MIREILLE THOM

I refer to the reproduction of part of an article by Frederick Forsyth in The Malta Independent on Sunday of 1 July under the heading “They wrote...” This article was initially published in the Daily Express of 22 June. The author had to resort to name-calling in the absence of any facts that might have held his story together. As this extract contains a number of gross inaccuracies, I think that it would be useful to revisit them.

Commissioner Joe Borg, did not recently receive the report on the status of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean as claimed in the article, but was made public last year by scientists advising the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. This international organisation, better known as ICCAT, establishes measures to manage fisheries of bluefin tuna, a highly migratory fish, in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. At the end of January, ICCAT allocated quotas for 2007 to those ICCAT members who fish bluefin tuna in these areas. A quota of 16,779.55 tonnes was allocated to the EU. This quota is consequently shared between the various member States concerned by this fishery, including Malta.

It is not correct to say that “Borg decreed a fishing ban until stocks could recover”. He did nothing of the kind. What the Commission was preparing to do at the beginning of June was to close the bluefin tuna fishery until next year because the Council of Fisheries Ministers had not yet adopted the necessary measures to allow for the full EU quota of 16,779.55 tonnes to be included in EU rules as part of the recovery plan. Until this was done, it would have been necessary to close the fishery because the provisional quota was close to exhaustion. However, on 11 June, the Council gave the green light to transpose the ICCAT conservation measures for bluefin tuna, including the full EU quota, into EU law. This meant that the fishery no longer needed to be closed because the EU vessels could legally catch the rest of the EU quota.

There was therefore no need for the alleged bullying episode to take place to force a doubling of the quota – which in any case would not be possible under ICCAT rules. The claims in the article you reproduced may make for amusing fiction but certainly do not reflect reality.

Ms Thom is spokeswoman on Fisheries and Maritime Affairs of the European Commission in Brussels.