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Some Atlantic Fish Stocks Facing Extinction Unless Bycatch Fishery Ended: Report

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

HALIFAX (CP) - Threatened fish that are supposed to be protected by international fishing bans are still being caught and sold by foreign and Canadian fishermen who claim the catches from the Grand Banks are unintentional, says a new study to be released Tuesday.

The study, produced by the World Wildlife Fund, suggests that deliberate, illegal fishing is increasingly being disguised as accidental bycatch - the marine species caught by fishing gear intended for other fish.

International fishing rules allow for a certain amount of bycatch, since most boats haul in many types of fish and other marine life while fishing for a particular species of fish.

A portion of the commercially valuable bycatch can be kept and sold.

"It's sort of a dirty little secret everyone knows about," says Bob Rangeley, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, a privately financed conservation group with five million members worldwide.

"But we can't talk about recovery until you remove this threat."

Protected species, such as cod, plaice and flounder, are being fished so aggressively in international waters off Newfoundland that they might never rebound, says the report, titled Bycatch and the High Seas: A Review of the Effectiveness of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization.

The report's authors say some fishermen are pursuing restricted species because the fish they say they are after are less valuable, creating an "incentive to maximize bycatch."

"This is done either through ignoring bycatch limits or by ensuring that each fishing trip catches the full limit of bycatch."

Rangeley says that in some areas, bycatch makes up 80 per cent of the landed catch.

In 2003, 5,400 tonnes of cod were caught on the once-rich southern Grand Banks, an amount that totalled 90 per cent of the estimated stock at the time.

"Recovery is not possible at those kinds of levels," says Rangeley. "That population will eventually go extinct. It's got to stop on that cod stock, or it's gone."

The majority of the cod bycatch taken from the southern Grand Banks was landed by boats from Portugal, Spain, Russia and Canada, the report says.

The report says the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, the group that manages fisheries in international waters outside Canada's 200-mile limit, has failed in its efforts to control the problem of overfishing and illegal fishing.

The World Wildlife Fund says the 13-nation regulatory body has become toothless in prosecuting members who violate fishing regulations and does little to protect stocks, many of which have come under moratoria since its creation in 1979.

The WWF is calling on NAFO, which is meeting in Estonia this week to set next year's quotas, to toughen enforcement and clamp down on the bycatch fishery.

The group also wants the Canadian government and NAFO to protect sensitive marine habitats, eliminate a NAFO provision that allows countries to unilaterally opt out of fisheries quotas, limit the number of boats on the Grand Banks and use more scientific advice in setting catch limits.

Earlier this month, a Canadian panel of experts issued a report saying NAFO has done such a poor job it should be dismantled and replaced.

The report, commissioned by the federal government, said NAFO had lost all credibility in Canada because it has become powerless to enforce fishing regulations.

Federal Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan has said the institution needs to be reformed, not scrapped.

Source: Canadian Press

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