It must be nice to be one of those whose task is conserving the wild resources of the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic fishery managers meet once a year in attractive places remote enough to deter most of the world’s media, such as Dubrovnik, Antalya and Marrakesh. This year’s meeting is taking place amid the coconut palms and water features of the Summerville resort near Recife, in Brazil. It is hot and humid but some of the officials present have Tahiti to look forward to next month, where they will meet under the guise of a different organisation to discuss the decline of fish stocks in yet another ocean.

It would be wonderful to report that the progress made by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas and Billfishes (Iccat) matches the five-star standard of the Summerville resort, but of course it doesn’t. The people who meet every year to set catch limits for the tunas, swordfish, sailfish, marlin and sharks of the Atlantic belong to arguably the most dysfunctional environmental organisation on earth. Its members have entirely failed to achieve their founding aims.

In 1969, when Iccat held its first meeting, the decline of the bluefin tuna on the western side of the Atlantic was already giving cause for concern. The North Sea population was commercially extinct and the Brazilian population — just off the coast here — was being wiped out. Now it looks as though the stocks in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean are going the same way. The bluefin, which once roamed the Atlantic in vast shoals like buffalo on the American prairies, is nearing its last round-up. By the end of the 1960s, the numbers of bluefin in the Atlantic were thought to have declined by half. Since then they have declined by another 80%. As with the blue whale in the 1970s, it is on conservation’s front line.

The bluefin is not alone. Less well known is the plight of the Atlantic’s sharks. The most endangered, such as the bigeye thresher, are in worse shape than the bluefin because they reproduce at a rate of two pups every 14 years instead of laying millions of eggs every year. Even if we stop catching them, they may not recover. Shockingly, Iccat has yet to set any limits on catching sharks.

Like the whaling nations before them, the tuna managers have had many opportunities to take sound scientific advice and do the right thing over the years. They have taken none of it. Iccat has reduced quotas from time to time, but never as much as advised.

Iccat has been unable to agree penalties or to enforce them on its members. It remains in thrall to short-term commercial fishing interests, strongly represented on delegations from the European Union and other Mediterranean countries. Officials from Britain and the other pro-conservation countries are strangely under-represented on the EU delegation.

The pressure was finally on last week. An editorial in The New York Times urged the United States to come back with nothing less than the closure of the bluefin fishery. The chairman of the Iccat meeting this year, Fabio Hazin, a Brazilian professor, warned that “if we do not follow the instructions science is giving us, our credibility will be irreversibly jeopardised”. Unfortunately, scientists have to labour under the perverse recovery plan for the bluefin that Iccat agreed three years ago.

Its objective is to ensure there is a 50% probability that bluefin stocks recover by 2023. Wouldn’t a 95% probability of recovery have been a better objective? Well, yes, but this is Iccat. The plan was clearly designed to ensure that its members could go on fishing. Dr Gerald Scott, Iccat’s chief scientist, revealed that achieving the recovery plan with any certainty would require the bluefin quota for next year to be set nearer to 8,500 tons than the 15,000 tons that many at the meeting thought they could get away with.

Some of the fishing nations — including Libya and even Japan, the biggest tuna-consuming nation — have begun to discuss whether it would be easier to stop fishing than try to enforce an 8,500 quota on 20 fishing nations that is open to fraud. A joint United States-Japanese proposal has emerged, testing the water for a total closure of the bluefin fishery. By this weekend a sense was emerging that this was the last chance saloon.

Even if rational decisions emerge from Iccat’s deliberations later today, it needs to be asked whether these will make up for its 40 years of mismanagement of the sea. Whatever is decided, the reality is that it may be too late for some species, such as the slower-growing sharks, to recover.

The reality is that Iccat has failed and no longer deserves to exist. Its “fishery managers” do not deserve their handsome perks and free polo shirts embossed with bluefin tuna. Iccat was the first body of its kind, a flawed model for the network of regional fishery management bodies that now manage the world’s oceans, all of which are catering for, to varying extents, short-term commercial interests. Sooner or later the problem of how to manage the oceans needs rethinking. Endangered species, the ecosystems they depend upon and, let’s face it, our own future food security, deserve better champions than this.

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