Politics: Fishing for Dick
This morning's Washington Post included a story which should complete your 2002 scrapbook for breathtaking rollback of environmental regulations by the Bush Administration. It seems that the Department of Commerce has decided that we should change the standard for so-called 'dolphin-safe' tuna. It once was that you couldn't use tuna fishing methods that threaten dolphins if you wanted to call you tuna dolphin safe and send it to the US. Under the new, relaxed rules, tuna fishers only need to avoid actually killing dolphins. How they do it (and if they do it, frankly) is up to the fishermen. Apparently, the rules state that observers on board the tuna vessels can attest that no dolphins were killed or seriously wounded in the tuna fishing. (I can only imagine who pays the observers.)
The problem isn't necessarily that dolphins might still get killed, because we've got bigger fish to fry (forgive the pun). It's that the whole rule was devised to discourage fishing techniques that use dolphins as targets to identify and fish schools of tuna. This is the methodology that leads to dead dolphins, as the nets encircle the fish and the mammal. Now that minor obstacle is gone. Even if the observers on the boats actually exist, the fishing operations will simply work like this: Killed no dolphins, sell these fish to the U.S. Oops, killed some dolphins, we'll sell these fish to somebody else. We shift from a policy which hopes to perpetuate something positive (less dolphin death in tuna fishing) to a policy which is designed only to technically achieve a very limited outcome (less actual tuna served in the U.S. which was caught alongside dead dolphins).
That tuna will carry the 'dolphin-safe' label in the U.S.
This morning's Washington Post included a story which should complete your 2002 scrapbook for breathtaking rollback of environmental regulations by the Bush Administration. It seems that the Department of Commerce has decided that we should change the standard for so-called 'dolphin-safe' tuna. It once was that you couldn't use tuna fishing methods that threaten dolphins if you wanted to call you tuna dolphin safe and send it to the US. Under the new, relaxed rules, tuna fishers only need to avoid actually killing dolphins. How they do it (and if they do it, frankly) is up to the fishermen. Apparently, the rules state that observers on board the tuna vessels can attest that no dolphins were killed or seriously wounded in the tuna fishing. (I can only imagine who pays the observers.)
The problem isn't necessarily that dolphins might still get killed, because we've got bigger fish to fry (forgive the pun). It's that the whole rule was devised to discourage fishing techniques that use dolphins as targets to identify and fish schools of tuna. This is the methodology that leads to dead dolphins, as the nets encircle the fish and the mammal. Now that minor obstacle is gone. Even if the observers on the boats actually exist, the fishing operations will simply work like this: Killed no dolphins, sell these fish to the U.S. Oops, killed some dolphins, we'll sell these fish to somebody else. We shift from a policy which hopes to perpetuate something positive (less dolphin death in tuna fishing) to a policy which is designed only to technically achieve a very limited outcome (less actual tuna served in the U.S. which was caught alongside dead dolphins).
That tuna will carry the 'dolphin-safe' label in the U.S.
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