Three different proposals with one goal: protection of the mako shark in the North Atlantic. And then: none of them finds a majority. Business as usual continues.
To set the catch quotas for the coming year, the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) met in the middle of the month. In doing so, fisheries policy missed a fundamental milestone for the protection of mako sharks: stocks in the Atlantic are so severely threatened that recovery by 2045 would only be 53% likely, even with a zero quota. The scientifically proposed measures by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) and the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) were reflected in the submitted action plans of the EU and the USA in a significantly less progressive manner than in Canada's proposal: this envisaged a complete ban on catching and landing, which would probably have stopped overfishing immediately - allowing the small remaining stocks to recover straight away. In contrast, the EU proposal envisaged that only makos already caught dead (approx. 25%) could be landed, which would have corresponded to approx. 500 tonnes. The Americans demanded a quota of 700 tonnes for the year 2021 and 500 tonnes for 2022. Furthermore, monitoring on the high seas would have been virtually impossible.
None of the proposals found a majority - so in the end nothing was decided: no measures to protect the remaining stocks of mako sharks. The next meeting is not until the end of 2021 - the protection of makos has been postponed by a year, when it may already be too late for the species to regenerate.
One cannot negotiate with nature. Until this realisation has filtered through to the relevant decision-making bodies, we apparently have to wait (at least) another year.
