NEWS | Wednesday, 21 January 2009

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Raphael Vassallo
Unless serious international efforts are made to control illegal fishing, the world’s fish stocks will collapse altogether by 2048.
This, in a clamshell, is the bleak outlook provided by ‘End of the Line’: a full-length feature documentary, based on the book by Telegraph journalist Charles Clover and partly sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund, which premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA.
As evidenced by the outcome of last November’s international tuna summit in Marrakech, corporate greed, political apathy and a generally misinformed public have all contributed to a failure in curtailing rampant overfishing.
Meanwhile, illegal and unregulated fishing has been allowed to spiral out of control: and nowhere more visibly than the Mediterranean Sea, which has seen its shark populations dwindle by as much as 99% in recent years, while species such as the Northern bluefin tuna are now considered “critically endangered”.
“Overfishing is the single biggest immediate threat to our oceans, and the film highlights some of the most conspicuous examples of excessive exploitation of marine resources, such as the decimation of bluefin tuna stocks in the Mediterranean,” Miguel Jorge, director of WWF-International’s Marine Programme, said this week. “Given that most people know very little about the state of our oceans, we hope the film serves to stimulate cinema-goers’ appetite for seafood that only comes from responsible fishers.”
People seem to know very little also about Malta’s role in the decimation of the bluefin tuna – a topic prominently featured in the 90-minute documentary.
The Mediterranean’s largest bluefin tuna ranching nation, Malta claims to have exported almost 12,000 tonnes of the endangered ocean-going predator last year alone. The Maltese government has always insisted that its fisheries operate in full accordance with international fishing conventions. But NGOs have pointed out numerous discrepancies in Malta’s ranching and export declarations: including an apparent 5,000 tonne mismatch between the amount ranched last year, and the amount physically exported.
EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg last week told MaltaToday that he is currently looking into these allegations.
“It is possible that the 5,000-tonne figure includes fish which would be defined from a customs standpoint as being ‘in transit’, and which would therefore not qualify as being re-exported in customs records,” he said.
If the makers of ‘End of the Line’ are correct in their assertions, the bluefin tuna is but one of several species that will disappear from our seas in the next 30 years.

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