U.N. treaty to aid 'international' fish.

The United Nations began accepting signatures this week for a treaty to protect some 20 percent of the world's fishes. It covers not only those pelagic giants-such as sharks, tuna, and marlins-that can migrate throughout the ocean, but also the stocks of smaller, less migratory fish whose range merely straddles the 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of at least one country.

Each coastal nation can manage fishing within its EEZ-usually through licenses and quotas on catches. But beyond that, "on the high seas, it has basically been lawless," observes David Wilmot, director of the Ocean Wildlife Campaign in Washington, D.C.

Though several international commissions have sprung up over the years to regionally manage fish in international waters, such groups have not provided the level of protection that would be called for under the new treaty, notes Wilmot. For instance, Carl Safina of the National Audubon Society in Islip, N.Y., points to the heavily exploited bluefin tuna-each of which can stretch 15 feet in length, weigh more than 1,500 pounds, and command up to $50,000. Though western Atlantic stocks have declined by 80 percent since 1975-"due in part to the international demand for gourmet sushi"-he says that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has no management plan for them.

The new treaty would be the first to "put the precautionary principle into fisheries management," explains attorney Suzanne Iudicello of the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C. Uncertainty plaguing data on current fishing impacts cannot be used to justify putting off limits on catch size or regulating equipment, she says: "You must err on the side of the fish."

A report this year by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome noted that already "69 percent of the world's marine stocks, for which data are available, [are] either fully to heavily exploited (44 percent), overexploited (16 percent), or very slowly recovering from overfishing (3 percent) and therefore in need of urgent corrective conservation and management."

To enforce the treaty, notes Lisa Speer of the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City, the nations that ratify it could "deter"-and sometimes impound-any ship that appears to be violating the management policies.

The fish protection treaty will become legally binding as soon as the governments of at least 30 nations ratify it, a process that is expected to take a year or more.