The environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned on Thursday that illegal driftnets cast by Moroccan, French and Italian fishermen continue to kill thousands of dolphins in the Mediterranean each year and urged European Union governments to implement a new law banning the practice.
An estimated 3 000 to 4 000 dolphins are caught annually in the Alboran Sea off the coast of Morocco, which comprises just 3% of the Mediterranean, according to a new WWF report that named a fleet of 177 Moroccan fishing vessels as the most deadly for marine life in the area.
A further 13 000 striped and short-beaked dolphins — which were recently placed on a list of endangered species — are ensnared around the Straits of Gibraltar and in neighbouring zones, the conservation group said.
”The evidence we have gathered on the Moroccan fleet brings us to think that illegal driftnet fishing currently happening in the whole Mediterranean results in a massive slaughter of vulnerable species,” said Paolo Guglielmi, head of the marine unit at the WWF Mediterranean Programme.
”More than 4 000km of illegal nets from the Moroccan, French, Turkish and Italian driftnet fleets are ensnaring all that gets in their way,” he said in a statement.
The slaughter is occuring despite a ban on driftnet fishing by the European Union on January 1 2002 and a United Nations moratorium on large-scale nets from 1992.
Morocco is a non-EU country and was not included in the EU decision, but companies from the 15-nation bloc still supply vessels from the country with illegal driftnets, said WWF spokesperson Olivier van Bogaert.
”It is illegal and that is what we are trying to denounce,” he said.
The WWF called on the EU to monitor and prosecute all the fleets of its member states using driftnets.
It also urged the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean and non-EU countries to introduce legislation banning these nets.
The WWF report is called Biodiversity Impact of the Moroccan Driftnet Fleet in the Alboran Sea. — Sapa-AFP