Spanish admit taking 25% more tuna that quota allowance

June 2008. WWF and Greenpeace have expressed serious concern at official Spanish government data that reveals an overshoot of the country's fishing quota for Mediterranean bluefin tuna in the 2007 season - of over 25 per cent.

Statistics supplied by Spain's Presidency Ministry reveal that total Spanish catches of Mediterranean bluefin tuna in 2007 were at least 7,000 tonnes - some 1,500 tonnes more than the legal quota of 5,568 tonnes - an excess of over 25 per cent. Spain initially reported catches of 5,192 tonnes of bluefin tuna catches in 2007.

Worst overfishing
The Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery has one of the highest levels of overfishing in the world, and ascertaining real catch rates is not an easy task. WWF and Greenpeace have repeatedly requested investigations into the catch declarations of the 6 Spanish purse seine vessels on various occasions, without satisfactory response.

The Spanish government this week sheds light on this issue by stating that in 2007 "a figure above 3,000 tonnes was reached" for the Spanish purse seine fleet - contrasting the 1,638 tonnes as originally reported by Spain to the European Commission.

7000 tonnes
The catch levels of the Spanish tuna fleet other than purse seiners are better known. For example, Basque baitboat fishermen caught 1,707 tonnes of bluefin tuna in 2007 and the tuna traps in Andalusia caught 1,348 tonnes of this species. Considering just these three segments of the fleet alone -purse seiners, baitboats, and tuna traps - the minimum total catch of bluefin tuna by the Spanish fleet for 2007 already reaches more than 6,000 tonnes. This, however, does not take into consideration the rest of the fleet - such as the Mediterranean longliners, the fleet that fish with handlines in the Strait of Gibraltar, and the fleet from Cantabria and Asturias - which would raise the total catch for Spain in 2007 to a conservative 7,000 tonnes.

Spanish disregard for conservation
"It is outrageous that with this catch record, the Environment Minister still opposed the anticipated closure of the bluefin tuna fishery last week", said Sebastian Losada, Oceans Campaigner at Greenpeace. "Spain's Environment Ministry is continuing to defend the interests of industrial fleets over the most threatened fish species in the world."

Greenpeace and WWF have requested an urgent investigation last year by the European Commission into bluefin tuna catches by the Spanish fleet.

"This is not the first time WWF and Greenpeace have blown the whistle that Spanish statistics on bluefin tuna catch do not add up," added Raul García, Fisheries Officer at WWF. "There is mounting evidence that Spain is a major perpetrator of the dramatic crisis facing the Mediterranean bluefin tuna stock. Spain not only has the largest fishing quota for this species, but it continues to defy the law by exceeding allowable catch levels - and so substantially."

Inconsistencies
The inconsistencies in the Spanish statistics do not end there. According to the Presidency Ministry, the average annual catch by purse seiners is 2,233 tonnes - which contrasts markedly with the annual catches officially declared by Spain to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) in the past decade - of around 1,700 tonnes on average.

Further, in a report published on 5 December 2007 by the Court of Auditors of the European Communities, Spain was revealed as falling far behind fisheries controls expectations. Among the accusations made, the report stated that in 2005 there was a 40 per cent difference between reported catches made by Spain to the European Commission and those that appeared on the Spanish national databases.