 2004 by Robert Ovetz, PhD The Ecologist (UK), March 2004 It swam the oceans when dinosaurs walked the earth. Now our hunger for tuna means the Pacific leatherback turtle could be extinct within 10 years. Dressed in brightly coloured turtle costumes, a crowd of chanting protesters wound its way along the busy streets of San Francisco’s Fishermen’s Wharf. As the protesters marched and danced their way past the many harbourside restaurants lining the way, their chant rung out: ‘Get on the right track; stop killing the leatherback!’ Several bemused diners looked up from their meals, wondering how their overfilled plates of swordfish steak and tuna Niçoise could possibly have anything to do with the demise of a turtle. They soon found out. October’s demonstration marked the launch of the California-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project’s (STRP) Save the Leatherback campaign for a moratorium on longline fishing in the Pacific Ocean. Longlines are not ordinary fishing lines. The word ‘long’ does them a dis-service. They carry not one hook, but thousands, stretched out along an invisible mono-filament line up to 60 miles long. If I was sitting in my trawler on the Thames looking up at the Houses of Parliament, my longline would stretch all the way back out past Hampton Court, past Heathrow Airport, the M25, Windsor Castle, all the way out to Oxford. Or I could sit in a Glasgow shipyard and fish off the coast from Edinburgh, on the other side of Scotland. Each year, longlines float tens of billions of hooks in the Pacific alone. They are used mainly to catch swordfish and tuna. While doing so, this wasteful, indiscriminate method of fishing maims and kills more than four million sea turtles, sharks, sea birds, whales, dolphins, porpoises, billfish (such as blue marlin), sea lions and countless other marine species. Because Pacific leatherbacks feed on jellyfish near the surface of the sea, they are extremely vulnerable to swordfish and tuna longlining, both of which are conducted in relatively shallow high-seas water. The proliferation of longlines since the 1970s has devastated their population. Estimates of nesting females illuminate a terrifying collapse in leatherback numbers – 95 per cent in the last two decades. Having once swum with the dinosaurs over 100 million years ago, the leatherback now hangs by a thread on the edge of extinction. In a 2000 article in the journal Nature, marine biologist James Spotila said that if longline fishing is not stopped the Pacific leatherback sea turtle will become extinct in five to 30 years’ time. The Save the Leatherback campaign is using a broad array of tactics to stop this happening. Tactic 1: Target consumers For many consumers, causing the probable extinction of a creature that has swum the world’s oceans for over 100 million years is not enough to stop them ordering swordfish or tuna from the menu. After all, oily fish is good for you: it’s full of omega-3 fatty acids. But what if swordfish really isn’t that healthy, if, in fact, it contains levels of mercury 500 per cent higher, on average, than levels considered safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency? What if even the US Food and Drug Administration warned children and women who are pregnant or of child-bearing age not to consume swordfish and other species high in mercury? This is just what the Save the Leatherback campaign found when it teamed up with the San Francisco-based pressure group the As You Sow Foundation in November 2002, to conduct laboratory tests of swordfish sold in the US’s five major supermarket chains. STRP reacted to the alarming test results by filing a notice of intent to sue the supermarkets and the US restaurant chain Red Lobster; it invoked California’s Proposition 65, a 1986 ‘right to know’ law requiring businesses to post public warnings about toxic materials in food. California law allows the state’s Attorney General to seek penalties in excess of $1m if corporations fail to warn the public about mercury exposure. With this evidence, the California Attorney General filed the lawsuit itself in February 2003. To settle the suit, an interim legal agreement stipulates that stores will post signs warning customers of the dangers of consuming mercury-contaminated seafood – especially swordfish, shark, tuna, king mackerel and tilefish. Then last October, the campaign achieved a much more significant victory when Red Lobster dropped swordfish from its 500-odd North American restaurants in response to a year-long petition campaign. STRP’s emphasis on linking the health and environmental impacts of eating big predatory fish breaks new ground. It has brought together new allies working on pollution, nutrition, public health, ocean, animal, fishing and reproductive campaigns to address issues that may have once seemed separate and unconnected. By targeting the consumers of top-of-the-food-chain seafood, the campaign aims to squeeze down demand in order to reduce the fishing effort and give some breathing room for the leatherback. When demand is forced down, the incentive for continuing destructive and unprofitable longline fishing will decline. Tactic 2: target Business But it wasn’t enough just to hope that business would respond to customers changing their habits. At the National Fisheries Institute’s (NFI) annual conference and International West Coast Seafood Show, both in Long Beach California last October, STRP activists confronted swordfish dealers who had refused requests to drop the fish from their inventories. They hung up door hangers reading ‘do not disturb the oceans’ throughout the five largest hotels where delegates were staying. And they infiltrated the seafood show’s exclusive opening night gala on the legendary Queen Mary cruise ship, dropping a banner reading ‘swordfishing kills sea turtles’ before being ejected (they had pulled off a similar drop at the starting line of the nearby Long Beach Marathon earlier the same day). STRP targeted the NFI because of its role as an official adviser to the US Trade Representative, which describes itself as being ‘America’s chief trade negotiator and the principal trade policy adviser to the president’. The NFI is currently pushing for a disastrous expansion of WTO authority over the oceans. It is also using its political clout to subvert eco-labelling and ustainable fishing reforms and to promote longlining. (It unsuccessfully opposed planned ‘country of origin labelling’ legislation in the US.) The NFI’s shameless promotion of cheap imported aquaculture drove US shrimper organisations to quit the organisation in October 2003. The longline industry has a lot to fear from the Save the Leatherback campaign. A 1999 lawsuit filed by STRP and the non-profit public interest law firm Earthjustice closed two million square miles of territorial waters around Hawaii to swordfish longliners there. The US district court judge found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was not doing enough to enforce protections for sea turtles dying on the longlines. When about three dozen Hawaiian longliners sought to exploit a loophole in the ruling by relocating to Californian waters, STRP and Earthjustice responded with another lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop longlining for good. Tactic 3: get government on board Little by little, advocacy efforts are bringing the US government around as well. The Hawaii ruling led the NMFS to propose closing the US’s west coast to longlining in an attempt to prevent the leatherback’s continuing decline. While a decision on such a ban remains a hostage to political fortune, recreational fishermen have teamed up with Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, who has submitted a bill to ban longlines in Californian waters. The state has already closed its waters to gillnets, and had a series of marine protected areas planned before new Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger intervened. If these waters are to be closed it will be because of a combination of solid marine biology research and a hefty dose of common sense. Longlines are deadly to leatherbacks, humans and fish. In total, 20 to 40 per cent of the longline catch is thrown back as so-called ‘bycatch’: marine life with little or no commercial value. Bycatch also is a huge problem for recreational anglers and even fishermen targeting other commercial fish. For example, nearly half the swordfish catch is actually caught as bycatch; greed and bycatch have left swordfish fisheries on the brink of collapse for the past two decades. Only a few decades ago the average size of a swordfish was more than 300 pounds (individuals are known to have weighed as much as 1,000 pounds). Now most swordfish catches are primarily made up of juveniles that have not reached reproductive age and commonly weigh in at less than 90 pounds. Tactic 4: demand a UN Moratorium The international nature of this ocean crisis necessitates international action at the highest level. In many cases, local solutions are not forthcoming because fisheries management agencies encourage ... |
| Fishing at the WTO March 4th, 2004 by Robert Ovetz, PhD Z Magazine (US), October 2003 The U.S., joined by Chile, New Zealand, and such “friends of the whale” nations as Norway and Iceland, has sounded the alarm about the damage being done to our marine ecosystems by an estimated $54 billion in annual subsidies. But behind this problem is that these “friends” have long been the worst “foes” of the fish for decades. Subsidies for everything from low interest loans for vessel upgrades to fuel tax rebates have driven the overcapitalization of the global fishing fleet. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fisheries progressing to fully fished and overexploited have exploded, from 5 percent in the 1970s to 75 percent only a few years ago. Alongside the collapse of the historically abundant cod, bluefin tuna, swordfish, and lobster fisheries, the 100-million-year-old Pacific Leatherback sea turtle has been driven to 5 percent of its population in just 2 decades by lucrative Pacific longline tuna and swordfish fleets. These fleets are estimated to be responsible for the annual killing of upwards of four million sharks, whales, porpoises, dolphins, billfish, and seabirds alone. When one looks behind the PR smokescreen, it is apparent that the foes of the fish’s agenda is to use the WTO to gut what little regulatory oversight exists. What the foes share most is their collective interest as net importers of fish from subsidized lease agreements with developing nations. In total, wealthy nations consume about 85 percent of global fish imports, one half of which comes from developing nations. This leaves increasingly less access to traditional fisheries by small-scale fisherpeople serving more than a billion people who rely on fish as their primary source of affordable protein. As these poor nations are pushed to make payments on their unwieldy international debt by exporting their fish stocks, their populations are being drained of invaluable biodiversity and traditional sources of both food and employment. Many small, fish-rich Pacific island nations are already alarmed by the foes’ interpretation of the lease payments as subsidies and have formed a block in the WTO to oppose their efforts. These rental agreements are critical for foe partners such as New Zealand, Iceland, Canada, and the U.S. that are busy privatizing what little remains of their own depleted fisheries within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ). At the heart of their management strategy has been self-governance by such industry heavyweights as the U.S.-based National Fisheries Institute that dominates both the toothless regional fishery councils and is the official advisor to the U.S. trade representative on fisheries issues. Privatization has been the stimulus for so-called Individual Transferable Quotas, an opportunistic distortion of the “those who live here, fish here” principle popular among fisherpeople in Alaska. While apparently benign on the surface, ITQs allow the sale of quotas to large industrial conglomerates, which are free to deplete a fishery, wipe out its biodiversity with relentless “bycatch,” and move on, leaving local communities of fisher- people, consumers, and marine species high and dry. What these foes of the fish don’t like to admit is that they have only given lip service to a range of well-intentioned international conventions and treaties such as the groundbreaking 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, which many of them have either never ratified or have attempted to sabotage at every turn. The U.S., for example, has never ratified this convention and has also failed to enforce many of the treaties it has ratified. Expanding the illegitimate undemocratic authority of the WTO to the ocean and fisheries would seem to be an easy out from the burdensome responsibility for preserving this global common resource shared by all. However, past experience of bringing more oceans and fisheries issues to WTO jurisdiction has been disastrous. Under the guise of getting tough on subsidies—only 7 percent of members nations have bothered to disclose their subsidies as long mandated by WTO rules—the WTO would likely bypass pork barrels for the industrial fleets responsible for wasting 25 percent of their catch by tossing it back into the ocean dead or dying. Instead, most vulnerable to their efforts would be such sustainable measures as Marine Preservation Areas, time and area closures protecting spawning habitats, ecolabeling, bans on genetically modified Frankenfish, and other conservation measures mandated by local law and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs). The WTO is the wrong place to go to save our fisheries and oceans—unless we want to destroy them. Rather than surrendering our conservation laws, we need immediate intensified efforts to strengthen existing MEAs that currently lack compliance, enforcement, and funding. The most destructive fishing methods, such as Pacific longline fishing, should be placed under an immediate moratorium as the UN successfully did with driftnet fishing in the 1990s. If the recent expansion of the WTO to include agriculture, intellectual property, and services such as education and water, have been a disaster for billions of people worldwide, then we should be very concerned that the ocean and fisheries are on the WTO chopping block in Cancun. -------------------------------------- Robert Ovetz is a Marine Species Campaigner for the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. He is on the faculty of the New College of California, San Francisco. |
| LATIN AMERICA: Sea Turtles Face Deadly Beaches January 29th, 2004 Diego Cevallos* - Tierramérica MEXICO CITY, Jan 27 (IPS) - Killing a sea turtle or stealing eggs from their beach nests can cost the perpetrator 140,000 dollars in fines and up to nine years in prison in Mexico, while in Cuba the fine is 200 dollars, and in Costa Rica the punishment is three years behind bars. But these penalties and the legal protections established in most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have failed to halt the turtle's journey to extinction. Of the eight sea turtle species existing in the world today, seven could disappear in the near future, warn experts. On certain Latin American beaches, one can still find hundreds of shells of sea turtles that have been killed with machetes or clubs. Also found are the remains of turtles whose fins have been cut off for the skin or they are sliced open, for their eggs. ”Every year there are fewer turtles coming to the beach, and that is because of the massacres and because the government only promises to protect them but does not take effective action,” fisherman Manuel Abarca told Tierramérica. Since 1999, he and a dozen friends have been protecting the sea turtles as they deposit their eggs in the sand on a beach in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Seven sea turtle species head to more than 127 Mexican beaches to nest. Mexico has some of the strictest laws in this regard, and since 1990 has maintained a total ban on killing sea turtles or extracting their eggs. Nevertheless, unofficial estimates indicate that more than 2,000 of these animals are massacred each year. ”I think it is many more than that, because on this beach alone there are easily more than 500 killed each year,” said Abarca. Through the 1980s, most countries in the region permitted the capture of sea turtles and their eggs, but in the 1990s, when evidence emerged that their populations were on the decline, governments issued bans and enacted laws against those activities. The turtles are used for their oils and meat, their skin is used to make shoes and handbags and handicrafts. People eat their eggs, which are high in protein, and because they are believed to have aphrodisiac properties. Sea turtles have been around for more than 100 million years, despite their naturally high mortality rates and, more recently the attacks by humans. Scientific studies show that just 0.02 to 0.2 percent of every 10,000 turtle offspring survive to adulthood. In Costa Rica, one of the few nations of the Americas that still allows the controlled harvesting of sea turtle eggs, experts lament that these species continue in a state of emergency despite programmes, regulations and penalties intended to protect them.. The 'baula', or leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the species in greatest danger, as its population has dropped off in Mexico, Chile and Peru, biologist Isabel Naranjo, with Costa Rica's Sea Turtle Restoration Program, told Tierramérica. ”It is believed that if the rate of extermination continues, in 10 years the leatherback will disappear,” she said. In 1992, there were 1,000 to 1,500 leatherback turtles reaching Costa Rica's beaches. By 2003 there were was just 52. Cuba, which is demanding an end to the global ban on sales of the shell of the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), is practically the only country in the world that reports an increase in the number of turtles laying eggs on its beaches. On the island are stored 7.8 tons of sea turtle shells, collected between 1993 and 2002. Although Cuba is fighting the ban on trade in sea turtle shells, it maintains strict regulations on human contact with the species. Violators of the conservation laws on the socialist-run island must pay fines of 15 to 200 dollars. In addition to the leatherback and hawksbill, there are Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii), loggerhead (Caretta caretta), olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea), green (Chelonia mydas), black (Chelonia agassizii), and flatback (Natator depressus) sea turtles. Venezuela also has laws stipulating fines and prison time for violations of the 1996 ban on capturing sea turtles. Nevertheless, Tierramérica heard complaints from environmentalist about the continued illegal trade in these species. On Paraguaná Peninsula, in northwest Venezuela, facing the Dutch Antilles, at least 200 sea turtles are captured each year, charge the activists. Clemente Balladares, a marine biologist with the governmental agency Profauna, acknowledged that the sea turtle species populations have declined in Venezuela. ”Effective application of the law is subject to the availability of resources, a budget, patrol boats and trained guards,” he told Tierramérica. Throughout Latin America, governments claim they lack inspectors to protect sea turtles, but that they are doing what they can to prevent their extinction. Environmental authorities are promoting ecotourism, education of fisherfolk, and public campaigns to reduce demand for turtle meat and eggs. These issues will be taken up by more than a thousand experts during the international symposium on sea turtle conservation to take place Feb. 22-29 in Costa Rica. ”Year after year we have reported the deaths of sea turtles to the government, but only now are they paying attention, because we called up the journalists and we made it a big deal,” said Abarca, a Mexican fisherman who serves as the honorary secretary of the turtle protection camp of San Valentín, on the Guerrero coast. He told the press in early January that at least 500 sea turtle shells could be found in the vast area he and other fisherfolk have been monitoring the past five years. On Jan. 19, when the police had begun to patrol a portion of the 13-km beach, Abarca conducted another count, and found 179 more shells. ”The massacre occurs every year, but many do it out of necessity, because here there is no work, no tourism, no agriculture,” he said. ”I want to tell everyone they should protect this animal, but also tell the government that it should not just make promises, but help people so they don't have to take the turtle eggs, and also send police to capture the criminals that make turtles into a business,” said the fisherman. (* José Eduardo Mora/Costa Rica, Dalia Acosta/Cuba and Humberto Márquez/ Venezuela contributed to this report. Originally published Jan. 24 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.) (END/2004) |
| Fish Wars: How Cheap Oil Drives Industrial Longline Fishing January 23rd, 2004 By Dr. Robert Ovetz Some fish is rich in essential oils such as highly touted omega 3’s. But if tuna and swordfish are on your plate they are rich in another kind of oil—cheap petroleum harvested by war and occupation. One of the world’s biggest beneficiaries of cheap oil is industrial longline fishing which is pillaging our fragile ocean ecosystem in the hunt for these two predatory fish. A groundbreaking new study by professor Peter Tyedmers of Canada’s Dalhousie University soon to be published in The Encyclopedia of Energy explores the energy efficiency of a number of world fisheries, including longlining. Taking into account the material and petroleum required to power a wide variety of industrial fishing vessels, Tyedmers compares the amount of edible protein in their catch. The results are shocking. According to Tyedmers, amongst fisheries targeting high value species, “it is now common for direct fossil fuel energy inputs alone to exceed nutritional energy embodied in the catch by at least an order of magnitude.” In an earlier preliminary study of 54 North Atlantic fisheries from 5 countries, Tyedmers uncovered a wasteful paradox: “the availability of abundant energy … enables most contemporary fisheries to continue even when stocks are in decline.” Among the fisheries with the most inefficient “edible protein return on investment,” vessels targeting shrimp, tuna and swordfish are at the bottom of the list. By comparison, the most efficient fish species to target are small deep sea species such as menhaden and mackerel, most of which are unfortunately ground up into meal or used for oil. Tuna and swordfish are especially petroleum hungry fisheries, consuming three times the average energy in his study. Between 1986 and 1999, the amount of energy consumed by these fisheries skyrocketed fourfold. Replicating the results of an earlier study in Japan, Tyedmers puts longlining at the very bottom in terms of efficiency. Since the mid 1970s oil crisis, the amount of fuel consumed by larger and larger vessels has been rapidly outpacing the growth in the actual catch. Tyedmers’ study identifies a new problem associated with targeting large predatory species such as tuna and swordfish, adding to an already lengthy and damning list. These fish are caught by so-called “longlines” which can stretch up to 50 miles long and carry hundreds of baited hooks. Longlining creates a non-selective killing field that annually cruelly snags and drowns upwards of 4 million endangered whales, dolphins, sea turtles, porpoises, sharks, seabirds, sea lions, and billfish such as marlins in the Pacific alone. The Pacific leatherback sea turtle has been the hardest hit by longlining. The leatherback’s female nesting population has collapsed by 95% in the past 22 years. This sea turtle is expected to go extinct within the next few decades unless action to reduce the mortality of adult turtles is taken. Not only is longlining for tuna and swordfish deadly for sea turtles, but it is dangerous to humans. These two predatory species contain high levels of methylmercury, which is dangerous to developing fetuses, pregnant and nursing women, children and the elderly. Both the US Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency have issued warnings about mercury in these species and California requires a warning be displayed in supermarkets. A study by two of Tyedmers’ colleagues at Dalhousie University published in the journal Nature in 2003 found that about 90% of our predatory fisheries are already depleted. This is having a dire multiplier effect on the very fisheries upon which 1 billion people depend for their primary source of animal protein. The massive expansion of industrial fishing capacity powered by “cheap” oil is at the heart of the crisis. If it weren’t enough that longline fishing is extremely inefficient, and kills leatherback sea turtles and other endangered marine species, it is also a major contributor of climate warming carbon dioxide gases. The fisheries in Tyedmers’ study consumed a staggering 1 billion liters of diesel fuel, each liter of fuel producing 2.66 kilograms of CO2. The impact of global warming on the ocean ecosystem is devastating. Water temperatures are rising and microorganisms at the base of the ocean food chain are in decline. Fish may be highly valued for its essential oils but this is the kind of oil we would be better off leaving off our plates. [Robert Ovetz, PhD is a Marine Species Campaigner with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project. Contact him at: robert@seaturtles.org. Sign our petition calling for a UN moratorium on Pacific longlining at: www.seaturtles.org] |
| Letters to the Editor: Turtle protection is a good start January 20th, 2004 by Dr. Robert Ovetz I would like to compliment the Northeast Distant Fishery Sea Turtle Bycatch Reduction Project, announced last week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a move in the right direction to solve the problem of sea turtle bycatch. However, the plan itself will not stop the slide of the leatherback sea turtle toward extinction. Despite the development of a circle hook (which features a slight adjustment in the angle of of a J hook), a change in bait from squid to mackerel and the development of a leatherback lift, the new plan will have little impact on leatherback sea turtles and none on a wide range of endangered species caught as bycatch and not included in the study. Changes that longliners employ as a result of the study will not affect the continuing decline of the Pacific leatherback whose female nesting population has been estimated to have declined by 95 percent in the past two decades. Furthermore, as is shown in the NOAA's own video, "Leatherbacks Aboard" at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/mediacenter/turtles/ , leatherbacks are mostly caught on their flippers by longline hooks and will be unaffected by the new bait since they feed on jellyfish not squid or mackerel. It is unclear from the NOAA report how much such a lift will cost, who will pay for it, if it will be mandated for all U.S. longline vessels, and if there will be enforcement to ensure that it is actually used. Most importantly, NOAA estimated a reduction in leatherback bycatch of 70 percent. Although this study may help reduce turtle bycatch, the achievable reduction is inadequate for protecting the plunging Pacific Leatherback population. These new techniques are insufficient to fulfill guidelines for reducing bycatch rates to "levels approaching zero" for endangered sea turtles. Any incidental take of leatherbacks is detrimental to their continued survival. The only way to protect the leatherback is to maintain the closures to longline fishing in U.S. waters of the Atlantic and Pacific not reduce bycatch related restrictions as NOAA is recommending. The Sea Turtle Restoration Project advocates expanding these closures as a UN moratorium on longline fishing in the Pacific. Finally, the NOAA plan does little to protect consumers of fish from high levels of methylmercury in tuna and swordfish, which are caught by longline fishing. The FDA issued a warning that swordfish, shark, king mackerel and tilefish (also known as golden snapper) contain enough mercury to affect the central nervous system and harm developing fetuses. Pregnant and nursing women, women who might become pregnant and young children should not eat these fish. The NOAA project would encourage an intensification of longline fishing by opening currently closed longline tuna and swordfish fisheries thereby further endangering both endangered sea turtles and seafood consumers. Both sea turtles and consumers would suffer in order to keep longliners afloat in our waters. -Robert Ovetz, Ph.D., Marine Species Campaigner, Sea Turtle Restoration Project, Forest Knolls, CA published in the Outer Banks Sentinel, NC Sunday Jan. 18, 2004 www.womacknewspapers.com/obsentinel/ |
| Cutting the Longline to Extinction: New Sea Turtle Campaign Takes Aim at Industrial Longline Fishing and Mercury Poisoned Seafood December 9th, 2003 By Dr. Robert Ovetz Chanting “Get on the right track… stop killing the leatherback!,” a festive protest of people of many ages dressed in colorful turtle costumes wound its way along the busy streets of San Francisco’s Fishermen's Wharf. The action this past October marked the launching of the Bay Area-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project’s Save the Leatherback (www.savetheleatherback.com) campaign for a moratorium on longline fishing in the Pacific Ocean. Longline fishing in the Pacific kills tens of thousands of sea turtles annually to serve up swordfish, shark and tuna poisoned with high levels of methylmercury for lucrative seafood markets in Japan, the US and Europe. Longlines are the greatest threat to sea turtles, maiming and killing as many as 40,000 each year. Having once swum with the dinosaurs, the more than 100 million old leatherback now hangs by a thread at the threshold of extinction. The campaign to save it is at the heart of a concerted international effort to end the lawless pillaging of the oceans and needless slaughter of millions of marine species such as the Pacific leatherback by industrial fishing, while also sounding the alarm about the threat of methylmercury poisoning to people who eat swordfish and other predatory fish. The Ancient Leatherback The leatherback sea turtle is the dean of the seven species of sea turtles. Weighing up to 2000 pounds and reaching as much as nine feet in length, the leatherback has a unique external anatomy characterized by a leathery shell composed of skin overlying a mosaic of thin bony plates. The Pacific leatherback takes up to 15 years to mature and returns to the same beach where it hatched. To get there, a single leatherback follows a complex migration route stretching thousands of miles each year back and forth across the entire Pacific Ocean. Because leatherbacks feed on jellyfish near the surface, they are extremely vulnerable to both swordfish and tuna longlining, both of which are conducted in relatively shallow pelagic (i.e. high seas) water. The rapid explosion of longlines since the 1970s has devastated the leatherback. Estimates of nesting females illuminate a terrifying collapse in the leatherback population — 95% in the last two decades. This nosedive has aroused widespread international support for immediate action to stop the extinction crisis. Reversing the Decline STRP’s Save the Leatherback campaign is undertaking a broad array of initiatives including taking direct action, pursuing strategic legal action, advocating for a UN moratorium on Pacific longlining, educating seafood consumers about the impact of mercury poisoning, and undertaking media and advertising campaigns. This last October, the campaign achieved a significant victory when the restaurant chain Red Lobster, which is owned by Darden Restaurants, Inc., dropped swordfish from its approximately 500 restaurants throughout North America in response to a year long petition campaign. The success of the Red Lobster campaign compliments other efforts to apply pressure on other high profile sellers of swordfish through the threat of a lawsuit against the Safeway, Kroger’s, Albertson’s and Whole Foods supermarket conglomerates. STRP teamed up with the San Francisco-based As You Sow Foundation in November, 2002, to conduct laboratory tests of swordfish sold in the five major supermarket chains. When the results turned up alarming mercury levels—as much as twice the level recommend by the US Food and Drug Administration—STRP filed a notice of intent to sue the supermarkets and Red Lobster under California’s Proposition 65. This 1986 “right to know” law includes a clause requiring the posting of public warnings about toxics in food that was not being enforced. With this evidence in hand, the California Attorney’s General office filed the lawsuit itself in February 2003. To settle the suit, an interim legal agreement between the parties stipulates that stores will post signs warning of the dangers of consuming seafood containing methylmercury, especially swordfish, shark, tuna, king mackerel and tilefish. The presence of methylmercury in predatory seafood species such as tuna, swordfish, king mackerel and shark has garnered extensive international media coverage and public attention in the past few years. Fear of methylmercury poisoning in seafood led to the collapse of the seafood market in Hong Kong in November 2003. Paradoxically, the Japanese government has issued public health warnings about mercury in whale and dolphin meat even while it encourages the hunting of these two species for meat. Thanks to coal burning power plants, the largest emitters of mercury into the atmosphere that is transformed into methylmercury in the ocean, methylmercury continues to rapidly accumulate up the marine food chain right onto our plates. Predatory fish residing at the top of the food chain accumulate methylmercury levels considered unsafe for consumption even by US government standards. The US Food and Drug Administration warns children and women who are pregnant or of child-bearing age not to consume swordfish and other species high in mercury. Swordfish contains mercury levels that are 500 percent higher, on the average, than levels considered safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Not surprisingly, because the EPA’s allowable concentration of methylmercury is five times lower than that allowed by the FDA, powerful industry lobbyist organizations such as the National Fisheries Institute are pushing a standardization of health regulations in line with the more lenient FDA mercury toxicity levels. The continued marketing of methylmercury tainted seafood raises deeper issues of corporate influence over government public health regulations as well as emissions from coal burning power plants and automobiles, the two largest sources of methylmercury. As documented by a Now with Bill Moyers investigation on PBS in August 2003, industry lobbyists such as the US Tuna Foundation have watered down inspections and talked the FDA into removing tuna from their warning that states, “swordfish, shark, king mackerel and tilefish (also known as golden snapper) contain enough mercury to affect the central nervous system and harm developing fetuses. Pregnant and nursing women, women who might become pregnant and young children should not eat these fish.” At the same time, the Bush administration is sabotaging long awaited reductions in emissions of mercury and other pollutants from the energy industry and auto manufacturers with his so-called “Clear Skies” initiative. STRP’s emphasis on bringing together the health and environmental impacts of top predatory fish breaks new ground. It brings together new allies working on pollution, nutrition, public health, ocean, animal, fishing and reproductive campaigns to address issues that may have once seemed separate and unconnected. The emphasis on reducing consumer demand for top-of-the-food-chain seafood can squeeze down demand by the world’s second largest importer of swordfish in order to reduce the fishing effort and give some breathing room for the leatherback. When demand is forced down, the incentive for continuing destructive and unprofitable longline fishing practice will decline. Cutting the Longline This strategy is already beginning to hit a nerve in the industrial fishing world. At a weekend of direct action protests at the National Fisheries Institute’s (NFI) October national conference and International West Coast Seafood Show in Long Beach California, STRP activists successfully evaded extensive efforts to censor protest. Over the course of the weekend, activists confronted swordfish dealers inside the seafood show who had refused requests to drop the fish from their inventories, hung door hangers reading “Do Not Disturb the Oceans” throughout the five largest hotels where conference and seafood show guests were staying and unfurled a massive banner at two well-attended events. The activists were able to infiltrate and drop their banner, which read “Swordfishing Kills Sea Turtles,” at the exclusive opening night gala of the seafood show on the legendary Queen Mary cruise ship before being dragged off the ship by security. They had already pulled off a similar drop at the starting line of the nearby Long Beach Marathon earlier that day. NFI was chosen as a campaign target for its role as an official advisor to the US Trade Representative. The industry lobbying group is pushing for a disastrous expansion of WTO authority over the oceans. It is also using its political clout to subvert eco-labeling, promote longlining and oppose a planned “country of origin labeling” law. NFI’s shameless promotion of cheap imported aquaculture drove US shrimper organizations to quit NFI in protest in October 2003 to pursue a trade embargo. The longline industry has a lot to fear from the campaign. A 1999 lawsuit filed by STRP and Earthjustice closed two million square miles of territorial waters around Hawai’i to Hawai’ian swordfish longliners. The US district court judge found that the National Marine Fisheries Service ... |