U.S. Tuna Fishermen Fear Decision May Be Final Blow

The American tuna fishing industry, which has made a home here since World War II, has absorbed its share of shocks.

Foreign governments have seized boats. Foreign fleets have slashed prices on tuna, aggressively selling their catch into the U.S. market. One U.S. cannery after another was shuttered.

Still, the American fleet survived, if at times just barely.

But the most devastating blow of all may have come Thursday, boat owners and industry officials say, when when the three largest U.S. tuna canners announced they would no longer buy or sell tuna caught using methods that kill or injure dolphins.

Marietta Zolezzi, whose husband Julius owns and operates four tuna boats based in San Diego, called the canners’ action “devastating and tragic. We’ve been fighting this for 20 years.”

Tuna boat owner Leo Correia said he did not know if he could remain in business. “The damage is all done . . . I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“This could be the last nail on the American tuna boats,” said Peter Schmidt, president of Marco Seattle, whose Campbell Industries subsidiary in San Diego is one of the world’s leading builders of the boats that use massive nets, or seines, to catch tuna.

The 40 giant boats called purse seiners that are based here catch the bulk of their tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific where, for reasons that remain a mystery to marine scientists, large schools of tuna are accompanied by schools of dolphins. To envelop the tuna in the huge umbrella-shaped purse seine nets, the boats invariably snare and drown dolphins.

The number of dolphins killed by U.S tuna boats, which catch about 15% of the world tuna supply, has declined from 108,000 in 1976 to 12,643 last year, largely because of the presence of National Marine Fishery Service observers on each voyage. That’s significantly below the government’s maximum quota of 20,500 dolphins that can legally be killed annually by U.S. tuna fishermen. Implicit in the quota, fishermen say, is an admission by the government that some dolphin deaths are inevitable in purse seining.

Despite the improvement, the level of kills is still too high to satisfy environmentalists, whose years of pressure finally caused tuna canners to switch their policy.

The U.S. tuna fleet now views the alternatives to traditional fishing techniques and patterns as unappealing.

American boats can try to fish in other regions such as the Indian Ocean or Western Pacific Ocean where the dolphin phenomenon does not exist. But those regions are the scenes of intense competition among Asian, French and Spanish boats. Many of the boats in the American fleet are too small to make that great a voyage anyway.

The fleet could go after schools of smaller fish in the Eastern Pacific which do not attract dolphins, but tuna industry officials say catching “juvenile” tuna would be both inefficient and harmful to tuna preservation.

Going after smaller fish also would require the boats to get closer to foreign shores, raising the risk of seizure by foreign governments who enforce 200-mile territorial limits, said August Felando, president of the American Tunaboat Association, a San Diego-based trade group that includes 40 locally based tuna boat owners.

Felando ruled out as impractical a large-scale switch to other methods of tuna fishing such as pole-and-bait and long-line fishing, both of which require far more workers. The pole-and-bait technique involves using lures to catch tuna in feeding frenzies and long line fishing is the use of one huge line with hundreds of baited hooks.

Over the past 35 years, the tuna industry’s technology and capital investment have revolved around the giant purse seiner boats, Felando said, which can measure up to 220 feet in length, weigh 1,500 tons or more and cost $10 million each. There are about 380 of the ships operating in the world, of which 65 are registered in the United States.

Industry officials were skeptical that the U.S. canners’ policy switch would significantly reduce the killing of dolphins. Foreign tuna seiners would continue to fish in the Eastern Pacific but without the supervision of National Marine Fishery Service observers.

Schmidt foresees the possibility that foreigners’ catch could be shipped to U.S. canneries via freezer cargo ships, in which tuna from various fishing grounds are mixed together, including tuna caught beneath dolphins. In such cases, government inspectors would have a hard time determining if tuna was in fact dolphin-safe.

Up to now, U.S. tuna fishers have proven a hardy lot, adjusting to a series of setbacks over which they have had little control. But the number of tuna seiners based here has steadily decreased from the peak of 130 vessels in 1976 that caught a total of 300,000 tons of tuna to the current 40 boats that last year caught 275,000 tons, Felando said.

The purse seining method was developed by San Diego fishermen in the 1950s as a reaction to what Felando described as the “dumping” of low-cost tuna onto the U.S. market by Japanese fishermen in an attempt to drive the U.S. fleet from the seas. The huge purse seiners not only dramatically increased the size of each boat’s catch, but the fishing technique relieved boat operators from the time and expense of catching and maintaining live-bait fish on board.

The highly productive Eastern Pacific fishing ground, a triangular area that stretches from San Diego to Chile to Hawaii, increasingly has been fished by tuna boat association members in preference to areas closer to shore partially in response to foreign seizures of U.S. tuna boats. Most of the seizures took place after the boats intruded in what the governments held were territorial waters.

The local boat owners have also been affected by the closure of nearly all canneries located on the U.S. mainland. The last of the six canneries once located in San Diego closed down in 1984 and local boat owners must now unload their fish at cannery plants in American Samoa and Puerto Rico.