The latest decision by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) appears to make sense, but reactions to it highlight once again the tendency of organizations with vested interests to use data to support their agendas, rather than getting to the truth.
ICCAT moved to increase quotas for Atlantic bluefin tuna by 20 percent per year over the next three years for Eastern and Mediterranean stocks. Surely the industry will welcome this, as low quotas forced a rather abrupt end to the fishing season earlier this year, particularly in Spain, where fishing fleets caught the country’s entire quota of just over 2,500 metric tons in less than 48 hours.
Predictably, NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are railing against the increase, arguing that the science doesn’t necessarily back such a dramatic increase.
“It might seem a paradox, but the bluefin tuna case confirms that sometimes it’s more difficult to manage a success than a crisis,” Tudela said. “It’s hard to apply the term 'moderate' to an annual increase of 20 percent over 3 years. We are concerned that the huge conservation efforts of the last years might quickly fade away.”
Looking just at ICCAT data, it seems Tudela has a point. According to ICCAT’s own stock assessments from 2012, “In spite of recent improvements in the data quantity and quality for the past few years, there remain important data limitations for the 2012 updated assessment of the stock.” Further, the summary of the 2012 assessment acknowledges that new measures to improve stock assessment methods need to be put in
In the current assessment, ICCAT’s own researchers acknowledge “the conclusions of this assessment do not capture the full degree of uncertainty in the assessments and projections.”
Even ICCAT’s own press release highlighting its recent meeting where officials decided on the new quotas merely described “encouraging signs” of recovery. Not the strongest of statements, and reactions from groups like WWF fuel concerns that ICCAT jumped the gun on boosting quotas.
But as those groups argue advocates for quota increases aren’t paying attention to all the data, they ignore compelling fishery catch data that supports the ICCAT assessments, even if the ICCAT data is incomplete or imperfect. A typical fishing season for the Spanish bluefin fleet is about two months, and if the quotas truly reflected the current state of the stocks, it should have taken around that long for the fleet to hit its limit. Instead, the boats fished it in two days, which can only mean one of two things: Either the Spanish fishing boats
NGOs like WWF will tell us that the existing ICCAT data might not be solid enough yet to make a decision, and they may be right, but we can’t ignore the ease at which Mediterranean fisheries, especially from Spain, were able to meet their catch limits this year. It’s likely that when ICCAT’s data becomes more solid, it will only support the move that ICCAT officials made this week.
