Bridges Trade BioRes Review • Volume 3 • Number 2 • October 2009

EU, Canada Set to Square Off on Seal Ban

by Paige McClanahan

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When EU foreign ministers voted in July to ban imports of seal products into the European market, they set ablaze a trade and environment dispute that has been slowly gathering fuel for years.

Emotions run high on both sides of the debate. Animal rights groups - which have campaigned for the ban for more than three years - cheered the vote, but officials in Canada, home to the world’s largest seal hunt, say the embargo is unfair and have vowed to take their complaint to the WTO.

The European Parliament passed the embargo in a 550-49 vote in May, and the endorsement by EU foreign ministers on 27 July sealed the deal. The ban applies to all seal products, which includes pelts, meat, and omega-3 diet supplements derived from seal oil. But the regulation includes an exemption for seals taken by Canada’s Inuit communities, which consider the seal hunt vital to their cultural heritage.

Animal rights activists were jubilant. “Barbaric annual displays of animal cruelty will no longer be tolerated,” said Caroline Lucas, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament and long-time supporter of the EU ban, in a statement after the vote. The embargo “represents the will of European citizens,” and is “one of the most effective ways of shutting down demand” for seal products, Lucas stated in an interview.

Canada defiant

The vote drew a fierce reaction from Canada, where the sealing industry serves as a key source of income for some 6,000 families, mostly in the eastern coastal province of Newfoundland and Labrador, according to the Canadian government. Canada exports roughly 25 to 30 percent of its seal products to the EU, says a spokesman from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans; Norway, Russia and China are also major markets.

“The seal hunt is a major economic venture in many of our eastern and seaboard communities,” Canadian Trade Minister Stockwell Day told the BioRes. Day insists that the practice serves as a critical source of income and provides employment in a range of related industries including processing, ship-building and transportation.

Even before the EU ban was passed, many Canadian seal hunters were struggling to make ends meet. Fishing communities along the country’s eastern coast were hit hard by the collapse of Canadian cod stocks in the early 1990s and have never fully recovered. With other fishing options limited, seal hunting has offered many fishermen a critical income supplement, even though the hunting season provides employment for only two months each year.

“The seal hunt is tremendously valuable to those people in our remote Aboriginal, coastal, and northern communities who use it as a source of income at a time of year when economic opportunities are very limited,” Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said in an email message. “In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, several coastal communities can typically derive between 15 percent and 35 percent of their total earned income from the seal hunt.”

But with demand for seal products dwindling - thanks both to the global economic downturn and the threat of the European embargo - seal hunters are now hurting more than ever. This year, the price of seal pelts tumbled to C$14, down from a high of C$105 in 2006, and total income generated from the hunt took a nose dive. With the EU ban in force next year, demand for seal products will likely drop further, perhaps driving even more of the fishermen out of the industry.

A drop in prices resulting from the ban would also impact Canada’s Inuit communities, even though the EU regulation includes a specific exemption for the seals they hunt. Most of the products generated from the Inuit seal hunt are consumed locally and never make it onto the international market, says Duane Smith, President of the Canadian branch of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, but a fall in world pelt prices would mean lower profits for aboriginal seal hunters, even if their products never leave Canada.

‘It’s just politics,’ animal rights groups say

Such arguments fall on deaf ears among animal rights activists, who say that the economic importance of the hunt has been exaggerated and that the hunt itself is simply indefensible. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) argues that the seal hunt is characterised by “unacceptable cruelty”: seals are beaten with spiked clubs, impaled with steel hooks, or shot from moving boats - but rarely killed immediately. Such practices have no place in the Canadian economy, they say, and should not be allowed to continue.

“Economically, it doesn’t make any sense” to fight the EU ban, says Sheryl Fink, Senior Researcher and Projects Specialist at IFAW. In Newfoundland and Labrador, seal hunting represents less than half of a percent of provincial GDP, and the landed value of seal pelts ranked ninth among all fisheries in the two provinces in 2008. This year’s seal hunt, which ran from late March to late May, generated just C$1.2 million in income, Fink says, thanks in large part to the low pelt prices.

Instead of providing a boost, the hunt may actually be a drain on the Canadian economy, IFAW has argued, given that the government subsidises the industry by sending delegations overseas to promote the seal hunt, providing sealers with icebreaking services, and offering up federal grants for seal product development and marketing. All of this, Fink says, is done despite national surveys indicating that a majority of Canadians oppose the hunt.

“It’s just politics,” Fink says of Ottawa’s fierce opposition to the EU ban. Speaking out against the seal hunt is unthinkable for most Canadian lawmakers, who want to appear to be on the side of the country’s struggling blue-collar workers, she speculates. The lawmakers are just “trying to play to the home crowd.”

Indeed, opposing the seal hunt is a political non-starter in Canada. In March, Senator Mac Harb of Ontario introduced a bill to ban the country’s commercial seal hunt, while allowing the traditional Inuit hunt to continue. The legislation went nowhere; not a single other lawmaker came forward to support it. “This bill was stillborn,” a Liberal spokesman told Agence-France Presse at the time.

WTO case to come this autumn

Canada is wasting no time with its WTO challenge to the ban; the official request for consultations - the first step in the WTO’s dispute settlement process - should be filed at some point this autumn, says Trade Minister Day. Ottawa will be pushing the EU to allow seal imports from countries whose seal hunts meet strict international guidelines, Day says - he and other Canadian officials insist that the country’s hunt should easily qualify for such an exemption.

“We take our responsibility to ensure animal welfare very seriously,” says Fisheries Minister Shea. “We put in place strict guidelines to ensure that the seal hunt in Canada is carried out humanely and in line with advice from independent veterinarians.”

But winning such an exemption seems unlikely at best. Animal rights groups and some European legislators have called the seal hunt “inherently inhumane” and the EU resolution itself leaves little room for compromise:

“Given the conditions in which seal hunting occurs, consistent verification and control of hunters’ compliance with animal welfare requirements is not feasible in practice or, at least, is very difficult to achieve in an effective way,” the text of the ban reads.

‘No bearing’ on FTA talks

With a protracted seal dispute on the horizon, some observers have speculated that the trans-Atlantic tensions could derail ongoing EU-Canada free trade talks, but Canadian officials insist otherwise.

The seal dispute will have “virtually no bearing” on EU-Canadian trade talks, Day insists. “At a political level, people understand that it’s a stand-alone dispute on a particular product.”

A free trade pact would be a big win for Canada. One study predicted that an ambitious free trade pact could bring an additional US$8.2 billion into the Canadian economy each year and boost the country’s exports to the European market by 20 percent. The EU is Canada’s second-biggest trading partner, while Canada ranks eleventh on Europe’s list.

“As with any bilateral relationship, there are always some issues on which we don’t agree, but we must not let these disagreements get in the way of building a stronger economic partnership between Canada and the EU,” Minister Shea said. “During these times of economic difficulty, such relationships are all the more important.”

Paige McClanahan is Editor of Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.