"Dolphins are a common by-catch in tuna fisheries, especially in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, as they commonly swim with schools of yellowfin tuna. The dolphins, who swim closer to the surface than tuna, may be used as an indicator of tuna presence. Labeling was originally intended to discourage fishing boats from netting dolphins with tuna.
The tuna fishery in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is the only fishery that deliberately targets, chases, and nets dolphins, resulting in estimates of 6-7million dolphins dying in tuna nets since the practice was introduced in the late 1950s, the largest directed kill of dolphins on Earth.[9] With the onset of the Dolphin Safe label program, started in the US in 1990 but soon spreading to foreign tuna operations, the deaths of dolphins has decreased considerably, with official counts, based on observer coverage, of around 1,000 dolphins per year.[9] However, research by the US National Marine Fisheries Service has shown that chasing the dolphins causes baby dolphins to fall behind the pod, resulting in a large "cryptic" kill, likely damaging populations of dolphins, as the young starve or are eaten by sharks while the main pod is held by the nets.[10][11] Thus, claims that tuna fishing can continue to chase and net dolphins and not cause harm are not backed by scientific research."
This is not a problem with random by-catch. The issue was the systematic netting of dolphin pods due to their close association with tuna.
As I point out in my longer comment lower down, forbidding dolphin tracking causes much worse problems with random bycatch:
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
> You and I can argue about the relative value of dolphins vs. triggerfish all day, but the important take-home message here is that we are protecting animals that are not endangered at the expense of dozens of other species, and some of those other species are endangered.
From my reading, the WTO ruled correctly is this case. In 1990, the US passed a dolphin-protection law that added strict requirements to fish caught in US waters. The “dolphin-safe” certificate was designed with this in mind. Depending on where the fish is caught (in the "Eastern Tropical Pacific Zone" (ETP) or "Other fisheries"), there are more stringent or lax requirements. For the ETP zone, an example requirement is that a captain must receive training/certification on dolphin safe practices and also verify the entire haul of fish was caught using dolphin-safe practices. Fish caught in the "Other fisheries" are subject to less stringent requirements. Since much of Mexico’s tuna are caught in the ETP zone, they argue that they are unfairly being held up to US standards. Other countries, in “Other fisheries” zones, are held to a lower requirement. If Mexican tuna are sold to other countries, then they fulfill multiple unnecessary requirements and are at a disadvantage to other countries. Futhermore, it would segment their fishing industry into "US approved" and "Non-US approved" because certification must be applied to the entire haul of fish, not a portion of a haul.
There's a lot of text after this but the court determined this certification is unfair and is considered "less favorable treatment".
So the Mexicans are opposed to dolphin safe practices? Perhaps a Mexican Tuna boycott would be useful from the Sierra Club. US tuna companies that are dolphin safe could label their Tuna "not Mexican tuna" and consumers could sort this out quickly (assuming Dolphin safe labeling actually made a difference in consumer behavior.)
I am not sure why there just can't be a rule to make all tuna dolphin safe. The animal industry practices in many countries around the world are just horrific. Shark fin soup for instance, Halal butchering practices, tuna fishing. Dog farming in Korea (where they often blowtorch the fur and kill the animal by dipping it, alive and conscious into vats of boiling water; the fear and adrenaline, they say, positively favors the meat.)
Yet we have a big conference in Paris about human CO2 emissions (which have a negligible effect on the climate, but a huge effect on the world economy), but never seem to have any international cooperation on environmental issues that can actually be solved: the treatment of animals within industrial processes. It's almost as if countries don't actually care about the actual environment but instead want to enact "environmental" policies that actually serve to redistribute wealth instead of making a quantifiable difference in the ecosystem.
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S undersecretary of state for global issues, addressing the Rio Climate Summit audience, agreed: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy.."
I say we should be aggressively campaigning for things like dolphin safe, cage free, etc, instead of trying to advance the religion of global warming. I mention this because te Sierra Club used to actually be on the leading edge about these sorts of issues but around the early 1990s started getting infiltrated by the climate warrior crowd.
While this is disappointing outcome, I hope more HN readers will take up the "save the dolphins, stop TPP" rally. For all of the tech community's outcry against the TPP's pro-DRM, pro-copyright provisions and blatant disregard for users' rights, nothing is going to help sway public opinion like a "save the <cute animal>" appeal.
WTO and TPP globalization's aim is to rollback consumer and environmental protections to the least-common denominator, making it cheaper and easier for businesses to thumb their noses at safety, antropogenic climate change and species extinction. WTO could have set the bar to a sensible, consistent level, but instead decided that sensible and responsible measures which stopped dolphin deaths were unimportant.
I am not sure I understand the TPP connection here.. The ruling wasn't made under TPP as that's not even in force. So I fail to understand the anti-TPP propaganda here.. This dolphin ruling would have happened with or without TPP.
I am not defending TPP at all, but this ruling has nothing to do with it. It seems like a bit of a propaganda ploy to connect the two. Will saying no to TPP undo this ruling? Nope.
> The WTO decided the label violated WTO rules slated for replication in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), [...] The ruling shows how so-called “trade” rules go far beyond trade and interfere with environmental policies that protect wildlife.
So basically, it's saying that if you think this WTO ruling is bad, you should think the TPP is even worse, because among all the other bad stuff in the TPP, it also will enforce anti-informed-consumer anti-environmental decisions like this.
The fishing of Tuna itself is morally questionable. We are busy wiping out the oceans of life. Tuna fish are at the top of the food chain, fishing Tuna has been likened to hunting tigers.
Many tuna species do need help, but that's a really hyperbolic comparison:
A) Every single species of tiger is at least IUCN Endangered, and many are Critically Endangered, or Extinct. [1]
B) Whereas tuna species have a spectrum of IUCN ratings from Least Concern to Critically Endangered, with "Near Threatened" looking like the mean, and with no extinction of any tuna species witnessed yet in documented human history.[2]
C) Tuna are high predators, but are rarely apex predators like tigers. (For example, predators of albacore: [3][4])
D) I can only find one example of tuna extirpation: the North Atlantic Bluefish.[5] Whereas tiger territories have diminished 93%.[2]
> It can be difficult for people who have never seen it in action to appreciate the scale of modern commercial fisheries. Commercial fishermen aren’t out on the high seas with handheld rods and reels catching one fish at a time. The nets that tuna fishermen use, which are called purse seines, are miles long. With a net that size, it’s pretty much impossible to catch only tuna. Those nets also catch anything that happens to be swimming near the tuna. These unfortunate animals, killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are called bycatch.
> There are three ways that tuna schools can be located. The first is to search for them directly using surface ships and small aircraft, which is inefficient, time-consuming, and not always effective (you can’t see tuna from the surface if they’re deep enough or if weather conditions aren’t ideal). The second is to attract tuna using floating objects, which we’ll discuss in more detail shortly. The third is to follow dolphins- for unknown reasons, dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are often found associated with schools of large tuna.
> Because finding dolphin-associated schools of tuna was extremely easy (unlike tuna, dolphins have to return to the surface where they are easy to spot), it was the preferred method for decades. The Eastern Tropical Pacific Tuna Fishery had a high rate of dolphin bycatch. According to NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Service Center, an estimated six million dolphins were killed during the forty or so years that purse seining around dolphin-associated tuna schools took place. That’s approximately 150,000 dolphins per year, which is by far the largest cetacean bycatch of any fishery in history. However, it is important to note that mortality from being tuna bycatch did not mean that dolphins were endangered. The two primary species involved are spinner dolphins (data deficient) and spotted dolphins (least concern).
> A massive PR campaign led by the Earth Island Institute resulted in making it illegal to sell tuna caught from dolphin-associated schools in the United States. Dolphin-safe tuna was born.
> Now that fishermen could no longer use what was previously the most common method for catching tuna, they needed to change strategies. They turned to using floating objects (sometimes called FAD’s or fish aggregating devices) to attract tuna to a known location. One of the strangest known behaviors exhibited by open-ocean animals is their tendency to aggregate around any solid object that floats. This might have something to do with the fact that many open-ocean animals go their entire lives without seeing any sort of hard surface. This method is extremely effective for aggregating tuna, but it also aggregates many other species. Setting a purse seine around a dolphin-associated tuna school results in catching primarily large adult tuna (the target size because they have more meat per unit effort and because they have reproduced already) and dolphins (which are not endangered) . Setting a purse seine around a floating object results in all sorts of bycatch, including endangered sea turtles, open ocean shark species which are already in serious trouble, and high numbers of small tuna (which have not yet reproduced).
> A simple glance at the table above shows that while dolphins bycatch goes down, every other studied species (except “unidentified bony fishes”, “other sailfishes”, and marlins) has much higher bycatch rates in “floating object” tuna fishing than in “dolphin associated” tuna fishing. In other words, while better for dolphins, “dolphin-safe” tuna is disastrous for almost everything else.
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
> Last summer, I went on NPR’s “The Pat Morrison Show” to discuss this issue with a representative from the Earth Island Institute, the organization most responsible for dolphin-safe tuna policies. I had expected him to acknowledge that the bycatch was a problem, but that it was still important to protect dolphins because they’re intelligent mammals (or something like that). Instead, he argued that there was no bycatch of endangered species taking place under dolphin safe tuna policies, and he accused me of perpetuating the propaganda of evil fishermen who “just want to kill dolphins”. Yikes.
> A conscious choice to go back to a previously-banned fishing method that kills large numbers of charismatic animals puts a bad taste in my mouth, but the fact is that fishing for dolphin-associated schools of tuna catches primarily non-endangered dolphins and adult tuna. Dolphin-safe tuna fishing is killing dozens of species, many of whom are endangered, and threatening the integrity of entire ecosystems.
Dolphin-safe tuna might be the most straightforward example in the world of political posturing for its own sake, in direct opposition to the avowed goals of the organizations that support it. And here's the Sierra Club decrying a step towards clawing it back.
> Most of us want to know that the food we purchase and serve to our families does not come at the expense of wildlife.
I suspect this is correct but I do not share this sentiment, and in fact, I find it absurd. Most people only want to harm specifically raised and genetically modify living things for their entire miserable lives in captivity OR make sure that only a very select group of free living things is killed due to a narrow sense of cultural aesthetics.
I don't think we should rush out and needlessly murder dolphins, but the average person may notice that label, but removing it would likely have little to no bearing on consumer selection which is driven primarily by advertising.
>I don't think we should rush out and needlessly murder dolphins, but the average person may notice that label, but removing it would likely have little to no bearing on consumer selection which is driven primarily by advertising.
So you're discounting the advertising advantage of saying "We don't kill dolphins like the other guys"? That's strange. I'm old enough to remember when dolphin-safe tuna was a cause celeb. Advertising you were dolphin-safe had big time marketing push. I think even Charlie the Tuna got in on the act. For a more contemporary example, we can look at GMOs and "organic" food. There's no science saying that GMOs are dangerous or that "organic" food is healthier or safer, but that doesn't stop them from being a market differentiator that drives sales.
>But today, for the fourth time in four years, ...
In these trade agreements, some countries are more equal than others. The US probably has the trade power to continue to ignore the WTO ruling. The US has done so repeatedly in the past with other issues.
Well the real truth is, when on a world stage our values may clash with the values of another and we won't always get our way. There was a recent dust up over labeling of beef sold in the US with regards to foreign sources.
To be honest I see no reason why the labeling is not permitted so as to allow more consumer choice. Origin and such are valuable tools for smart consumer purchasing. That they run afoul of what lax rules other countries want should not be a consideration.
What is next? Ruling that preference given to some foods based on their original origin will be tossed? It is the logical conclusion that many rules in the EU which do protect certain products will be ended too.
How narcissistic! Trade politics block the fishermen from making use of the occasional dolphin that gets caught in the net. Why toss the meat when it could be used to feed starving people? It's this kind of moralism that keeps everyone down.
[+] [-] smackay|10 years ago|reply
"Dolphins are a common by-catch in tuna fisheries, especially in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, as they commonly swim with schools of yellowfin tuna. The dolphins, who swim closer to the surface than tuna, may be used as an indicator of tuna presence. Labeling was originally intended to discourage fishing boats from netting dolphins with tuna.
The tuna fishery in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is the only fishery that deliberately targets, chases, and nets dolphins, resulting in estimates of 6-7million dolphins dying in tuna nets since the practice was introduced in the late 1950s, the largest directed kill of dolphins on Earth.[9] With the onset of the Dolphin Safe label program, started in the US in 1990 but soon spreading to foreign tuna operations, the deaths of dolphins has decreased considerably, with official counts, based on observer coverage, of around 1,000 dolphins per year.[9] However, research by the US National Marine Fisheries Service has shown that chasing the dolphins causes baby dolphins to fall behind the pod, resulting in a large "cryptic" kill, likely damaging populations of dolphins, as the young starve or are eaten by sharks while the main pod is held by the nets.[10][11] Thus, claims that tuna fishing can continue to chase and net dolphins and not cause harm are not backed by scientific research."
This is not a problem with random by-catch. The issue was the systematic netting of dolphin pods due to their close association with tuna.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|10 years ago|reply
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
> You and I can argue about the relative value of dolphins vs. triggerfish all day, but the important take-home message here is that we are protecting animals that are not endangered at the expense of dozens of other species, and some of those other species are endangered.
[+] [-] tristanj|10 years ago|reply
Here is a pdf of the case: https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/FE_Search/DDFDocuments/225...
[+] [-] codezero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingkawn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|10 years ago|reply
I am not sure why there just can't be a rule to make all tuna dolphin safe. The animal industry practices in many countries around the world are just horrific. Shark fin soup for instance, Halal butchering practices, tuna fishing. Dog farming in Korea (where they often blowtorch the fur and kill the animal by dipping it, alive and conscious into vats of boiling water; the fear and adrenaline, they say, positively favors the meat.)
Yet we have a big conference in Paris about human CO2 emissions (which have a negligible effect on the climate, but a huge effect on the world economy), but never seem to have any international cooperation on environmental issues that can actually be solved: the treatment of animals within industrial processes. It's almost as if countries don't actually care about the actual environment but instead want to enact "environmental" policies that actually serve to redistribute wealth instead of making a quantifiable difference in the ecosystem.
Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S undersecretary of state for global issues, addressing the Rio Climate Summit audience, agreed: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy.."
I say we should be aggressively campaigning for things like dolphin safe, cage free, etc, instead of trying to advance the religion of global warming. I mention this because te Sierra Club used to actually be on the leading edge about these sorts of issues but around the early 1990s started getting infiltrated by the climate warrior crowd.
[+] [-] Doches|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bro-stick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bro-stick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|10 years ago|reply
I am not defending TPP at all, but this ruling has nothing to do with it. It seems like a bit of a propaganda ploy to connect the two. Will saying no to TPP undo this ruling? Nope.
[+] [-] eridius|10 years ago|reply
> The WTO decided the label violated WTO rules slated for replication in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), [...] The ruling shows how so-called “trade” rules go far beyond trade and interfere with environmental policies that protect wildlife.
So basically, it's saying that if you think this WTO ruling is bad, you should think the TPP is even worse, because among all the other bad stuff in the TPP, it also will enforce anti-informed-consumer anti-environmental decisions like this.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_karana|10 years ago|reply
A) Every single species of tiger is at least IUCN Endangered, and many are Critically Endangered, or Extinct. [1]
B) Whereas tuna species have a spectrum of IUCN ratings from Least Concern to Critically Endangered, with "Near Threatened" looking like the mean, and with no extinction of any tuna species witnessed yet in documented human history.[2]
C) Tuna are high predators, but are rarely apex predators like tigers. (For example, predators of albacore: [3][4])
D) I can only find one example of tuna extirpation: the North Atlantic Bluefish.[5] Whereas tiger territories have diminished 93%.[2]
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuna#True_tuna_species
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
3 http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/2011/bularz_noah/interactions...
4 https://swfsc.noaa.gov/textblock.aspx?ParentMenuId=136&id=11...
5 https://www.google.com/search?q=tuna+extirpation
[+] [-] elthran|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|10 years ago|reply
Compare http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=6539 (a marine biology blog), which I'll quote from at length:
> It can be difficult for people who have never seen it in action to appreciate the scale of modern commercial fisheries. Commercial fishermen aren’t out on the high seas with handheld rods and reels catching one fish at a time. The nets that tuna fishermen use, which are called purse seines, are miles long. With a net that size, it’s pretty much impossible to catch only tuna. Those nets also catch anything that happens to be swimming near the tuna. These unfortunate animals, killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are called bycatch.
> There are three ways that tuna schools can be located. The first is to search for them directly using surface ships and small aircraft, which is inefficient, time-consuming, and not always effective (you can’t see tuna from the surface if they’re deep enough or if weather conditions aren’t ideal). The second is to attract tuna using floating objects, which we’ll discuss in more detail shortly. The third is to follow dolphins- for unknown reasons, dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are often found associated with schools of large tuna.
> Because finding dolphin-associated schools of tuna was extremely easy (unlike tuna, dolphins have to return to the surface where they are easy to spot), it was the preferred method for decades. The Eastern Tropical Pacific Tuna Fishery had a high rate of dolphin bycatch. According to NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Service Center, an estimated six million dolphins were killed during the forty or so years that purse seining around dolphin-associated tuna schools took place. That’s approximately 150,000 dolphins per year, which is by far the largest cetacean bycatch of any fishery in history. However, it is important to note that mortality from being tuna bycatch did not mean that dolphins were endangered. The two primary species involved are spinner dolphins (data deficient) and spotted dolphins (least concern).
> A massive PR campaign led by the Earth Island Institute resulted in making it illegal to sell tuna caught from dolphin-associated schools in the United States. Dolphin-safe tuna was born.
> Now that fishermen could no longer use what was previously the most common method for catching tuna, they needed to change strategies. They turned to using floating objects (sometimes called FAD’s or fish aggregating devices) to attract tuna to a known location. One of the strangest known behaviors exhibited by open-ocean animals is their tendency to aggregate around any solid object that floats. This might have something to do with the fact that many open-ocean animals go their entire lives without seeing any sort of hard surface. This method is extremely effective for aggregating tuna, but it also aggregates many other species. Setting a purse seine around a dolphin-associated tuna school results in catching primarily large adult tuna (the target size because they have more meat per unit effort and because they have reproduced already) and dolphins (which are not endangered) . Setting a purse seine around a floating object results in all sorts of bycatch, including endangered sea turtles, open ocean shark species which are already in serious trouble, and high numbers of small tuna (which have not yet reproduced).
> A simple glance at the table above shows that while dolphins bycatch goes down, every other studied species (except “unidentified bony fishes”, “other sailfishes”, and marlins) has much higher bycatch rates in “floating object” tuna fishing than in “dolphin associated” tuna fishing. In other words, while better for dolphins, “dolphin-safe” tuna is disastrous for almost everything else.
> If you do the math on this (and you don’t have to because the Environmental Justice Foundation already did), you find that one saved dolphin costs 25,824 small tuna, 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks and rays, 1 billfish, 1,193 triggerfish and other small fish, and 0.06 sea turtles.
> Last summer, I went on NPR’s “The Pat Morrison Show” to discuss this issue with a representative from the Earth Island Institute, the organization most responsible for dolphin-safe tuna policies. I had expected him to acknowledge that the bycatch was a problem, but that it was still important to protect dolphins because they’re intelligent mammals (or something like that). Instead, he argued that there was no bycatch of endangered species taking place under dolphin safe tuna policies, and he accused me of perpetuating the propaganda of evil fishermen who “just want to kill dolphins”. Yikes.
> A conscious choice to go back to a previously-banned fishing method that kills large numbers of charismatic animals puts a bad taste in my mouth, but the fact is that fishing for dolphin-associated schools of tuna catches primarily non-endangered dolphins and adult tuna. Dolphin-safe tuna fishing is killing dozens of species, many of whom are endangered, and threatening the integrity of entire ecosystems.
Dolphin-safe tuna might be the most straightforward example in the world of political posturing for its own sake, in direct opposition to the avowed goals of the organizations that support it. And here's the Sierra Club decrying a step towards clawing it back.
[+] [-] christophilus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
I suspect this is correct but I do not share this sentiment, and in fact, I find it absurd. Most people only want to harm specifically raised and genetically modify living things for their entire miserable lives in captivity OR make sure that only a very select group of free living things is killed due to a narrow sense of cultural aesthetics.
I don't think we should rush out and needlessly murder dolphins, but the average person may notice that label, but removing it would likely have little to no bearing on consumer selection which is driven primarily by advertising.
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathankoren|10 years ago|reply
So you're discounting the advertising advantage of saying "We don't kill dolphins like the other guys"? That's strange. I'm old enough to remember when dolphin-safe tuna was a cause celeb. Advertising you were dolphin-safe had big time marketing push. I think even Charlie the Tuna got in on the act. For a more contemporary example, we can look at GMOs and "organic" food. There's no science saying that GMOs are dangerous or that "organic" food is healthier or safer, but that doesn't stop them from being a market differentiator that drives sales.
[+] [-] Klasiaster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] upofadown|10 years ago|reply
In these trade agreements, some countries are more equal than others. The US probably has the trade power to continue to ignore the WTO ruling. The US has done so repeatedly in the past with other issues.
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
To be honest I see no reason why the labeling is not permitted so as to allow more consumer choice. Origin and such are valuable tools for smart consumer purchasing. That they run afoul of what lax rules other countries want should not be a consideration.
What is next? Ruling that preference given to some foods based on their original origin will be tossed? It is the logical conclusion that many rules in the EU which do protect certain products will be ended too.
[+] [-] mmaunder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phphphph|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwaway533634|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runholm|10 years ago|reply