Greenpeace to launch tuna campaign from Malta

The Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace's flagship vessel, will sail into Malta on Monday where it will kick off a campaign to highlight the desperate state of tuna stocks.

The world's most effective environmental activist group will draw attention to illegal tuna fishing and the overfishing of bluefin tuna (BFT), particularly in the Libyan fishery.

Greenpeace has been absent from Malta for a number of years after its campaigns against the Maghtab landfill and the incinerators dominated the headlines.

Sebastian Losada, Greenpeace's Ocean Campaigner for the Mediterranean tour, told The Times that the organisation wanted to use Malta as a platform to inform the world about the depletion of one of the most valuable fish species in the world.

It also wanted to highlight the failure of governments to react to the well documented fact that BFT is being exterminated as a result of their lack of action.

In the past few years, the BFT fishery has suffered from one of the highest illegal fishing rates in the world, with catches of over 50,000 tonnes compared to a legal quota of 32,000 tonnes.

This year there will be rights to fish 29,500 tonnes of fish in the Mediterranean and the East Atlantic. But with the same amount of boats in the region and with new management measures which will not come into place before next month at least, it is clear that illegal fishing will still be a major issue, Mr Losada said.

Greenpeace expects over 200 tuna vessels with a capacity to harvest 35,000 tonnes of BFT to be concentrating only in Libya.

Asked to what extent fishing in Malta was depleting fish stocks, Mr Losada said that it was fishing in the entire Mediterranean region that was depleting fish stocks, particularly in Libya where the last healthy subpopulation of BFT is being targeted by more fishing vessels each year.

"Part of this tuna is fattened in Malta, a country with a capacity to fatten 9,650 tonnes of tuna, or two thirds of the 15,000 tonnes of tuna that scientists believe should be the maximum amount taken from this population to allow the recovery of the species," he said.

Greenpeace may not have to campaign too hard. The tuna fishing season, which opened on May 1, is in jeopardy after EU fisheries ministers recently failed to approve a new tuna recovery plan. According to an agreement reached last December, in the case of member states failing to strike a deal on slimmed-down catch quotas, EU fishermen would only be able to catch half the original quota this year.