Press conference by United Nations Environment Programme on bottom trawl fishing

Failure to curb the practice of bottom trawl fishing, which involves dragging heavy nets across the ocean floor, threatened one of the world’s most precious sources of biodiversity, said a group of environmental activists this morning at a Headquarters press conference sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme.  Representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Greenpeace International, and Oceana, all speaking as part of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, called on the General Assembly to act urgently to adopt a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling.

Lisa Speer, a senior policy analyst at the NRDC, told correspondents the General Assembly this week began informal consultations on a draft resolution on oceans and the law of the sea, but most delegates involved in the negotiations recognized that the text on the table was not sufficient to protect the seas from bottom trawling.  Calling the fate of the oceans “perhaps the most important environmental issue facing the world in this decade”, Speer said that delegates must decide whether to act to protect the deep seas or allow them to continue to be destroyed.

She added that she expected a group of nations to come forward in the coming days or weeks with a proposal to add much stronger language to the draft for consideration by the group.  The coalition was calling for a moratorium, or a “time-out”, on high seas bottom trawling until an adequate legal regime could be developed to control such activity around the world and until the biodiversity of the deep seas could be thoroughly assessed.

Scientists were just beginning to discover what was out there in the deep seas, said Ms. Speer.  Oceans, and the deep ocean in particular, were often found to be the source of biological resources that had enormous potential for human medicinal purposes, including treatments for cancer, asthma, and a range of immuno-suppressive drugs.  The deep seas were like tropical rainforests, both in terms of the extent of biodiversity and the sensitivity of their resources.

Likening the practice of catching fish by bottom trawling to “using a bulldozer to catch rabbits”, Ms. Speer emphasized that a worldwide moratorium would have a negligible economic impact on a tiny industry, whose catch amounts to less than half a per cent of the global marine fisheries catch.  “And the fish caught are fish that we would have here in New York at white-table restaurants, fish like orange roughy”, she said.  “These are not fish that are going to solve the world’s food problem.”

Karen Sack, Oceans Policy Advisor at Greenpeace International, echoed that view.  “For the sake of a few fish, we are allowing a few nations to effectively clear-cut the earth’s last wilderness areas before science has even had a chance to explore it”, she said.  “It is a scientific disaster and economic nonsense.”

Scientists have actually been at the forefront of efforts to stop the destruction caused by bottom trawling, said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist at Oceana, an international advocacy organization.  He described the damage caused by bottom trawling on the undersea islands known as “seamounts”, which he said harboured life forms found nowhere else on earth.  Deep sea coral gardens, coral reefs, and coral forests were all extremely vulnerable, and, because they also grew extremely slowly, were “unlikely to recover in our lifetimes, if ever”, he said.  “The crisis is real.”

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