Why does Bottom Trawling Continue? Blame Canada (seriously)

Are you against whaling? So am I. But there are worse activities than whaling. Top of my list would be "bottom trawling."

The world came very close to banning "bottom trawling" in the fall of 2006. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the United States tried hard to get the UN General Assembly to ban this destructive fishing practice.

How destructive? It's unbelievable, you can read about it here.

Only eleven nations have high-seas bottom trawling fleets -- Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia and Spain.

But thanks in large measure to the efforts of the Canadian government, we are back to the status quo:

Supporters of the ban said Canada's stance compromised prospects for stronger UN protections. . . . Canada has a fleet of bottom trawlers operating within Canadian waters. Its concern has been that a moratorium on the high seas could later be expanded to cover areas within national jurisdiction.

Basically, Canada worked hard to get a compromise proposal that ruined the chance of securing a world-wide ban on this destructive fishing practice. As this Greenpeace report indicates, Spain was also an major obstacle, but Canada -- because they did not even have a deep sea bottom trawling industry to defend --bears the fullest moral burden for having allowed this barbaric practice to continue.

This video was made prior to the vote last November at the UN. In case you missed it, it's hilarious.
A vote and an opportunity may have been lost -- thanks largely to Canada -- but the issue needs to go straight to top of the global agenda. The first time round, this urgent issue never received a fraction of the publicity it deserved.

Ban Bottom Trawling

It's just as serious but more urgent than stopping global warming, but nobody talks about it. It's time we all educated ourselves about"bottom trawling" -- a despicable fishing practice that causes untold ecological damage. Greenpeace puts the strong case against it in blunt terms:

We are campaigning for an immediate halt to high seas bottom trawling. If allowed to continue, the bottom trawlers of the high seas will destroy deep sea species, before we have even discovered much of what is out there. Think of it as driving a huge bulldozer through a lush and richly populated forest and being left with a flat, featureless desert. Think of it as beef farming by dragging a net across entire fields, cities and forests to catch a few cows. It's like blowing up Mars before we get there.

Apparently it's even uneconomical (the major bottom trawlers operate on state subsidies)! Greenpeace has more information about bottom trawling. I will be exploring this issue in future posts.