Tuna Wars by Steven Adolf

Tuna Wars by Steven Adolf

Author:Steven Adolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030206413
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


References

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Mitsubishi Corporation (2008) Mitsubishi corporation Atlantic bluefin tuna sourcing policy (updated November 2008)

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Hamilton A, Lewis A, McCoy M et al (2011) Market and industry dynamics in the global tuna supply chain. FFA, Honiara

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

S. AdolfTuna Warshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20641-3_22

22. The Tuna Police

Steven Adolf1

(1)Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Steven Adolf

Control and enforcement of strict harvesting rules for bluefin tuna. How would this work in a sea without borders? And what, in fact, was Europe doing on this front? The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is a story in itself. A largely untold story, in fact, about a painstakingly built cathedral of management policies to recover the stocks of different species that took decades of complicated negotiations between the member states and their fishing interests. This only began to pay dividends with respect to sustainable fishing from 2010 on, with remarkable results in terms of improved stocks in the common waters [137, 191]. But within European policy tuna always had been a different story with an external stage outside the common seas. It was European distant water fleets, especially those registered in Spain and France, that fished tuna in the oceans around the world. Bluefin tuna fishing had become a bit of an exception, happening for the most part in the Mediterranean. This sea was an intricate patchwork of different claims on fishing grounds with monitoring systems of extremely varying quality. The EU was the most important force in terms of industrial interest within ICCAT. But this management organisation, which was in charge, seemed to have the greatest difficulty in taking steps to protect bluefin tuna. Could it play a role when it came to enforcement of compliance?

To find out more about that, I travelled to Vigo, the port in the northern Spanish region of Galicia. Galicia is home to the majority of Spain’s present tuna canning industries, and with it the largest tuna processing industry in Europe. Vigo is the most important discharge port for tuna caught throughout the world by the state-of-the-art Spanish fleet of gigantic purse seine ships, largely skipjack, yellowfin and albacore tuna which disappear into cans as a bulk product or are presented as steaks on the supermarket shelves.

Here, in the office of the European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA), housed in a grand building on the port’s central avenue, I was shown how the tuna fleets in the Mediterranean and Atlantic waters were monitored. It was somewhat reminiscent of a James Bond film control centre: the wide computer screen in the office showed a chart of the Mediterranean, with dots and lines steering a course across it in different colours. Harry Koster, at the time the Dutch director of the European Fisheries Control Agency, explained to me how it worked. ‘Blue for the French, red for the Spanish and green for the Italian purse seine ships. These are the movements of the European bluefin tuna fleet, displayed within the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), which picks up signals from special boxes fixed to the boats via a GPS system,’ Koster told me.



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