Emilio Godoy, IPS News 20 Apr 10;
MEXICO CITY, Apr 20, 2010 (IPS) - By the time the shrimp season opens again in the fall, Mexico's fleet hopes to have regained certification to export shrimp harvested on the open sea to the United States, which it lost Tuesday. To do so, shrimpers will have to prove they meet sea turtle protection standards.
The U.S. government announced in late March that it would withdraw the certification because the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service determined that Mexico's turtle excluder devices (TEDs) no longer lived up to U.S. standards.
"Enforcement is important and the additional pressure to conform to international norms is likely to be helpful," Todd Steiner, head of the Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN), told IPS.
The California-based international marine conservation organisation is one of the groups behind the pressure to get Washington to apply non-trade sanctions due to the harm caused to several species of sea turtles by industrial shrimp fishing in open ocean off the coast of Mexico, where the shrimp season ended this month.
TIRN, which also has offices in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea, filed a lawsuit in November against the U. S. State Department for violations of the Endangered Species Act for allowing shrimp caught using methods that are deadly to sea turtles to be sold in the United States, the world's largest single market for shrimp.
According to the suit, filed in a California district court, the State Department has failed to properly evaluate and prevent harm to sea turtles from overseas fleets that export shrimp to the U.S. under the ESA’s Turtle-Shrimp Law, which certified in May 2009 that 15 nations (including Mexico) had adopted programmes to reduce the incidental capture of sea turtles in their shrimp fisheries.
But the government of Barack Obama decided to withdraw Mexico's certification after carrying out inspections of TEDs used by shrimpers in this country.
"The embargo is the result of a badly designed fishing policy; it comes from an overly lenient policy on the part of the government that allows this kind of activity," Alejandro Olivera, coordinator of Greenpeace's oceans and coasts campaign in Mexico, told IPS.
TEDs are a gear modification used on shrimp trawls that enables sea turtles to escape from the nets.
Mexico exported some 44,000 tons of shrimp to the United States in 2009, for an estimated 330 million dollars. The ban applies to around 38 million dollars worth of wild-harvested shrimp, a sector in which Mexico competes with Thailand, China, Vietnam and other nations.
Most of Mexico's shrimp is harvested in shallow coastal waters or farmed, and the ban will apply to only 20 percent of the country's annual shrimp production, according to Mexico's National Aquaculture and Fishing Commission (CONAPESCA), which announced that it would work with experts from the United States to get the country's fleets recertified through new inspections, most likely by the start of the shrimp season in September.
At the daily press briefing in Washington Monday, U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Philip J. Crowley said that although the withdrawal of certification of Mexico's TED programme "has trade ramifications, this is primarily an environmental compliance issue aimed at preserving endangered sea turtles."
He added that "both governments are engaged to ensure renewal of Mexican certification within the shortest period of time consistent with the requirements of U.S. law."
Wild shrimp is generally caught in trawl nets which catch everything in their path. Shrimp trawling has an especially high unintentional capture or bycatch of other species: for every kilo of shrimp netted, up to 10 kilos of other marine life is thrown back into the sea, dead or dying, according to Greenpeace's International Seafood Red List.
Six species of sea turtle are native to Mexico, where "most species remain extremely endangered, especially leatherback, greens and loggerheads on the Pacific coast," Steiner said.
Today there are as few as 2,000 adult female leatherback turtles in the Pacific Ocean.
A report on fishing in Mexico carried out in 2009 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), titled "Estudio social de la pesca en México", found an excessive number of boats and harvesting of juveniles, a failure to respect seasonal fishing bans, and a lack of work opportunities and access to loans.
Some 1,350 shrimp trawlers operate in Mexico, where there are at least 10 species of shrimp.
In 1988, FAO and the World Bank recommended that Mexico cut its Pacific shrimp fleet by 29 to 49 percent and the Gulf of Mexico fleet by 50 to 60 percent.
As a result of the U.S. withdrawal of certification, which critics say is questionable because it is a non-trade sanction against foreign products, CONAPESCA and PROFEPA - Mexico's federal environmental prosecutor - carried out 1,219 inspections of shrimp boats.
As a result, 40 boats were seized, and shrimping equipment was confiscated from 40 trawlers, along with more than 33,500 kilos of catch. In addition, 106 boats were fined for violating regulations on the use of TEDs.
Between 2005 and 2009, CONAPESCA revoked 305 commercial fishing licenses and 95 concessions, involving 400 shrimpers. The goal is to add another 92 boats to that total this year.
"Embargos work, but inspection and monitoring is needed. There are many unregulated boats and illegal fishing is a big problem," said Olivera, who suggested the creation of marine reserves where fishing is banned.
The threat of a ban on shrimp exports from Mexico had been hanging in the air for several years. In 2008, the New York-based Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) called for a ban to protect the vaquita marina, a highly endangered small porpoise that lives only in Mexico's Upper Gulf of California.
The vaquita marina is considered the world’s most endangered small cetacean species, with just 150 individuals left.
That year, the NRDC, the fishing industry and the Mexican government signed an agreement for a programme to protect the vaquita marina, which periodically drowns in shrimp nets.
Mexico was subjected to a similar ban in 1990, when the U.S. government banned tuna imports from Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, and the tiny Pacific island of Vanuatu in order to protect dolphins.
That measure was lifted in 2000, but since 2006 only tuna certified as dolphin safe can be sold in the U.S.
"I am hopeful that enforcement of the use of turtle excluder devices will improve and the embargo will be lifted," Steiner said. (END)
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