Date: Thu, 17 Apr, 1997
U.S. House Panel Votes to Lift Tuna Embargo
By Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A House committee Wednesday passed a bill to lift an embargo against imports of tuna caught in nets that also snare dolphins, as long as dolphin deaths were kept to a minimum.

Supporters said the bill, backed by Mexico and the Clinton administration, would reward Mexico and other Latin American countries for improved fishing methods that have drastically reduced the killing of dolphins that swim with tuna in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. But opponents said the bill, passed by the House Resources Committee, would allow the injury, harassment and death of dolphins in order to catch tuna that would be sold in cans carrying a label that the tuna was caught with "dolphin-safe" methods.

The bill, which was passed in the House last year but never reached the Senate floor, has split many Democrats in the White House and divided environmental and wildlife groups. Now that the bill has been passed by the House committee it will have to once again go to the full House and the Senate for approval. The committee passed the bill on a voice vote after rejecting amendments from Democrats for stricter protections for dolphins they said may be drowned in nets, injured or chased by high-speed helicopters during the tuna harvest.
"I think it's about a lot of other decisions about trade policy that have little or nothing to do with dolphin-safe policy," California Rep. George Miller, the committee's ranking Democrat, said.

But Maryland Republican Wayne Gilchrest, the bill's sponsor, said it would put into law improved fishing methods that have reduced dolphin deaths from 100,000 a year to less than 5,000. Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, the United States and other countries signed an agreement in 1995 to limit dolphin mortality, which this bill would place into law. The bill would lift the embargo the United States imposed in 1990 on tuna caught in huge "purse seine" nets that are placed on dolphin to catch the tuna that swim below. But it would cap the number of allowable dolphin deaths at 5,000 annually, and says no tuna should be labeled dolphin-safe if there were an observed dolphin death during the catch.

Tuna companies in 1990 adopted "dolphin-safe" labels to affirm they were not selling tuna caught with the huge nets placed on dolphins. Gilchrest also said the bill would reduce use of other fishing methods that result in a heavy bycatch of turtles and other marine life. Critics say the administration is pushing this bill to lift the embargo because it fears it would lose if countries challenged the existing law at the World Trade Organization that governs international trade rules.

Mexico and other countries twice won challenges taken to the former General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade against the U.S. dolphin-safe law, but the United States vetoed those decisions. Hearings on the tuna-dolphin bill were scheduled to start Thursday in the Senate.



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