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Why do we
need COLTO?
It's an unfortunate reality
that there are a few unscrupulous people who have put short term profit and
illegal gain ahead of sustainable fishing and sustainable environmental
practices. Toothfish IUU activity has the potential to threaten not just
individual legal fishing operators' livelihoods, but also some toothfish
populations, as well as ecologically related species such as seabirds, which
are caught and drowned by illegal fishermen.
Each of these problems is
cause for concern to governments, industry and conservation groups as well
as the general public, and correctly so. Regulations and requirements for
legal toothfish operators are stringent, and designed to ensure sustainable
harvesting of toothfish populations, sustainable fishing practices that
avoid killing seabirds and mammals, and sustainable livelihoods for legal
fishermen.
As an example, legal
fishermen are required by the Commission for Conservation of Antarctic
Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR – see website
www.ccamlr.org) to use special bird mitigation
measures such as:
-
having lines out the back
of their boats when hauling and setting longlines to ensure birds don’t
get caught on hooks;
-
preventing any discharge of
offal overboard to avoid attracting and provisioning seabirds;
-
having heavily weighted
lines to prevent birds grabbing the baits and becoming hooked as the lines
are being set;
-
having specific closed
seasons to prevent fishing for toothfish at times when birds are
feeding/nesting.
Further to this, CCAMLR
annually reviews catch levels and implements limits on the legal take of
toothfish, sets research requirements and programs for legal operators, and
works to improve understanding of the stock and ecological linkages that
exist in toothfish and other fisheries in the sub Antarctic region.
Of all the issues CCAMLR
deals with, IUU fishing for toothfish is the most significant threat to
undermine the fisheries resources management as well as the ecologically
related species management by CCAMLR. IUU fishermen abide by none of the
CCAMLR measures, and IUU fishing has been estimated to have killed tens of
thousands of seabirds in the Southern Oceans over the past ten years.
Legal industry members in the
toothfish fisheries have been working for many years with governments,
conservation groups and international conservation and management bodies, to
protect toothfish fisheries as well as seabirds and mammals in the
region.
Industry members were
instrumental, with conservation groups, in setting up the International
Southern Oceans Fishing Industry Clearing House (ISOFISH) in 1997, which
reported on IUU activity over a three year period. This group
was funded variously from industry, conservation and government groups.
The information gathered from
both industry and conservation sources was compiled and distributed to
governments and appropriate agencies to assist them to eliminate IUU fishing
for toothfish. ISOFISH produced reports on IUU activity from Norway,
Mauritius, and Chile as well as a report on how illegal operators were
changing vessel names and ports of registration to avoid legal requirements
such as the CCAMLR Catch Documentation System.
So successful was ISOFISH
that the IUU fishing dropped to minimal levels by 1999/2000 and the group
was subsequently disbanded.
Unfortunately, after ISOFISH
members decided that sufficient profiling and assistance had been given to
authorities to enable effective control over toothfish IUU fishing, the lack
of an industry/conservation group "watchdog" saw increased activities by
new, more highly organised, IUU operators. These illegal operators believed
they no longer had a significant risk of capture and/or public exposure for
their illicit activities.
Consequently,
IUU fishing for toothfish
saw an increase as newer,
more organised, illegal operators began, or returned, to plunder
populations of toothfish.
In an attempt to quantify the
IUU toothfish trade, several studies have been undertaken by TRAFFIC (a
wildlife trade monitoring network). Their reports can be found at
TRAFFIC.
The
TRAFFIC reports demonstrated that there has been a substantial quantity of
toothfish entering the trade from illegal sources.
A powerful example of the
sort of shift that has occurred in the type of operators involved in the IUU
fishing activity was outlined in the report released in 2002, titled "The
Alphabet Boats, a case study of toothfish poaching in the Indian Ocean"
which outlined one group of IUU operations.
Following the release of the
Alphabet Boats report, Australian journalists compiled an international
investigative program on IUU fishing for toothfish, released on the ABC
called “Toothfish Pirates”.
Since this
time IUU fishing has declined significantly however, as history has shown,
COLTO members and its supporters need to remain vigilant.
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