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Greenpeace calls for fish trawling moratorium
July 24, 2005
The international agency overseeing the North Atlantic fishery should place a moratorium on the practice of bottom trawling because it has depleted fish stocks and destroyed their habitats, Greenpeace writes in a report to be published on Monday.
environmental agency will ask Canada to put a temporary ban on bottom trawling, the practice of dragging huge nets along the ocean floor to scoop up everything in their path, ecologists told the Canadian Press news agency.
The North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) has become so ineffective that 10 species under its jurisdiction are under moratoriums, Greenpeace wrote in its report to be released in Halifax.
Greenpeace criticizes NAFO for rarely punishing its members for overfishing, a situation that has been made worse by trawling, which it says lops off fish habitats on undersea mountains and reefs and uses sonar to target entire schools of fish.
"NAFO has been responsible for managing one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the fisheries for the past 20 to 25 years and has basically failed miserably," said Karen Sack, a co-author of the Greenpeace report.
Sack said Ottawa must take a leading role if NAFO cannot be relied on to enforce the fishing quotas it sets in the North Atlantic, an area where 60 per cent of the world's trawling takes place.
"We believe this moratorium is urgent and should be put in place this year and we are concerned the Canadian government is not taking a pro-active role as a steward of the deep ocean," Sack said.
Greenpeace has sent one of its ships, a former Russian navy fire-fighting vessel called the Esperenza, into the Grand Banks area off Newfoundland to monitor trawling catches and report back to Halifax on Aug. 10.
NAFO, formed in 1979, allows its 13 member countries to opt out of quotas if they do not agree with them. Over the years, Canada has filed more than 300 overfishing citations but won just 24 convictions from NAFO.
During the past three years, Canada has twice temporarily barred from its ports ships from the Faroe Islands after the region of Denmark disregarded shrimp quotas. The Faroe Islands lie between Scotland and Iceland.
A marine specialist with Ecology Action Centre in Halifax says Canada must now ban trawling if NAFO continues to fail the environment.
"If we wait for the international agencies to move on their own to protect these sea mounts, there will be nothing left," Mark Butler said.
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