Tuna Turnabout : Mexico Announces a Dolphin Protection Plan

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari announced Tuesday that international observers will be allowed on all 46 Mexican tuna boats by December, and that a new law will set penalties for killing dolphins as part of a 10-point program to protect dolphins and other marine mammals.

He also announced a $1-million effort to develop tuna-fishing methods that will take fewer dolphins. Mexican environmentalists praised the measures, but their U.S. counterparts called them “cosmetic.”

The incidental killing of dolphins, which swim above schools of tuna and drown when they are snared under water, has been a point of conflict between the United States and Mexico and led to a U.S. embargo of Mexican tuna early this year. A special committee of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the international trade organization, last month said that embargo was illegal.

Mexico, nonetheless, has chosen to step up protection of dolphins.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy here would not comment on whether the program is sufficient to allay concerns about Mexican fishermen killing dolphins, or to prevent an appeal of the GATT decision at the organization’s meeting in October.

U.S. and Mexican environmentalists were divided in their assessments of the Mexican measures.

Homero Aridjis, president of the ecological organization Group of 100 and one of the few Mexican environmentalists who has spoken against setting nets on dolphins, said the measures represent positive steps.

Tuesday’s announcement, in effect, sets aside the GATT decision. Aridjis said the ruling set a dangerous precedent because it was based strictly on commercial issues, without regard for the environment.

Mexico’s action also will pressure Venezuela to allow inspectors to accompany its 26-boat tuna-fishing fleet. Previously, inspectors were allowed on only a third of Mexico’s fleet. “Under that system, it was impossible to know how many dolphins died,” Aridjis said.

The San Francisco-based environmental group Earth Island Institute said plans are going forward for a demonstration when Salinas speaks in the Bay Area next Monday.

“We see these steps as cosmetic, a face-saving measure,” a spokesman for the institute’s Save the Dolphins Project said. “It says nothing about stopping the killing of dolphins.”

The Mexicans are taking these steps only because “they are in an important stage of negotiations with the North American free trade agreement,” the Earth Island spokesman said. “They have to make Congress believe they are concerned about the environment.”

Environmental concerns have emerged as a potential obstacle to the North American Free Trade Agreement being negotiated among the United States, Canada and Mexico. Ecologists have said that Mexico has a weak record on environmental protection and predicted that, under a free-trade arrangement, it would become a haven for polluting industries.

The dolphin protection program is the latest of several dramatic environmental gestures the Salinas Administration has made. In March, the government shut down an oil refinery that was a major contributor to air pollution around Mexico City.