Angling for Relief : U.S. Ban on Mexican Tuna Batters Ensenada

The economy of this sun-splashed town, once thriving with dozens of tuna boats and busy fish-packing plants, has been devastated by a 5-year-old U.S. embargo on Mexican tuna spurred by protests against the killing of dolphins.

Although tourism and maquiladora factories are important, fishing is Ensenada’s biggest industry. And since the U.S. market for Mexico’s tuna catch was shut off in 1990, more than 4,000 fishing industry workers have been idled, dozens of marine supply firms have closed and 70 of the 88 tuna boats once moored to the local quays have left town.

But Congress may soon reconsider the ban. On June 22, the U.S. House Resources Committee is expected to hear proposals by the Clinton Administration and members of Congress to modify the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the legislation that led to the embargo.

Ensenada’s politicians, boat owners and workers say a lifting is long overdue. They are bitter about the ban, contending that the Mexican tuna industry has been in virtual compliance on dolphin protection for the last two years. Their contention is supported by the U.S. State Department, which wants the embargo ended.

Most publicity surrounding the dolphin-tuna issue was on the devastation of San Diego’s tuna fleet, but the impact was more keenly felt here in Ensenada. Although most Americans see it as a weekend getaway for yachtsmen and revelers at Hussong’s Cantina, Ensenada was the undisputed hub of Mexico’s fishing industry when the U.S. embargo began.

“The embargo is unjust,” Ensenada Mayor Oscar Sanchez del Palacio said. “It’s not doing the city, the fishing industry or the dolphins any good.”

Ensenadans feel like pawns on the chessboard of international trade, said Andres Armenta Gonzalez, president of the National Fishing Industry Chamber’s Ensenada delegation. He noted that a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade panel ruled the tuna embargo an unfair trade practice in 1993, and that the United States ignored that ruling.

Armenta Gonzalez added that lifting the embargo could usher in a new wave of foreign investment in fisheries and related packing industries by companies looking to take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA provisions confer a huge competitive advantage on products produced or processed within the United States, Mexico and Canada.

U.S. conservation groups, although they concede that Mexican fishermen have lowered dolphin mortality significantly, still oppose lifting the embargo. They say consumers will support only those brands of tuna caught using fishing methods that purport to cause no dolphin deaths, methods Mexican boats do not use. All major brands of tuna now in U.S. supermarkets are dolphin-safe, they point out, because of intense consumer interest.

The number of dolphins killed by tuna boats operated by Mexico and other countries in the Eastern Pacific declined from 133,000 in 1986 to 4,000 last year--but that’s not good enough, the groups say.

“The American consumers have stated unequivocally that they don’t want dolphin-unsafe tuna,” said Bill Snape, counsel for the Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation advocacy organization in Washington and a point group in the campaign to preserve the embargo. The movement to lift the embargo is being led by “anti-conservationists” in Congress, he said.

The volatile dolphin-safe tuna issue, which prompted thousands of schoolchildren to write “save Flipper” letters to government officials in the late 1980s, is likely to take center stage again once congressional committee hearings begin.

Mexico became a player in the international tuna market in the early 1980s after buying U.S.-designed tuna seiners and strictly enforcing its 200-mile territorial limit to keep out foreign boats. The enforcement made the tuna-rich Eastern Pacific coastal waters Mexico’s own private preserve.

Using efficient purse-seine technology developed by American boat owners, Mexico’s tuna boats quickly gravitated to Ensenada as a base because of its good harbor, support industries and proximity to the U.S. market, just a 90-minute truck drive away. By 1988, nine Ensenada packinghouses, including Pesquera Pacifico, the largest in Latin America, were canning tuna for the U.S. and European markets. The city’s fish industry also developed a thriving market in frozen tuna for Japan.

But as Mexico’s fishing industry grew, purse-seining methods aroused greater and greater opposition among a wide range of animal-rights proponents.

Using mile-long purse-seine nets, boats encircle schools of tuna that, for reasons not fully understood, swim below pods of dolphins in the open sea. All tuna boat captains have to do is find large numbers of dolphins and “set” their massive nets around them. It’s a good bet that prime schools of adult tuna will be swimming underneath.

Unfortunately for the dolphins, boat captains initially made little effort to spare the mammals that led them to their quarry. In 1986, the nets trapped and killed an estimated 133,000 dolphins in the Eastern Pacific alone, a statistic that, combined with stark video footage of dolphins hung up in the nets, sparked a grass-roots U.S. campaign to ban all tuna caught by such methods.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1988 bans all tuna caught in the Eastern Pacific by boats that “set” their nets around dolphins. The law is restricted to the Eastern Pacific fishing grounds because it is there that the dolphin-tuna relationship has been proven to exist.

The law was the final straw for most U.S. tuna boats, many of which had been based in San Diego. Those that hadn’t already been driven to the Western Pacific by the Mexicans’ 200-mile limit left, resolving to fish for skipjack tuna, which swim unaccompanied by dolphins. Skipjack, however, are not nearly as lucrative as the Eastern Pacific’s yellowfin tuna, which are five times larger.

Most U.S.-owned boats now operate out of American Samoa in the Western Pacific, discharging their cargo in canneries there and in Puerto Rico, where there are incentives to bring the tuna.

The Mexican boats stayed put, however, sticking with purse-seine technology but trying to reduce dolphin mortality and eventually win over U.S. conservationists. On each voyage, Mexican boats and all other vessels in the Eastern Pacific take along observers designated by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, a La Jolla-based international agency set up to research and monitor tuna resources worldwide.

By using observers and instituting safety measures--such as avoiding strong currents and nighttime net-setting--boats owned by Mexicans and other nations have cut overall Eastern Pacific dolphin deaths from an average of 15 per haul of fish in 1986 to less than one now, according to Martin Hall, head of IATTC’s tuna-dolphin program.

But despite the lower dolphin toll, the embargo remains. The Mexican fishing industry, therefore, wants Congress to either redefine “dolphin-safe” to permit a small number of kills, or to apply dolphin-safe rules to all parts of the world, said Juvenal Hernandez Acevedo, Ensenada director of the Mexican fishing industry chamber. That would entail putting observers on all Western Pacific boats, instead of the 20% that carry them now.

Brian Hallman, deputy director of the Office of Marine Conservation in the U.S. State Department, said the dolphin population is no longer endangered and that the embargo should be lifted.

“The Mexicans have a very legitimate complaint about the embargo, not because it’s discriminatory, but because Mexicans are doing a very good job of fishing,” Hallman said. “Dolphin mortality has gone down to such a low figure that this issue should go away. There are 10 million dolphins in the Eastern Pacific; stocks are all growing. It’s not a conservation issue,” Hallman said.

But with the embargo in place, the participating countries see no benefit to continuing with the observer program, and ending the observer program would ultimately lead to more dolphin deaths, he said.

“Countries are upset to the point they are wondering why they should stay,” Hallman said. “Their fishing industries are putting pressure on them to reconsider whether they should be in the [observer] program.”

In Ensenada, five of nine packinghouses--including Pesquera Pacifico--have shut down because of the embargo. Mayor Sanchez del Palacio even blames the embargo for a rise in local crime, saying the drop in tax revenue caused Ensenada to deactivate half of its 60 police cars.

“We have done everything we can do, everything that has been recommended,” said Armenta Gonzalez, the fishing industry chamber president. “This is nothing but disguised commercial aggression.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Declining Catch

Hit with a U.S. embargo spurred by protests against the killings of dolphins, Mexico has seen its tuna catch decline from its peak in 1988. That has caused economic problems in Ensenada, formerly the center of the Mexican tuna fishing industry. Mexican tuna fleet’s annual catch, in metric tons:

1994: 127,000

Source: Mexico’s National Chamber of the Fishing Industry