Shark fins are seen on display in a refrigerated case in a Monterey Park, Calif., store. (AP Photo/Nick Ut/FILE)
Follow-up: News about world fisheries
Congress hits shark ‘finning’ practice; fleet subsidies cut would be ‘historic’; whales don’t compete with humans for fish, studies show.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ July 3, 2008 edition
On June 11, the House Natural Resources Committee approved the Shark Conservation Act of 2008. The bill attempts to curb the practice of shark finning by US-based fishing boats and limit trade with shark-finning fleets abroad.
Between 26 million and 73 million sharks are caught yearly, according to a 2006 study in Ecology Letters, a French science journal. The shark’s fins may be cut off and the carcass thrown overboard to make room for more valuable fins, which are used in dishes like shark fin soup, a delicacy throughout East Asia. Scientists say the targeting of sharks, along with sharks being incidental bycatch, have led to their dramatic decline. Some populations are down by as much as 90 percent in the past 50 years. The nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature says that more than half of mid-ocean sharks are in danger of extinction.
The bill does not target all fishing, but stipulates that sharks be landed with fins still attached. This will help limit finning at sea, viewed widely as a great waste. Nonfishing vessels will no longer be permitted to ship and transfer fins, a measure aimed at limiting the fin trade. It also lays out a process to ban shark products from countries with poor shark-preservation programs. The bill still has to pass votes in the House and Senate.
WTO may cut fishing subsidies
Economists say subsidies boost world fishing fleet capacity far above what the oceans can sustain. By one count, subsidies – including low-interest loans to fishermen, artificially cheap fuel, and more – amount to one-quarter of an estimated $80 billion industry. The overcapacity that results is bad news for the more than 1 billion people who depend on fish as a major source of protein. One-quarter of the world’s fishing stocks are said to be overfished; another 50 percent are exploited to full capacity.
A working document outlining a ban on fishing subsidies for large fishing operations has been introduced at the World Trade Organization. Some WTO members, notably Japan and the European Union, are resisting. Others, including Brazil, Iceland, and the US, have expressed support.
Courtney Sakai, senior campaign director for the nonprofit Oceana, calls the proposal “historic.” Reducing fishing subsidies, she says, is “probably the single biggest thing you could do to protect the ocean.”
Don’t blame the whales
Whaling nations like Japan and Norway have long said that culling whales boosts fish stocks. That assumes whales eat the same fish humans do. But at the International Whaling Commission’s 60th annual meeting in Santiago, Chile, scientists released three reports saying whales don’t meaningfully affect human fisheries. The largest baleen whales eat the smallest zooplankton. And, at least in the tropics, toothed whales may actually improve fisheries by hunting organisms that prey on the same fish humans target.
Good news for US fisheries
Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service released its report on the status of US fish stocks. The Magnuson-Stevens Act states that overfishing must end by 2010. Progress was made on that front.
Seven stocks are no longer “subject to overfishing,” according to NOAA Fisheries, lowering the grand total to 41. Of the seven, four have increased in biomass and are no longer considered overfished. Three stocks have fully recovered since 2006, and no new stocks became subject to overfishing in 2007. Two stocks (winter skate, summer flounder) fell and are now officially “overfished.” That’s 45 overfished stocks out of the 244 for which NOAA has data. Overall, it’s the biggest one-year improvement since these reports began 30 years ago.
But others point out that the report is still full of holes. First, NOAA has very little progress to report on rebuilding overfished stocks. And Tony DeFalco, director of regional operations for the Marine Conservation Network in Portland, Ore., points out that NOAA still knows very little about half the 530 stocks in its purview. “The magnitude of the problem is even more significant than the report portrays,” he says. “We don’t know the status of the majority of the stocks, and we need to know.”
( More stories )
Comments
2. Virginia H. Cross | 07.05.08
Of course I’m deeply interested in our fisheries and their supplies for our local people that can’t fish or even live by the Oceans to enjoy what is underneath them personally. At the same time I have had the fortune to live on an Island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and enjoyed this privilege and to partake in the fishing for my family growing up welfare.There is something special dealing with our local fishermen and their catches for their business of making a living off the seas and our rewards of eating what they bring in. I feel they know what is right and reasonable to make a living to feed the surrounding communties which spread across all of our United States. I have seen the bottom of the Ocean change with time and tide, storms and tempest and new creatures moving in and old ones moving out. I’ve seen richness abundance to bleak areas and new creatures taking over where they hadn’t been before. Would you look at this as growth and prosperity or going where the food is and the surroundings at present which always change either for the worse of for the better? If nothing else it is making all of us fish eating people aware of our God gifted surroundings for which each one of us are caretakers in our special fields of concern and non-concern. Example: I was called in one day to help one company patch up the holes that were broken in their underwater fencing that held the herring that would be quick freeze for market for other fishermen. The shark would bite holes in the fencing to be able to get inside the herring trap to eat the herring fish. I was hired to go inside and patch up the holes in the herring trap which I did. I knew the shark inside were full of herring, so I was in safe relation to all of them. I counted 90 shark inside while mending the fence.It was interesting how all the fish including all the herring would follow me around underwater while making repairs.The owner on top was in a row boat watching and he also saw the fish follow me around. I always carried my spear gun with me as it was a tank job staying down. Once my line caught on a snarl knob underwater on the post of the herring trap. It brought me to a jolt to a dead stop. I had to back up carefully and unhitch the line. In the meantime all the fish went in circles tumbling head over heels over each other until I started forward in line.Then the fish continued to follow me. The man on top noticed this disturbance also and wondered what had happened. When finished with mending the half acre of fencing, the owner ask me how many shark did I count. I told him at least 90 to 100 shark,and that is exactly what he found as he cleaned out the trap. His business was back in business and I did what I loved to do, help others and get paid for my service. Once again these are stories going into My Underwater Encounters Book, and you most certainly are free to print them. I’ve also gone with big ships with nets hauling in certain fish. The fishermen were good and could tell by the tugs and pulls on their nets exactly what kind of fish they had in their nets and how much. They would keep the ones they were looking for and turn the other loose back to the Ocean. I found it worth while going along with the ride and hauling in the nets. I learned a lot working with these seasoned fisherman. The ones I’ve worked with know their trade, their lines, their Oceans their fish and making a living for their families, things we all like to buy in the grocery store and restraints.For the laws and rules that are imposed upon them, have these people gone fishing to understand more the impack of their decision making in their fields of knowledge? You are free to print my comments as the stories will go into my book on My Underwater Encounters. I always followed the rules and laws laid down for bottom fishing and respect them. I also try to understand the bigger business of feeding our Nation and the fishermans families making a living. I just want what’s reasonable for all, including the fish and for future generations. I will always love the Oceans and the Peace it gives to me. Virginia H. Cross (Flipper)
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate – even pointed disagreement – is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. Gene Soccolich | 07.03.08
COMMERCIAL FISHING CALLS FOR CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT
WE, THE PEOPLE, legal residents of the United States and members of the commercial fishing community, to achieve a more sustainable fishery and fishing industry, request formal congressional oversight hearings on the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) stewardship, which we find to be grossly deficient, causing severe economic harm, and in which we proclaim our vote of no confidence.
Fishery resource assessments, diligently conducted by marine scientists, are only part of the data equation needed to establish credible optimum yield estimates and develop true ecosystem based management. Marine fisheries, due to their primitive nature and extreme sensitivity to climatic changes, are at the vanguard of global warming economic impact.
NMFS has failed to promulgate any comprehensive methodology for assessing the impacts of such environmental variability on reproductive patterns, migration routes and ecosystem relationships. NMFS instead has placed the entire onus of resource depletion on commercial fishermen with constraints recklessly causing severe harm and suffering to the fishing community. Fishermen, who have obeyed NMFS regulations, now find themselves and their fishing communities on the brink of economic disaster.
Federal court recently has rebuked our government for its gross lack of comprehensively addressing the impacts of global warming, and as corroborated in a September 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office. U.S. fisheries already must operate in an unfair competitive arena of fisheries subsidized by other nations, from where imports now greatly surpass U.S. harvests. Our fisheries no longer can sustain more elitist federal disregard. That the U.S. demands the destructive discard of all inadvertent by-catch in the face of world hunger only manifests a nation’s arrogance. NMFS’s expedited resource recovery plans will turn the small fisherman, unable financially to sustain more constraints without due compensation, inhumanely into the ultimate by-catch.
Without comprehensive assessments on potential environmental change impacts on marine fisheries, optimum yields must not be lowered without providing equal compensation to affected fishing communities. The government legally cannot have it both ways, however in the absence of comprehensive impact data, compensation also cannot be ascertained. Historical data and resource assessments no longer are sufficient to meet baseline scientific requirements to substantiate NMFS’s recovery plans.
No industry could reasonably operate in a business manner under such a constant barrage of abrupt emergency actions and regulatory changes by NMFS for over a decade. Immediate congressional oversight of NMFS’s assessment methodology, not its simple consideration of environmental variability, is the next logical action to the findings of the federal court and the GAO. Taking no action only would condone the present suffering of our fishing communities and set dangerous federal precedent for placing other sectors of our nation’s agricultural communities in similar jeopardy of economic distress and increased foreign dependence. We trust our congressional representatives to have both the will and the wisdom to take rightful action and stop this bleeding.
THE PORT OF NEW BEDFORD BUSINESS ALLIANCE