Members of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas heeded calls by environmental groups and left bluefin tuna catch quotas in the Atlantic unchanged, while rejecting proposals to impose the first quotas for some shark species.
The commission, which is known as ICCAT and has 46 member countries as well as the European Union, decided to leave the 2014 quota at 1,750 metric tons in the Western Atlantic and 13,400 tons in the Eastern Atlantic at a weeklong meeting in Cape Town that ended Monday.
"We are very happy about that," Sergi Tudela, head of fisheries for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, told reporters in Cape Town. "It was very important for ICCAT to stick to science and to follow the scientific recommendations against some pressure from the contracting parties to increase the quota this year."