"ICCAT moves at glacial speeds, " moans Glenn Delaney, one of its three U.S. commissioners.
Oversupply was tops on the agenda at ICCAT's annual meeting in late November in Dublin.
It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to save ICCAT from being gutted of its responsibilities by CITES next year.
Facing this hail of demands, ICCAT met between November 9th and November 15th in Recife, Brazil, and announced a quota of 13, 500 tonnes.
But other ICCAT members--led by the European Union--are catching more than the agreed-upon amount of bluefin and dumping it on the market, diluting prices.
Indeed, between 1996 and 2000, fleets in the eastern Atlantic caught 66% more bluefin--an excess of 89, 000 tons--than ICCAT scientists have recommended to preserve the stocks.
While such action is obviously long overdue, it is far from clear whether ICCAT's roughly 40 member countries will actually vote to do the right thing.
The nations at ICCAT meetings are typically represented by fisheries' ministers or their representatives, not the sorts of well meaning conservationists that usually attend green congresses.
The spawning stock of tuna is only 36% of its level 30 years ago, and ICCAT's scientists warned in September that the Mediterranean bluefin was on the brink of collapse.
Worse, latest data show that 36% of bluefin--which can grow to 1, 500 pounds--caught in the Mediterranean Sea and the Bay of Biscay fell beneath the 7-pound minimum set by ICCAT in 1998.
At Doha, the parties to CITES will have to decide whether ICCAT is serious about sticking to scientific advice in future, or if, when the threat to its authority has been removed, it will be back to business as usual.
Though ICCAT also promised to commit itself to catch levels based on scientific evidence, it proposed to postpone doing so until somewhere between 2011 and 2013, and then only at levels that would give a 60% probability of rebuilding the stock by 2023.
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