To save the world’s rarest marine mammal, conservationists seek ban on Mexican seafood imports

A decade of rescue crusades by conservation groups, hard-core eco-activists and the U.S. Navy have failed to prevent the world’s rarest porpoise from becoming fatally entangled in gill nets set for seafood in Mexico’s northern Gulf of California.

Now, with less than 20 vaquita left in the wild, the prospect of the species’ extinction within two years has prompted a last-ditch effort with significant economic and political consequences for the United States and Mexico.

Conservationists on Tuesday asked an international trade court judge in New York for a preliminary injunction banning imports of an estimated $16 million worth of fish and shrimp harvested with gill nets in an area of the gulf roughly a third the size of Los Angeles County and just three hours south of the border.

U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Gary Katzmann said he would rule within two weeks. His decision may hinge, in part, on whether the costs of implementing an embargo to save the species are greater than the costs of its disappearance.

An embargo on about 47 tons of corvina, 90 tons of sierra, 172 tons of chano and 1,150 tons of shrimp caught annually within 160 miles of the border “would create the necessary incentives to ensure that the Mexican government takes the gill net problem seriously,” Giulia Good Stefani, an attorney representing the Natural Resources Defense Council in the case, said in an interview, “just as embargoes catalyzed the transition to dolphinsafe tuna and turtle-safe shrimp trawling.”

Tighter control of the fishing industry may also help reduce the number of vaquita killed in gill nets that poachers use to snare a large endangered fish known as totoaba, whose swim blabbers are prized on the black market in China, where they are believed to have medicinal properties.

A gill net is a wall of netting hung vertically in the water that lets a fish get its head, but not its body, through the mesh. The fish’s gills get caught in the mesh as it tries to back out.

Katzmann took the request under consideration after hearing arguments presented by Good Stefani and Agatha Koprowski, a Department of Justice attorney representing defendants such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross; Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin; Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, and Chris Oliver, assistant administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Koprowski argued that a judicially imposed import ban could threaten high-level ongoing negotiations between the United States and Mexico regarding the fate of the vaquita, and undermine Mexico’s trust in the United States as a negotiating partner.

The lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute contend that by allowing gill-net-caught fish and shrimp from the vaquita’s range to be imported into the United States, the defendants are violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which requires the government to ban seafood from foreign fisheries that kill or injure marine mammals at a rate above U.S. standards.