The United States won a legal battle over "dolphin safe" tuna-labelling on Friday, when the World Trade Organization's appeals judges dismissed Mexico's argument that the US labelling rules violated WTO rules. More than 10 years after the dispute first came to the WTO in October 2008, the WTO ruling ended Mexico's claim that US labelling rules unfairly penalised its fishing industry.
Mexico said it had cut dolphin deaths to minimal levels but that it was being discriminated against by US demands for paperwork and sometimes government observers. Tuna catches from other regions did not face the same stringent tests, it said. Mexico will now aim to grow its tuna industry in other markets while attempting to re-establish a dialogue with the United States, said Luz Maria de la Mora, its foreign trade sub-secretary, on a local radio program.
"The industry will have to decide if it's convenient to modify its fishing method, but I don't think that will happen because it's a sustainable, responsible method," she said. The dispute centred on US refusal to grant a "dolphin safe" label to tuna products caught by chasing and encircling dolphins with a purse seine net in order to catch the tuna swimming beneath them. Mexico's tuna fleet in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean used such methods almost exclusively.
"Dolphin-safe tuna" could only be used to describe tuna captured in nets where there was no death or serious injury of dolphins. But the WTO found that "setting on" dolphins with a purse seine net was likely to kill or injure them, even if there was no observable evidence of such deaths and injuries.
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