Malta the worst offender for tuna ranching infringements in 2010

Infringement reports issued by ICCAT, the international regulator of the blue fin tuna industry, reveal that Malta registered no fewer than 12 infringements (some of them multiple) between 22 May and 21 June, 2010 – 11 of which directly concern shipments of live tuna destined for Malta-based tuna farms.

The only country to come close to that amount of infringements was Spain, with eight.

This revelation emerges just a few days after a damning report on the state of the global tuna industry, carried out by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) and published last Saturday, uncovered mammoth multinational fraud associated with the tuna fattening trade.

The press release accompanying this report singled out France as the main offender insofar as fishing infringements were concerned, and limited its references to Malta’s ranching industry only to a bare minimum.

This prompted one local newspaper, The Times, to carry a report last Tuesday claiming that Malta had been “cleared” of wrongdoing by the report.

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But on closer inspection, the same report also reveals that Japanese inspectors had refused entry to 3,500 tonnes of imported tuna in 2009.

Much of the rejected tuna had come from Maltese ranches: a fact confirmed by Malta’s director of fisheries Dr Andreina Fenech, who told ICIJ that the amount constituted “most of the tuna farmed in Malta, the equivalent to €40 million.”

The Japanese are still blocking €8 million worth of Maltese bluefin, the report continues. “ICIL’s analysis… suggests why Japanese inspectors may have raised questions about bluefin from Mediterranean ranches. More than a dozen ranches appear to have harvested more fish than they reported transferring into their cages.”

Under-declaring of catch and of transfers into cages is in fact one of the most frequent among the 12 reported infringements regarding Malta’s tuna industry. In one of these cases, a single Maltese tugboat (Budafel, also implicated in the immigrant-towing incident of 2007) was found to have committed “multiple violations which taken together constitute a serious disregard of measures in force pursuant to ICCAT”.

All 12 of this year’s infringements were recorded by government inspectors reporting to the European Commission – which in turn submits its reports to ICCAT – and many involved insufficient data and systematic failure to maintain catch and transfer records.

This in turn makes it impossible to accurately calculate the amount of tuna actually ranched and sold by Maltese operators.

Nonetheless, according to the ICCAT documents, a minimum of 307.7 tonnes of live tuna was illegally transferred into Maltese cages this year, worth approximately €6 million in Japan.

This is however a conservative estimate, as other shipments destined for Malta’s farms remain unquantifiable owing to insufficient data.

The blue fin tuna is an endangered species, and earlier this year a last-ditch effort to ban the tuna trade was defeated at United Nations level. The government of Malta lobbied vociferously against the ban.