Trawlers cry foul over green fish list

12 September 2010 - 02:00 By ANTON FERREIRA
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now

Wildlife conservation group WWF has revised its list of fish environmentally acceptable to eat, but some big fishing companies are crying foul.

The new list issued by the Southern Africa Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI) this week gives consumers the go-ahead to eat as much snoek, calamari and canned tuna as they like among the "green" species.

But it classifies dozens of species as "red", meaning they should not be bought at all, and raises an orange warning flag over popular fish such as sole and kingklip, which consumers should "think twice" about eating.

"We don't agree with the list at all," said George Bezuidenhout, managing director of Sea Harvest.

"When you start saying 'think twice', you're scaring people off eating a fish that they can consume quite comfortably, like sole and kingklip, which are the two species we are particularly concerned about," he said.

The head of the SASSI programme, Samantha Petersen, acknowledged that sectors of the fishing industry had put pressure on her - including threats of court action.

"They are not happy," she said. "They have a vested interest in having sole and kingklip on the green list. But we're not prepared to greenwash them."

Petersen said that while sole was not a threatened species, the method used to catch it had killed many other endangered species. And while kingklip populations were recovering, about 8000 endangered albatrosses were killed every year by kingklip trawlers.

Petersen said sole could be moved to the green list "very quickly" if the industry was willing to change its trawling method.

"What a great success story that would be. The environment wins, and the industry wins. But we're not there yet, so we need to keep up the pressure."

Bezuidenhout criticised the WWF for lumping sole and kingklip together in the orange category with farmed abalone.

"It creates an impression that these species are in dire straits when quite frankly they're not," he said.



subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now