The European regime of IUU certificates for importing tuna and other fish is being applied under very different procedures and interpretations in the different EU-countries. As a result EU tuna-importers are losing market shares to foreign tuna traders and to the European vessels that don’t have to apply IUU certificate rules.
The IUU certificate is being applied since January 2010 as a measure in the fight against illegal, unregulated and unreported fish entering the EU. But according to tuna importers in the EU, each country has -since then- organised its own different authority who applies the EU certificate regulation in its own different way according to criteria that are unclear and never have been established as such by the EU regulators.
“Sometimes it depends on the Ministry of Fisheries, sometimes it’s the Customs Officeâ€, says Mr. Jurgen Smet, Managing Director of Atunes del Maresme in Cádiz. “Here in Spain we cannot get clearance for the rest of the import procedures of a container of tuna as long as the Ministry of Fisheries does not approve the IUU certificate. That takes at least a week. In France, where the Customs Office is in charge, it is fixed in two days.â€
Also the criteria on which the IUU certificate is approved differ and are not always clear enough, Mr. Smet states. “In Spain they ask detailed technical information on the fishing vessel and even a satellite report of the vessel monitoring system to check where the tuna was caught. Or they want to know the content per container of tuna instead of the cargo as a whole. But why? This was not what the EU decided on how the IUU certificate had to be. As an import company you don’t know what to expect when the rules are being applied.â€
As a result, imports in certain harbors are much easier than in others. Spain is considered a difficult entrance for the IUU certificate, while for instance France, Belgium or The Netherlands are much quicker and easier in approving the paperwork. The impression is that in EU countries with a big own tuna fleet, the IUU regulation is used to make tuna imports from outside the EU more difficult.
According to Mr. Smet the application of the IUU certificate should be organised on a central European level to avoid these differences. “It would be very useful to have a central European agency that applies the same standards. Now we have an EU import regulation that is completely different in each country.â€
