Viewpoints

Pedro Garcia

La Asociacion de Naturalistas del Sureste (ANSE) in Southeast Murcia, Cartagena,Spain.

Fishing tuna for the farms can be another form of excessive fishing-a form of fishing that can threaten wild tuna populations. It is since the arrival of theJapanese market that everything has been complicated. Boats with "flags of convenience" wereoften using our ports and were fishing tuna in the western Mediterranean. From our pointof view, they have greatly contributed to the overexploitation of the tuna.

The differences in the fishing methods are huge. There is the traditionalfishing with a fishhook where they only fish few tunas each draw. But with the other methodthe boats that fish tuna for the farms capture an enormous quantity of tuna from one timealone. The fish that goes to the farms don't pass through LONGA. The traditional fishermanhas to declare everything to LONGA. The farms do not declare this fish because no one controlsthe exact number of tuna that the farms produce within them.

Many of the tunas captured die on their way to the farms, but there areno official statistics. When a boat captures a group of tunas, a portion die at this moment,another part goes to the farm, to the pool on the boat, which is then transferred to thefarm. En route, another portion of the tuna also die, no one knows or says how many die.Another portion dies when they arrive at the farm. There is a loss of fish, which are reproducers.It is very important to notice that the tuna farms capture reproducing tunas and this Mediterraneanreproducing bank is being put in danger.

Gines Mendez

President of Atunes de Mazarron in Murcia, Spain

The fishermen must continue to evolve to aquaculture as he did on land,from hunter to rancher. From a fruit collector, he became a farmer. This step has yet tobe taken in fishing. Aquaculture is a special opportunity to precisely control many variablesthat can't be controlled when a species grows in the wild.

There has been very intense tuna fishing until now. As a matter of fact,aquaculture has already started to alleviate wild stocks. Tuna aquaculture is a very substantialshock absorber for extractive fishing because a fisherman receives, as a minimum, seven timesmore for his catch than 15 years earlier. If the fisherman gets more resources, more valuefor his product, he will need to fish less. If in order to feed each tuna, the tuna farmersneed to feed it 20 kilos of small fish, then this is a benefit for all. The way I see it,this is an advantage for the extractive sector, for the fishing industry. How is that a wasteof resources?

What if you pay 50 cents of an Euro for 1 kilo of bait, and then, youare able to transform those 50 cents of an Euro and multiply them by 10 times. If it is notsupposed to add any value, what is one to do? Is it a sin to generate income? Making moneyand generating income is what the enterprise is after in order to create more jobs, to beable to grow and to be able to advance technologically.

Pablo Xandri

Director for the Conservation Program of the WWF Adena in Madrid, Spain.

The first problem we found is a lack of transparency in the data regardingtuna populations. What we do know with some certainty is based on data from 1998, which saysthat the population has decreased by eighty percent.

We think that tuna farming can alleviate the problems of over-fishing,but currently they are not providing a real solution because they are not growing tuna onthe farms. The tuna are being caught from the wild and being fattened on the farm. They arestill cutting into the wild population. It is not a closed water farming cycle that is breedingand reproducing the tuna; rather they are capturing them in the wild. The farms are increasingpressure on the wild stocks.

The resource of tuna is a grand resource that can produce a lot of wealth.It is also a public asset, a common asset, and because it is a public asset, it must be protected.In five to ten years, the wild tuna population can collapse; it will not be able to reproduceany more and cannot be recovered. Now is the moment that all methods for saving the tunashould be put into place to preserve it.

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