U.S. environmentalists are challenging an attempt by the administration of U.S. President George Bush to resume imports of Mexican tuna fish caught using techniques alleged to cause high numbers of incidental dolphin deaths.

On Dec. 31, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a branch of the U.S. Commerce Department, announced it was lifting a ban on Mexican tuna caught by encircling mixed schools of dolphin and tuna with vast purse-seine nets. It claims that refinement of the technique has caused annual dolphin deaths to fall dramatically.

Green activists dispute that assertion. They contend dolphin populations in a 1,500-mile-wide band of ocean from the Galapagos Islands to the middle of Mexico—an area called the Eastern Tropical Pacific—are depleted and in danger of collapse. They claim Mexican fishermen disguise real dolphin mortality rates and intimidate or bribe ostensibly independent observers on their boats.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Commerce Department agreed to a 90-day delay in lifting the prohibition on Mexican tuna until a lawsuit filed by nine environmental nonprofits, led by the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute and including the Humane Society of the United States and Defenders of Wildlife, is heard in federal court.

Mexico is one of the world’s largest tuna producers, while the United States accounts for roughly half of world consumption. The Bush administration is not proposing to lift bans on tuna imports from other Latin American countries such as Colombia and Ecuador, which also use the purse-seine method.

Critics point to U.S. study

According to David Phillips, director of Earth Island’s Marine Mammal Project, NMFS’s own scientific data contradict its claims about dolphin deaths. A report published by NMFS says populations of northeastern spotted dolphins (Stenella attenuata) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are at 20% of pre-exploitation levels, while eastern spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris orientalis) are at 35%, making both species officially “depleted.”

“Neither population is recovering at a rate consistent with these levels of depletion and the reported kills,” the report adds, apparently supporting environmentalists’ accusations that the true scale of dolphin deaths is not being officially recorded by the observers.

“This [lifting of the embargo] is no more than a political gift to Mexico at the expense of dolphin lives,” says Phillips. “With this new decision by the Bush administration, tuna fishing nations will deliberately target thousands of baby dolphins, leading to death from starvation and predators. We cannot allow that to occur.”

Purse-seine fishing began in the 1950s when it was noticed that yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) tended to swim below spinner, spotted and common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Industrial-scale fishing ensued, with boats capable of carrying 1,500 tons of tuna.

According to biologist Samuel LaBudde of the Endangered Species Project, a San Francisco nonprofit, Mexican fishermen now use helicopters and speedboats to spot and round up fish—as well as dynamite to disorientate them—in chases that can last 30 minutes.

Vast underreporting alleged

Dolphin deaths caused by stress, fatigue and the separation of calves from their mothers are never witnessed and thus not reported, LaBudde contends. And the dolphins that are caught and drowned in the nets are massively underreported by official observers, he says, claiming observers tend to remain at fixed points on the vessel with limited visibility. The real rate of dolphin mortality, LaBudde asserts, is 10 times higher than the official figures.

“I don’t think the American public would accept the label ‘child safe’ because a certain product only killed 5% of children,” says LaBudde, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Commerce Department and a founder of the highly successful consumer campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the ban on Mexican tuna imports.

However, the Commerce Department and the Mexican government insist purse-seine fishing has been so refined—using such improvements as nets with strategically placed escape routes—that dolphins rarely are killed or even trapped nowadays.

“There is an adequate mechanism of enforcement and reporting on the boats,” says Ricardo Belmontes, director of international fishing at Mexico’s Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fishing and Food (Sagarpa). He adds Mexican tuna fishermen have underwritten the observer program to the tune of US$15,000 per boat per year.

Whatever the result of the legal wrangling, purse-seine-caught tuna may never become widely available in the United States. A spokesman for Del Monte, which owns StarKist, the brand that accounts for around 45% of the U.S. tuna market, told EcoAméricas that it would not use purse-seine tuna even if dolphin deaths are confirmed to be in decline.