Portugal is one of the countries that continues to allow deep-sea trawling, which is harmful to the deep-sea ecosystem, alert two reports released today by a collective of organizations that defend nature.
“Despite consecutive UN resolutions calling for urgent action, countries such as South Korea, Russia, Cook Islands, Spain, Portugal, France, Australia, New Zealand and Japan continue to allow their boats to fish in the deep sea in international waters using bottom trawl [fishing] material,” says a statement.
This, he continues, is "a highly harmful technique, with devastating implications for the future of deep-sea marine life in the international oceans."
The complaint follows on from two reports by international experts, one carried out during a workshop organized by the National Center for Oceanography in Southampton and the other by the Coalition for the Conservation of the Deep Sea (DSCC), a collective of organizations such as the Greenpeace and the Pew Environment Group.
Both conclude that, several years after the passage of two UN resolutions (61/105 in 2006 and 64/72 in 2009) to protect deep-sea ecosystems, many countries with the fishing industry still have not implemented them.
In the first study, the Azores are considered a case of reference because deep sea trawling has been prohibited since 2005, although deep sea angling is still allowed.
However, there are still Portuguese fishing boats that continue to use this method, namely in Canadian waters, in the northwest of the Atlantic Ocean, said Matthew Matthew Gianni, from the DSCC.
At the date of the last statistic made by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2006, 80 percent of the 285 boats that fished in the deep sea belonged to 10 countries, including Portugal.
Gianni attributes the delay in implementing the resolutions to “lack of political will” and, he admits, to possible “interests of the fishing industry”.
But the risk is that several of the species that live in the deep sea are increasingly at risk.
Another scientist, Alex Rogers, professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Oxford, says there is evidence of damage to corals and fauna that live on the seabed, particularly in the northeast Atlantic.
"The situation is such that the UN has to act, whether it is to ban fishing in those areas or at least give a deadline for implementing the resolutions," he told the Lusa agency.
Rogers and Gianni are two of the experts who will participate in a debate on deep sea fisheries on 15 and 16 September at the UN in New York.
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