Governments Fail to Take Action to Prohibit High Seas Bottom Trawling

July 17, 2005

Government representatives at a United Nations preparatory meeting in New York in June failed to take a strong stance against bottom trawling in the high seas, despite the hopes of environmentalists and scientists that they would do so. However, those same environmentalists and scientists continue to hope that the UN General Assembly will take action later this year.

Scientists believe that as many as 98 per cent of the world's marine species live in, on, or just above the sea floor, large numbers of them clustered around undersea mountains known as seamounts, many of which are home to life forms that do not exist even on other seamounts, let alone elsewhere in the sea.

Fewer than fifty of the tens of thousands of seamounts have been scientifically explored; indeed, in December last year, a United States Navy submarine collided with a previously undocumented seamount in the western Pacific. Last year, researchers discovered a hitherto-unknown species of black coral that grows to heights of six feet in the waters off Los Angeles.

However, researchers contend that bottom trawling is devastating much of this sea floor ecosystem before scientists have even had a chance to explore it. In Norwegian waters, an estimated one-third to one-half of deep-water coral reefs have been damaged or destroyed by trawling; photographs document giant trawl scars up to four kilometers long. In 1997, a bottom trawl fishery south of Australia brought up an estimated 10,000 tons of deep-water coral to catch less than 4,000 tons of orange roughy. Some trawled seamounts off Tasmania are now 95 percent bare rock. One comparison of trawled and untrawled seamounts on the Chatham Rise showed that coral covered 52 percent of the seafloor on undamaged seamounts versus two percent on seamounts that had been trawled.

Environmentalists argue that the only solution to this issue is for a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling. Furthermore, they contend, such a moratorium would affect only a small percentage of the global fishing fleet. It is estimated that, out of 3.1 million fishing vessels in operation worldwide, only 100-200 are bottom trawling the high seas on a full-time, year-round basis. The approximately 170,000-215,000 tons of fish those vessels caught in 2001 was at most one quarter of one per cent of the 84 million tons caught worldwide that year. And virtually all high seas bottom trawling is conducted by vessels from just 11 countries. Countries from the European Union (including the recently admitted Baltic States) are responsible for approximately 60% of the high seas bottom trawl catch. One nation, Spain, accounts for approximately two-thirds of the EU catch and 40% of the global total.

The EU, swayed by Spain, had been the principal opponent of any UN action on bottom trawling in previous years, but campaigners had sensed a slight shift in the Spanish and EU positions, heading into June's meeting of the United Nations Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS). However, despite urgings from countries such as Norway, Chile, Fiji, Palau, New Zealand, and Mexico, the EU continued to hold firm against any action, and the UNICPOLOS meeting did not recommend that the General Assembly adopt a moratorium.

Campaigners will now turn their attention on other preparatory meetings between now and the opening of the UN General Assembly in September.

www.fishinghurts.com

July 17 , 2005.