Tuna Canners Pledge Policy to Protect Dolphin

The three biggest companies in the U.S. tuna industry on Thursday pledged not to buy or sell fish caught using methods that kill or injure dolphins.

The move surprised but delighted environmentalists who have been waging a fierce grass-roots campaign to ban fishing techniques that kill an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 dolphins a year.

The first announcement came from H. J. Heinz Co. and its Long Beach subsidiary, StarKist Seafood Co., the world’s largest tuna canner. StarKist said that within three months, its products will carry labels promising “No harm to dolphins.”

“StarKist will not purchase, process or sell any tuna caught in association with dolphins,” said Anthony J. F. O’Reilly, chairman of Heinz.

The company said also that it would continue its practice of not buying tuna caught with gill or drift nets, which indiscriminately kill large numbers of marine animals.

StarKist’s chief competitors rushed to match its pledge. Bumble Bee Seafoods and the Van Camp Seafood Co., which markets Chicken of the Sea, made similar announcements only hours later. Van Camp and Bumble Bee are owned by foreign companies. Together, the three canners market about 75% of the tuna eaten in the United States. This country represents as much as half the world market for canned tuna.

The canners’ announcement provoked a doomsday reaction from the American Tunaboat Assn., the San Diego-based trade organization representing 40 boat owners that use giant purse seiner nets. The members collectively bring in about 15% of the world’s tuna catch annually. In a statement, ATA President August Felando said the tuna canners’ move will “severely impact if not destroy the U.S. tuna fleet.”

The reaction from environmentalists, by contrast, was ecstatic.

“Amazing,” said Mark J. Palmer, conservation director for Ocean Alliance, a San Francisco-based marine conservation group. “The tuna industry has been so adamant in the past that it’s been OK to kill dolphins in catching tuna.”

Until now, only tiny companies such as Deep Sea, which packs a variety called tongol tuna, have labeled their product “dolphin safe.”

The three big companies all cited consumer pressure in letters, postcards and petitions as the major reason for their new policies.

“And of course a lot of our consumers are environmentalists,” said Keith A. Hauge, president and chief executive officer of StarKist Seafood.

Earth Island Institute, a San Francisco-based environmental group, has been conducting a boycott of canned tuna and took credit Thursday for spearheading the campaign to protect dolphins. The 2-million member environmentalist group Greenpeace, which also praised the industry move, had 30,000 volunteers every night advising consumers to avoid buying tuna until what it called “tainted tuna”--fish that could not be verified to have been caught in “dolphin-safe” ways--could be identified on store shelves.

Meanwhile, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) and Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-Del.) had introduced bills to require “dolphin safe” or “dolphin unsafe” labels for tuna products.

The controversy has long focused on fishing methods. For reasons that perplex scientists, dolphin in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean swim over tuna, and so are used to spot schools, a practice called “fishing on dolphin.” The fish are gathered in purse-seine nets, something like a giant upside-down umbrella. But dolphins caught in these nets often are injured, or they drown. Estimates of dolphins killed annually run from 100,000 to 200,000.

Dolphins also die along with a wide variety of marine life on gill and drift nets, sometimes called “entanglement nets” that measure 15 miles or more in length and hang like transparent, deadly curtains.

These nets perform an “indiscriminate strip-mining of the ocean,” says Bob Sulnick, executive director of American Oceans Campaign, a Santa Monica-based environmental group. “It’s like killing the buffalo.”

Fishing methods that do not harm dolphins include the use of long lines, with individual hooks that are strung well below the surface, where dolphins swim, and bait fishing, in which fishermen using unbarbed hooks pull fish out of a feeding school individually, flinging them overhead and into the hold.

The three tuna companies expected the move would add no more than a few cents to each can of tuna. StarKist’s Hauge said that market research showed that wouldn’t put off consumers.

Felando, of the ATA, reiterated his group’s position that fishing for tuna under schools of dolphin is the only efficient means of catching large quantities of the fish, adding bitterly that the move by the canners ignores the progress that tuna seiners have made to minimize the killing of dolphin. Last year, ATA member boats killed 12,643 porpoises, a number that was 38% under the 20,500 quota of porpoises set by the government.

“If there were other means (of tuna fishing), why would we be so stupid as to not accept them?” Felando said.

Felando predicted that ATA members, nearly all of whom are based in San Diego, will be forced to sell their fish to foreign canners who will obtain increased pricing leverage because they will know that the U.S. market is closed to the U.S. tuna seiners. Up to now, ATA members have sold virtually their entire annual catch to U.S. canners.

ATA members may also be forced to abandon the Eastern Pacific fishing grounds, which Felando described roughly as a triangle stretching south from San Diego to Chile and as far west as Hawaii. Instead, the San Diego boats may be forced to fish in the South Atlantic, the scene of intense competition among Spanish, French and Latin American boats, he said.

Felando also had dire predictions of harm to the Pacific tuna fishing grounds because, as a result of the canners’ new standards, tuna seiners will now go after younger and less mature tuna schools that are not followed by dolphin.

“The worst case scenario is that every one fishes (for) the smaller fish,” Felando said. “This will have a tremendous impact on tuna conservation.”

Felando called the measure “horribly counterproductive” in terms of lowering porpoise mortality because the ban will remove U.S. purse seiners, the “most regulated fishers in the world” from the U.S. market, saying that government inspectors accompany U.S. tuna seiners on each fishing trip to supervise the treatment of porpoises.

“Porpoise will continue to swim with large, mature yellowfin tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific and will continue to be encircled,” Felando said in a statement. “Foreign boats, which operate free of stringent U.S. quotas, will simply sell their catch to a growing European market and elsewhere. U.S. boats, which have pioneered and continue to lead in developing technology and techniques for porpoise rescue, will be forced to other fisheries, or even go out of business.”

But hailing the move by the canners was Bill Perkins, general manager of Western Fish Boat Owners Assn., a 300-member fishing trade group also based in San Diego. Perkins’ members also fish for tuna but mainly target albacore, which they catch by trolling with long lines. Albacore generally are not caught with purse seiner nets because the fish swim deeper and have different schooling habits from other tuna varieties.

The decision by the canners not to accept tuna caught by drift nets, which make no size discrimination among fish, is just the policy that the association has sought, Perkins said. The indiscriminate use of drift nets in the North Pacific has severely depleted the albacore fishing grounds in the North Pacific, he said.