Tuna embargo falls.

• Author: Strauss, Michael
• Position: Withdrawal of the US tuna import embargo

The six-year-old U.S. tuna import embargo has been withdrawn, amidst a controversy over whether the ban had begun to undercut its objective of promoting "dolphin safe" tuna.

The embargo banned imports of tuna caught in purse seine nets, the standard technique in the eastern Pacific, home to the world's most productive tuna fishery. In those waters, dolphins and yellowfin tuna frequently swim together. Because dolphins spend so much time playing at the surface, they are easy to spot, so for years fishers have used them to find the tuna below. In a purse seine operation, a large curtain of netting is deployed around the dolphins and the bottom of the resulting cylinder is closed by means of a drawline, preventing the escape of the tuna. As the net is reeled in, the whole catch is pulled below and the dolphins are drowned. In the years before the embargo, as many as 500,000 of these highly intelligent marine mammals were killed in purse seines every year.

In 1990, U.S. environmentalists campaigning for "dolphin safe" tuna scored a major victory when the country's three largest tuna processors announced that they would not purchase any tuna caught in association with dolphins. A year later, the embargo went into effect. Because the United States consumes a full third of the world's tuna, these measures created a general incentive to reduce dolphin mortality - a feat that has by and large been accomplished. U.S. processors, by switching largely from yellowfin to skipjack tuna (which is slightly lower in food quality, but doesn't swim with dolphins), have had little trouble accommodating the ban. And while the purse seine method is still commonly used to supply markets outside the United States, fishers have attempted to make the process more acceptable to environmentally aware consumers by chasing most dolphins out of the nets before reeling them in. By last year, dolphin mortality in the eastern Pacific fishery had dropped to 2,700 and one species, the rare eastern spotted dolphin, no longer appeared to be slipping toward extinction.

Despite its successes, the ban quickly ran into complications on both land and sea. Alternative netting techniques were found to take a higher toll on other nontarget species, such as sharks and endangered sea turtles. They also tended to catch more juvenile tuna, which could cause a long-term decline of the stocks. And the same year the embargo went into effect, Mexico challenged it before the GATT treaty (the...