BACK	ENVIRONMENT: Super Trawler Threatens Marine Food Chain

International concern about the negative effects of huge factory trawlers on the marine environment is growing as the 340- feet-long trawler, American Monarch, prepares to leave to fish for pollock roe on the Russian side of the North Pacific Ocean.

''Fish don't stand a chance against ships like the American Monarch,'' says Niaz Dorry, a campaigner with the international environmental group Greenpeace. ''Not only is it likely to jeopardize Russian stocks, but U.S. stocks and the North Pacific ecosystem as a whole are put at greater risk.''

The 65 million dollars American Monarch can net and process about one million pounds of fish per day. Its owner, the Seattle- based American Seafoods, is a subsidiary of Resources Group International (RGI), a Norwegian firm that plans to build 24 additional super-trawlers.

American Seafoods maintains that these trawlers are not a threat to fish populations.

''Once again Greenpeace is making exaggerated and even false claims in a effort to alarm the public and enlist support for their cause,'' said Bernt O. Bodal, president of American Seafoods. ''The reality is that a certain number of fish are going to be harvested - the number and size of the boats competing for those fish are irrelevant to the health of the stocks.''

But not just Greenpeace says that fish populations and marine ecosystems worldwide are threatened in large part from factory trawlers, like the American Monarch. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that nearly 70 percent of the world's commercial fish species are fully exploited, overfished, or otherwise in urgent need of management.

In 1950, no marine fish stocks were known to be overfished. Once abundant species like cod, shark, and tuna are in sharp decline, with blue fin tuna now listed as an endangered species.

''It's pretty simple,'' says Greenpeace's Dorry, ''Fish don't stand a chance against ships like the American Monarch. And, given the global reach of factory trawlers, no fish are safe.''

Fishing communities worldwide are now feeling the full impact of the factory trawlers, with millions of people losing their livelihoods, according to a new book ''The Plundered Seas'' published by the Sierra Club.

''Hundreds of millions of people build their lives and cultures around the capture and preparation of fish, which provide as much animal nutrition as all of the world's chickens and cows combined. But their relationship is changing with explosive speed,'' writes geneticist David Suzuki in the book's foreword.

Families that rely on fishing for their sustenance are now facing poverty and food insecurity as bounty from the oceans is depleted the world over, says the book. About one billion people - a fifth of the global population - rely on fish as their primary source of protein.

Several North Pacific pollock stocks already areb showing signs of distress. ''A glut of factory trawlers in the U.S. pollock fishery has created short, intense seasons with vast amounts of waste and dangerously high quotas,'' says Dorry.

The Central Bering Sea has been closed to fishing since 1992, due to overfishing by factory trawlers. Yet, many scientists believe the United States and Russian fisheries target the same basic stock of pollock.

The decline of many marine mammals and seabird species in Alaska, most notably the endangered Steller sea lion - that feeds on pollock, has paralleled the rise of factory trawling, say environmentalists. Fur seals, horned puffins, murres, cormorants, and other seabirds that depend on pollock are also in sharp decline.

Having been banned from fishing in Chilean and Peruvian water in 1997 amid concerns over its potential impacts on that South American country's fisheries, the American Monarch has spent most of last year docked in Seattle. Because it was built in Norway, the United States will not allow the vessel to participate in the two billion dollar a year fishing industry in U.S. territorial waters off of Alaska.

Since Dalmore Prokuct, a Russian company, agreed to a joint venture project with the company to fish for pollock in the North Pacific, the Monarch has been preparing to depart from Seattle to the Bering sea. The area is a popular target for factory trawlers because the Russians legally allow 40 percent of their pollock to be caught each year, while, for example, the United States allows 18 percent.

As the world's fisheries collapse, the temptation for fishing companies to make a quick buck - by ignoring the few effective conservation rules that do exist - has also increased, say environmentalists.

''There are international agreements and many laws,'' says Max Aguero, director of the Chile-based research organisation the Inter-American Centre for Sustainable Ecosystems Development.

Eventhough, Chile successfully banned the American Monarch from its waters after a legal battle, Aguero says that industrial fleets do not fully respect the regulations.

''Developing countries do not have the resources to enforce them, such as through good fleets to monitor the waters within their own boundaries. We need more means to police the oceans if we want to implement the regulations, and as an international community, we must find ways to self-regulate.''

As a starting point, Greenpeace is calling for a 50 percent reduction in fishing capacity of the global, large-scale fishing fleet, and an outright ban on factory trawlers in U.S. waters. (END/IPS/dk/mk/97)