Court Blocks Easing of ‘Dolphin Safe’ Tuna Labeling Rules

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Bush administration from relaxing the rules dictating whether cans of tuna can be labeled “dolphin safe,” suggesting that new labeling rules could lead to more injuries and deaths among dolphins that swim with tuna.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, in issuing a preliminary injunction, wrote that the decision to change the dolphin-safe definition appears to have been influenced more by international trade policies than scientific evidence.

In a 21-page opinion, the judge concluded that “dolphin safe” will continue to mean that fishermen cannot encircle dolphins with their nets when catching tuna.

Allegations in a lawsuit filed by the Earth Island Institute, Henderson wrote, “raise a serious question as to the integrity of [Commerce Secretary Donald Evans’] decision-making process.”

Although Evans “wisely refrained” from mentioning trade policy concerns as justification for the new label rules, the judge said there is “little doubt” that he faced pressure from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to liberalize the labeling rules, as requested by fishing fleets in Mexico, Venezuela and other Latin American countries.

“We continue to stand by our original decision to change labeling rules,” said Rebecca Lent, a deputy director at the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “We feel that this is the best thing going for dolphins.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service announced in December that it was altering dolphin-safe rules at the request of foreign fishing fleets which, unlike their U.S. competitors, continue to chase dolphins and encircle them with nets because yellowfin tuna follow dolphins in the eastern Pacific.

These foreign fleets said they need the dolphin-safe label to compete in the U.S. market and have vowed not to use the label on any tuna catches that result in known dolphin deaths.

In making its decision, the Fisheries Service noted that techniques to save dolphins, such as adding slack in the nets so that dolphins can escape, has dropped the annual death toll of dolphins from 350,000 decades ago to about 1,600 in recent years.

The service concluded that chasing and encircling dolphins to catch the tuna that swim beneath them was no longer posing a significant threat to dolphin populations.

American consumers have grown accustomed to the dolphin-safe label used since 1990 by the major U.S. tuna sellers, Star-Kist Foods Inc., Bumble Bee Tuna Seafoods Inc. and Chicken of the Sea International.

The U.S. fleet that supplies these companies abandoned the practice of chasing dolphins to catch yellowfin tuna at that time and moved to the western Pacific, where they catch skipjack tuna, which do not tag along with dolphins.

Attorneys for Earth Island were delighted by the judge’s ruling.

“It’s a violation of truth in labeling to change the meaning of the labels that say it is dolphin-safe when it isn’t,” said Joshua R. Floum, attorney for the Earth Island Institute. “It’s Orwellian.”