Is it the end of the line for tuna?

Jennifer Rankin in European Voice.com: The European Union's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) will be judged by what happens to bluefin tuna. The CFP's credibility will be badly damaged if the silvery-grey fish disappears from the waters of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Scientists fear that bluefin tuna, having been overfished for decades, is at risk of disappearing for good. “Collapse could be a real possibility in the foreseeable future,” said a report last year by scientists for the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the international body that manages the fish. The only thing protecting the fish in European waters is the EU's inspection and control regime, the teams of EU inspectors who check that fishing fleets are sticking to their quotas. The missions are more active than ever before, but not everyone thinks that they are enough to stave off collapse.

During this year's three-month mission (mid-April to mid-June) officials carried out more than 600 inspections and found 96 infringements of the rules. EU ships and planes patrolled the seas from the eastern Mediterranean as far west as the Azores.

…For Gemma Parkes, in the Rome office of the conservation organisation WWF, it is too early to judge how effective the EU mission has been. But she said “we know that the stocks are in dire straits and we know they are collapsing in real time as we speak”…

Northern bluefin tuna, shot by OpenCage, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License