Mexico Fishermen Blame Tuna Troubles on ‘Dolphin-Safe’ Rules

Those playful dolphins have stilled the clatter and clank at Latin America’s oldest and once-largest tuna cannery.

These days, only the occasional sea gull strolls among the silent cleaning lines and canning equipment at Pesqueria del Pacifico, where as many as 1,500 people once worked.

The work stopped three years ago, two years after the United States placed an embargo on Mexican tuna.

Of the 89 boats in the Ensenada fleet, all but 39 have moved or been sold. Five of the nine canneries stand empty.

The tuna is not to blame. It’s the dolphins who like to follow them around, and thus serve as guides for tuna fishermen. Too many dolphins were getting killed in the harvest of tuna, the U.S. government said.

Across Mexico, the tuna industry estimates, about 15,000 jobs directly and indirectly tied to tuna fishing are gone, about half of them in this town on the Baja California peninsula 70 miles south of San Diego.

At issue is “dolphin-safe” tuna, a label allowed in the United States only for tuna caught without the aid of schools of dolphins, which follow the coveted yellow-fin tuna and are used by fishermen to home in on the catch.

Bills in Congress to lift the embargo have strong--but far from universal--support.

The Mexican tuna industry and environmentalists opposed to lifting the embargo accuse each other of using environmental issues to mask financial interests.

Ensenada, an easy 90 minutes south of San Diego, is still a weekend playground for Southern Californians who come to fish, sail and knock back 99-cent margaritas at Hussong’s Cantina, possibly Mexico’s best-known watering hole.

Yachts dot the harbor and real-estate agents troll for Americans looking for a retirement home.

The architecture leans to gleaming white, sometimes Moorish. Cruise ships pull in a couple of times a week, discharging a tide of tourists among the handicraft shops and souvenir stands.

But on the tuna docks, which the fishing fleet shares with a Mexican navy detachment, things are quieter these days.

The U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1988 applies only in the Eastern Pacific, an area extending roughly from Mexico to northern Chile and some 700 miles out to sea. The act bans importation of fish whose capture involves the death of marine mammals.

It caused most of the American fleet to move to the Western Pacific, with bases in American Samoa. Only four of the 35 American tuna boats that once fished the Eastern Pacific still are there.

Mexico, which has reduced its dolphin kill to a tiny fraction of what it was, is crying foul. It claims that the embargo is a disguise to keep high-quality Mexican yellow-fin tuna off the American market.

The United States ignored a 1993 ruling by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that the embargo is illegal.

“Dolphin-safe” fishing, fishermen here contend, has environmental baggage far heavier than the threat to dolphins, virtually all of which are freed from the nets unharmed by technology developed in recent years.

There are three ways to fish commercially for tuna. One involves following the dolphins. For reasons not fully understood, the dolphins follow schools of adult tuna. Another technique uses floating objects, such as logs, around which tuna tend to gather. The third is simply visual sightings of schools of tuna.

All involve circling the tuna schools with “sets,” or encirclements, of nets, often a mile or more in length.

Only tuna caught using the last two methods can be labeled “dolphin-safe.”

But those two methods bring with them a heavy bycatch of other species, especially infant or juvenile tuna that have not reproduced, have no commercial value and are returned to the sea, usually dead.

The yellow-fin tuna fishing ground is among the most healthy in the world, but industry spokesmen say the wide demand for dolphin-safe tuna could endanger that.

“Fishing ‘dolphin-safe’ is the only way we can export,” said Carlos de Alba, a scientist with the Mexican Chamber of Fishing Industries.

“But if we keep fishing this way, or increase the dolphin-safe catch, the tuna population in the Eastern Pacific will drop by half in three years because of the bycatch of immature fish.”

He said detailed reports by observers, required on most Mexican tuna boats, show that more than 99% of the dolphins encircled by the tuna nets are freed unharmed.

“To have a dolphin-safe trip you have to fish without one single set on dolphins. Even if you don’t kill any dolphins, that catch cannot be sold as dolphin-safe.

“We are fighting to change that to no mortality. If you set on dolphins and there is no mortality, that tuna can be dolphin-safe.”

Congress is considering legislation, supported by the Clinton Administration and the majority Republicans, which would do just that.

Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund and others agree.

The change is opposed by the Sierra Club, Earth Island Institute and 83 other environmental groups.

Earth Island’s David Phillips calls the bycatch argument “completely spurious.”

“If you look at the amount of the bycatch since the dolphin-safe issue came up, it has gone down, and the reason it has gone down is because the fishing effort in the eastern tropical Pacific has gone down,” he said in a telephone interview from Earth Island’s San Francisco headquarters.

“They have always set on schools and logs. It is an opportunistic fishery. If you see schools, you set on those. If you see logs, you set on logs. If you see dolphins, you set on those.

“The fishery is in excellent shape. The average size of the fish is up, the reproductive potential is up.

“If there were some indication that the level of the juvenile catch is causing problems for the fishery, you would have seen it long ago.”

The bycatch argument, he said, “is just used as an excuse. What they really want is to bring dolphin-unsafe tuna caught by killing dolphins back to the lucrative U.S. market.”

Phillips readily acknowledged the reduction in the dolphin kill.

“But we’re not going to relax at this point and take the position that because of improvements we should go back to encouraging setting nets on dolphins,” he said.

U.S. Rep. George Miller of Martinez and Sen. Barbara Boxer, both California Democrats, have introduced a bill that would keep current labeling laws intact.

Observers certified by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission based in La Jolla are on board all tuna boats with capacities of 40,000 tons or more--most of the Mexican fleet--to verify dolphin-safe catches.

“You don’t see that in other areas, like in Africa, or France or Spain, where the captains of the boats make the certification,” said Jose Velazquez, owner of the 205-foot Quijote.

Dr. James Joseph of the tuna commission said that there are dolphin kills in other fisheries, such as the Atlantic, around Sri Lanka south of India and around the Philippines, but that there are no good statistics on how many because those boats don’t carry observers.

“We had a trip where we made 52 sets on dolphins and didn’t kill a single one,” Velasquez said. “But that tuna was not dolphin-safe because we fished on dolphins.”

He said the American fleet, much of which is based in the Western Pacific at American Somoa, often sets on dolphins at night, increasing the risk of dolphin kills.

“We haven’t done that for years,” he said.

The dolphin-kill by Mexico and other countries in the Eastern Pacific dropped from about 140,000 a year in the mid-1980s to about 3,500 last year, authorities say.

A declaration signed in Panama by 12 countries last October commits the countries that fish in the Eastern Pacific to take legal action to hold dolphin kills to 5,000 a year or less if the United States lifts the embargo.

In 1986, Eastern Pacific tuna fishermen were killing about 15 dolphins with each set. By 1991, when the embargo took place, the number averaged 3.1, and it was less than one per two sets in 1995.

When dolphins are sighted, they are encircled by the purse-seine net, which is then drawn shut at the bottom by winch-operated cables.

When about two-thirds of the net is drawn aboard, the tuna vessels launch small motor boats into the encirclement and the tuna vessel backs up, dropping part of the net below the water line.

The boatmen then herd the dolphins out of the net into the open sea.

Another development lowering the kill is the use of a finer net size, which keeps the air-breathing dolphins from getting their noses caught and drowning.

Mexico has replaced its American market with exports to Europe and Japan, but because of environmental pressures, most of that tuna, too, must be dolphin-safe. It exports about 50,000 tons a year, much of it frozen, to Japan.

Mexico has increased its own tuna consumption 10-fold over the last decade, although most of it is canned, not in Ensenada but in Mazatlan, Manzanillo or other ports nearer to the domestic markets.

When Pesqueria del Pacifico was operating it turned out 88,000 cases of canned tuna a month, a lot of it for American firms who put their own label on it.

The plant also suffered when the government privatized it under the administration of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Its top-selling tuna brand, Dolores, was sold separately, leaving the new owners with no familiar brand. They introduced a new brand that has not caught on.

“Some of our workers went to other canneries, some left the area, some are selling tacos,” said plant manager Jose Luis Gonzalez. “This town [El Sauzal, a northern suburb of Ensenada] used to be a fishing village. Just about every family had someone who worked here.”

“Those boats that are gone aren’t coming back,” said Alfonso Rosinol, vice president of Mexico’s fisheries chamber who has sold one of his three boats. “The boats were sold to Korea, to the United States, two to Iran. They are fishing many places.”

With the fleet aging and decimated, processing tuna for foreign boats may be what’s in store for Ensenada, if the embargo is lifted.

“They can bring the American boats here to unload and we can ship it precooked, frozen if they want, to the United States and they can put their own brand on it,” Rosinol said.

Uncanned Mexican tuna enters the United States duty-free.

“We are efficient, we have low labor costs,” Rosinol said. “This could happen for Ensenada.”

But Rosinol, who spends a lot of time in Washington pushing for the removal of the embargo, knows many factors are at work.

“The Flipper movies are back in the theaters again,” he said through a half-smile. “Now I hear they have one about a pig named Babe. Pigs are supposed to be smarter than dolphins, so the pork industry better be careful. It could be next.”