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EU rejects calls to drop planned tuna fishing ban
2008-06-18
BRUSSELS (AFP) - The European Commission on Tuesday rejected calls from France, Italy and Spain to drop a planned ban on industrial bluefin tuna fishing, defending its decision to close the fishing season early. Dismissing accusations that its decision was based on faulty figures, the commission said unnamed EU member nations were failing to keep track of catches, running the risk of overfishing. "The commission therefore cannot seriously be expected to consider their very poorly based request to suspend its well-founded decision," EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said in a statement. The commission sparked a wave of protest on Friday from Europe's leading tuna fishing nations -- France, Italy and Spain -- by announcing plans to close the season early for big industrial operations in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. The three countries decried the commission's decision as unjustified and disproportionate, raising doubts about the figures Brussels used. The commission's move targets fishing by purse seiners, boats that place nets around whole schools of fish before drawing them in. They account for 70 percent of all bluefin tuna hauls. Firing back at critics, Borg heaped scorn on figures from member states and said "the European Commission has in its possession all the data needed to establish that the EU purse seine fleet has now exhausted its quota." "The commission is convinced that the many failures of implementation and control which we have been noted since the start of the campaign have made it exceedingly difficult for the member states to monitor their own fleets' bluefin tuna catches accurately," he said. Under the commission's decision, boats from Greece, France, Italy, Cyprus and Malta will be banned from fishing bluefin tuna from June 16, while purse seiners from Spain will not be able to cast their nets from June 23. The season would usually have run to the end of June, when the fleet normally hauls in 90 percent of its catches, taking in as much as 550 tonnes of tuna per day. "The bluefin tuna stock has suffered greatly from many years of overfishing, in particular by the European industrial fleet," Borg said. "Any repeat of the overfishing seen last year could easily lead to the collapse of the stock, and thus to the definitive closure of the fishery for the foreseeable future, with disastrous consequences to all the fleets and fishermen that depend on it."
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