Regulate trawl fishing to protect deep-sea biodiversity: WWF

Regulate trawl fishing to protect deep-sea biodiversity: WWF

Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur

Fishing in international waters by dragging heavy chains, nets
and steel plates across the ocean floor poses a major threat to
deep-sea ecosystems and must be regulated, the World Wildlife
Fund (WWF) conservation group said on Tuesday.

A study commissioned by the WWF, the World Conservation Union
(IUCN) and the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council says
such trawling is the most common deep-sea bottom fishing method
worldwide and is considered to be the most damaging.

While the management of fisheries within exclusive economic
zones is largely the responsibility of coastal states, the
international community as a whole has a collective
responsibility for the high seas, the report notes.

Less than 300 vessels are involved each year, making up a tiny
fraction of the world's fishing fleet of three million, but their
method "rapidly reduces ancient, thriving bottom complexes to
rubble," the study says.

Deep sea features such as underwater mountains and cold water
corals typically support slow-growing, long-lived species, with
fish living up to 150 years and coral structures lasting several
thousands of years.

The report was presented on the sidelines of a conference of
the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which has
drawn some 2,000 government officials, scientists and activists
to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.

Fishing vessels flagged to only 13 countries, mainly from the
developed world, took more than 95 percent of reported high seas
bottom trawl catch in 2001, the last year for which data is
available, the study shows.

Those countries are expected to resist efforts to regulate
their activities, officials said.

"If we try to get official figures reported on the fisheries
where the bottom trawling takes place from the European Union, we
can't get them," Gordon Shepherd, the WWF director of
international policy, told AFP.

"So if they're not willing to give out figures it seems
unlikely they're going to be too happy about contemplating
regulation."

The WWF hoped the Kuala Lumpur conference would recommend a
moratorium on bottom trawling "so we can get the science right
and the information in place that would allow us to make proper
judgments on how these fisheries could be managed correctly," he
said.

The contribution of trawl fishing to global food security is
negligible, with the overall value not exceeding US$300-400
million annually, or 0.5 percent of the estimated global marine
catch of $75 billion in 2001, the report says.

But bottom trawl fishing is likely to expand in the coming
years due to growing market demand for fish products in developed
countries and increased regulation or restrictions on fisheries
within natural jurisdiction, it warns.

The report says estimates of species inhabiting deep-sea areas
range between 500,000 and 100 million, and a large percentage of
these are vulnerable to extinction.

It urges the United Nations to adopt and implement legally
binding regimes to protect deep-sea biodiversity from high-seas
bottom trawling, and to conserve and manage these fisheries.

The Convention on Biological Diversity grew out of the 1992
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and aims to protect the diversity
of life on earth, where thousands of animal and plant species
face extinction, mainly from human economic development.