Image: Mongabay / FIS

Half of MSC-certified ‘sustainable’ tuna caught with controversial gear

The following is an excerpt from an article published by Mongabay:

In November 2018, Pesqueras Echebastar, a Spanish tuna fishing company, received a certificate of sustainability from the London-based Marine Stewardship Council, the world’s largest ecolabeling scheme for wild fisheries. This was the first time a purse seine fishery using fish aggregating devices (FADs) — a controversial fishing method — had been certified by the MSC. Since then, the number of MSC-certified tuna fisheries using FADs has soared, according to a recent report by France-based nonprofit BLOOM Association.

“It’s a massive issue because FADs have not become sustainable,” Frédéric Le Manach, BLOOM’s scientific director and the author of the report, told Mongabay in an email. “It’s just the MSC standards and the way they are applied by certifiers that have gotten even weaker.”

The MSC’s senior PR manager, Susannah Henty, disagreed with the report’s findings. “We strongly refute the false and misinformed claims made by Bloom, which has a long running campaign against commercial fishing,” she told Mongabay in an email. “Fisheries obtain MSC certification by meeting a set of strict criteria on their environmental impact — only the highest-scoring fisheries will gain certification … Destructive fisheries cannot be certified as sustainable to the MSC Fisheries Standard.”

A magnet for fish

Source: MSC

Fishers have long known that fish tend to cluster around floating structures like logs, seaweed, coconuts, and even large animals. They’ve used this knowledge to their advantage, deploying human-made structures known as fish aggregating devices, or FADs, either anchored to the seafloor or drifting, to encourage fish to gather. They then catch the fish using various gear like purse seines, longlines or hooks.

In recent decades, the number of drifting FADs, or DFADs, in the ocean has surged, partly aided by low-cost satellite-tracking buoys that allow fishers to remotely monitor the devices. Tuna fisheries in particular have turned to DFADs because they reduce the time spent searching for tuna. These devices also lead to a much higher fishing success rate for purse seiners compared to using the nets on free-swimming tuna schools. This increased fish catch can help improve food security and revenue for developing countries, according to a review of DFADs published in July.

But there are several concerns too. For example, DFADs tend to catch more juveniles of yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and bigeye tuna (T. obesus) than when targeting free-swimming schools. This can potentially threaten their populations, researchers say. These devices also tend to result in much higher bycatch of non-target species like sea turtles, sharks and billfishes than does targeting free-swimming tuna schools. Moreover, many of the tens of thousands of these drifting devices get lost, abandoned, or discarded. They often drag mesh nets, which continue to catch marine animals as they float around, and many end up polluting shores.

Source: ISSF

MSC embraces FADs

The first tuna fishery became MSC certified in 2007. At first, only small-scale, low-impact tuna fisheries were getting the eco-certifications, the BLOOM report notes. [Continues...]

Author: Shreya Dasgupta | Mongabay | Read the full article by clicking the link here

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