WASHINGTON — A report issued today by conservation groups finds that 11 nations have at least some fisheries that fail to meet U.S. standards for preventing whale and dolphin bycatch. Entanglement in fishing gear kills hundreds of thousands of marine mammals around the globe every year.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) requires the U.S. government to ban seafood from nations that fail to meet the same strict standards to prevent marine mammal bycatch that U.S. fishers must meet. But the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recently delayed any decision on blocking imports from noncompliant nations until 2025.
“We found that some foreign fisheries are doing almost nothing to monitor or prevent marine mammal bycatch, and U.S. officials must follow the law and block certain seafood imports linked to deadly entanglements,” said Dianne DuBois, staff…