The Fisheries Agency said yesterday it does not believe a complete ban on trade in bluefin tuna is necessary as long as the species is properly protected.
Fisheries Agency Deputy Director General Chen Tian-shou (陳添壽) said Taiwan supports a recent resolution by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) that a complete ban on trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna is not necessary, as measures and restrictions are in place to ensure the recovery of existing stocks.
Chen said ocean fisheries, including bluefin, are replenishable resources and the government believes ICCAT’s conservation measures and restrictions on bluefin fishing are sufficient to maintain the species’ natural rate of replenishment.
ICCAT is an inter-governmental group responsible for managing bluefin stocks.
Chen said Taiwan has left 700 tonnes of its bluefin quota unfilled since 2006 and has not transferred it to other countries.
Taiwan catches between 1,000 tonnes and 2,000 tonnes of bluefin a year, all by small fishing boats ranging from 20 tonnes to 100 tonnes and all in the Pacific Ocean, he said.
The Fisheries Agency will give Taiwan’s position, which considers both the conservation of the species and the development of the fishing industry, at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference underway in Doha, Qatar, he said.
The agency, which expressed opposition to a ban on bluefin fishing last month, was responding to a call by Greenpeace International last week for Taiwan’s government to back a proposal by Monaco to ban the trade.
The conference will address several proposals to regulate the trade in Atlantic bluefin and a variety of shark species, as well as red and pink coral, but the bluefin issue has been the most contentious, pitting Asia against the West.
The ban on cross-border commerce in Atlantic bluefin proposed by Monaco during the conference was rejected 68 to 20.
An amendment proposed by the EU on banning the trade in bluefin, with the ban scheduled to be implemented in one-and-a-half years, was also rejected.
Japan has already said it will ignore any ban on the prized fish, which is highly sought after for sushi and sashimi. About 80 percent of the bluefin catch ends up in Japan.
Industrial-scale harvesting on the high-seas has caused bluefin stocks to plummet by up to 80 percent in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, the two regions that would have been affected by the ban.
Greenpeace voiced regret that the CITES conference has failed to protect endangered bluefin stocks and accused Japan, Taiwan and several other countries of ignoring protection plans and pushing the species toward extinction.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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