Canada fights ban on 'bulldozers of the sea'

Canada is trying to scuttle a proposed United Nations moratorium on destructive bottom trawling of the open ocean that has received surprisingly strong support from the United States, as well as other countries. "Canada's attitude towards the oceans is embarrassing and archaic," said Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, a scientific environmental group in Washington State. "Canada treats the oceans as if nothing could harm them," said Norse. The UN General Assembly started debate recently on an Australian-led plan for a temporary moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawling in unmanaged high seas and to impose tougher regulation of other destructive fishing practices. "Canada doesn't have any open ocean trawlers and has everything to gain from a ban," Norse pointed out. Trawlers have moved into the unregulated high seas in the past 20 years because of the decline in coastal fish stocks. These huge vessels drag their heavily weighted nets along richly productive undersea mountains called seamounts at depths of more than 1,300 yards. Like ocean-going bulldozers, they scoop everything in their 109 yard-wide paths, including enormous amounts of unwanted sea creatures, the so-called bycatch, while the net's huge steel rollers and doors weighing several thousand pounds crush the ancient coral habitat that is needed to produce the next generation of fish. "It's not much better than blowing up coral reefs with dynamite to get fish," said Norse. There's little scientific debate about the destructive nature of this of type of fishing. Studies in the Tasman Sea near New Zealand have found that seamounts heavily fished by trawlers are now 95 percent bare rock, compared with five percent rock on unfished seamounts. "The UN has been debating this issue for three years while the problem keeps getting worse," said Lisa Speer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US-based environmental group. "Fleets ply vast areas of open ocean beyond the reach of any national jurisdiction and they are doing irreparable damage to some of the oldest and most unique ecosystems on earth," said Speer in a release. There are only a few hundred bottom trawlers operating in the high seas, owned mostly by European countries and Japan. Their catch amounts to less than 0.5 percent of the fish taken from the seas each year. And nearly all is sold to wealthy nations like Canada, the US, Japan and Europe. "High seas trawling isn't about food, it's only about making money," said Norse. And yet without even one trawler calling Canada home, Canada has consistently opposed a UN-backed moratorium since it was first proposed in 2004.