Brussels, 21/09/2007 (Agence Europe) - The global environmentalist organisation the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has called on the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (NAFO) next week to adopt a recovery plan for cod stocks in the southern Grand Banks (a range of submarine plateaux to the south east of Newfoundland, on the edge of the North American continental shelf). The annual meeting of NAFO members begins in Lisbon, Portugal, on Monday 24 September. The European Community is one of the contracting parties and WWF hopes that Portugal, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, will be able to persuade the key NAFO member countries - Spain, Canada and Russia - to modernise their fishing practices to reduce unwanted, but very real, by-catches (catching fish other than the species targeted) of cod.
Last year, in moves welcomed by WWF, NAFO committed itself to reforming its decision-making procedures and it strengthened measures to counter illegal fishing activities (see EUROPE 9275). The regional fisheries organisation must now take concrete measures, beginning with putting in place a recovery plan for southern Grand Banks cod, before the stock is brought to extinction as a result of by-catches. Robert Rangeley of WWF Canada points out that Grand Bank cod stocks collapsed at the start of the 1990s and a fishing moratorium was imposed in July 1992. Despite this ban, however, the cod population has continued to decline because of by-catches of cod, when fishing for other species. WWF estimates that 5,400 tonnes - around 90% of the stock at that time - of cod were caught accidentally (by-catch) in the southern Grand Banks in 2003. Rangeley says that a purely theoretical reduction of by-catches to zero would allow the stock to return to a healthy state in five years. WWF is proposing a more realistic 50% reduction in by-catches and a continued moratorium on fishing targeting cod until the recovery plan target - increasing the spawning stock to more than 60,000 tonnes - is achieved.
In addition, WWF has called on NAFO members to take ambitious measures to protect areas where there are strong densities of coral.
NAFO, formerly known as the International Commission of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF), was formed in 1978 after Canada extended its jurisdiction to 200 miles. NAFO contracting parties are the European Community, France (for Saint-Pierre et Miquelon), Denmark (for the Faroe Islands and Greenland), Bulgaria, Romania, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Korea, Cuba, the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Japan. (lc)