It should come as no surprise that Greenpeace is trying to capitalize on Earth Day coverage to build visibility for its false attacks on canned tuna sustainability. After all, this eco-extremist group seizes every opportunity (no relevance needed) to repeat its baseless accusations about the health of tuna stocks used for canned tuna.

What is surprising are the lengths to which Greenpeace will say and do anything, including contradicting its own demands, using any media attention to rally its supporters to give money, signing more petitions and even hosting useless recipe contests.

Case in point. Greenpeace applauds Huffington Post’s unscientific attempt to portray canned tuna as a product that is high in CO2 emissions. Ironic from an organization that has spent a lot of time and money promoting carbon intensive pole-and-line tuna fishing as a sustainability panacea to replace the less carbon intensive tuna catch methods currently used today. In fact, pole-and-line fishing gear uses almost 300 percent more fuel than purse seine fisheries. Not to mention that pole-and-line fishing cannot meet the existing demand for tuna, which means denying millions of families access to an affordable, nutritious and ready-to-eat protein.

But hey, this is Greenpeace we’re talking about. Facts don’t matter, only self-promotion and fundraising — regardless of costs to the same environment it purports to save and those pesky humans who need healthy foods to survive.

via IntraFish

It would be easy to dismiss IntraFish’s take on Greenpeace’s campaign against canned tuna as merely an opinion, everyone is entitled to one. That particular opinion ultimately suggests the marginalized activist group is likely to “permanently change” how tuna is harvested and sold (Another Win For Greenpeace, March 7, 2012).

But rather than take the easy way, perhaps it is more appropriate to ask IntraFish to actually investigate the very real and negative impact Greenpeace’s demands would have on American families’ diets if they ever came to fruition, while probing the group’s goals for ulterior motives and unintended consequences.

IntraFish quotes hyperbolic Greenpeace campaigners lauding retailers, who are bullied into submission, as “progressive, comprehensive and visionary” but does not do the homework that would expose a campaign that is short on facts and long on fundraising. Read Full Post »

Earlier this month, Greenpeace sought to remind its supporters  that Taiwan’s pledge to better manage Pacific fisheries was full of hot air. How did it plan to do that? By launching a hot air balloon of course. Comically, however, wind prevented the balloon from actually flying. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for Greenpeace’s failure to launch serious reforms.

Let’s juxtapose the latest Greenpeace campaign with efforts undertaken by members of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF). Months earlier, the ISSF analyzed research compiled by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) Scientific Committee. And based on that rigorous scientific evidence, the ISSF developed recommendations to better manage tuna stocks, minimize bycatch and protect endangered species, including:

1. Complete closure of purse seine fishery in the Western and Central Pacific Oceans (WCPO);
2. Stop all transactions with purse seine vessels that transship at-sea to minimize illegal, unreported and unauthorized (IUU) fishing activities;
3. Adopt a limited entry, closed-vessel registry to reduce the number of fishing vessels to a level that is commensurate with the productivity of the WCPO fisheries; and
4. Prohibit deliberate purse seine setting around whale sharks, as well as, adopt mitigation measures for oceanic white tip sharks and blue sharks. Read Full Post »

from The Huffington Post

In a recent Huffington Post column, Greenpeace Board Member Jeffrey Hollander writes, “Canned tuna is not a product generally synonymous with innovation.” This is rich coming from an organization that has been using the same pressure tactics, often based on hyperbole and outright lies, for the past 40 years.

In fact, the people who put nutritious and affordable tuna in America’s lunch bags and on dinner tables have been improving the way tuna is found, caught, and kept viable for generations to come. That unheralded success has taken many years of continuous innovation and effort that will surely continue.

Consider the challenge. You are on a small boat in an ocean twice the size of Canada. In that ocean you are looking for only two species of tuna (skipjack and albacore) that roam for thousands of miles. How do you find and catch those fish and little else?

Random nets strewn about would catch everything. A fishing pole in the open ocean would catch next to nothing. Experience teaches us that migratory fish like tuna are attracted to floating objects like tree branches or logs in what is an otherwise featureless aquatic wilderness. These floating objects are known by the technical term Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), and they make fishing for tuna more efficient. Remarkably, innovations like FADs help keep bycatch — fish caught other than tuna — to less than 5 percent of the total catch.

But no one fishing method is perfect by itself. That’s why tuna fishermen use a variety of gear. As the methods improve, the mix of gear changes. This has been true for years. And as anyone who has dropped a line in the water knows, there is no one method that is 100-percent free of bycatch.

Greenpeace’s Jeffrey Hollander also says that it is becoming harder “to hide from the reality of what is happening to our oceans.”

That’s true… and that’s good news.

What’s happening in our oceans is that fish populations once thought to be on the brink are coming back. And those still facing challenges have sustainability oversight in place. Albacore and skipjack tuna stocks are healthy and thriving. And because of FADs, tuna bycatch rates have never been lower, which means tuna fishermen can better avoid catching other species of fish or sea turtles.

The bad news is that tuna brands and retailers in the U.K. have been bullied by Greenpeace into commitments that look good on paper but do little to improve actual tuna sustainablity. In fact, Greenpeace’s “solutions” will impact the health of people dissuaded from eating tuna and may have vastly more damaging consequences for ocean ecosystems.

Greenpeace’s says it wants tuna to be caught only with a fishing pole and line, or with no FADs — in other words, with no modern fishing techniques. Think about how that might work in practice. You’d need a lot more boats covering a lot more ocean in search of tuna that could be almost anywhere. That means more engines burning more fuel for more time, enough bait to decimate stocks of bait fish, and a massive new carbon footprint.

If, in reality, this approach is such a bad idea, why does Greenpeace talk about it incessantly? The reason is simple: Greenpeace needs something to talk about.

To raise the huge amounts of money it needs to support a global anti-business organization with its ships, helicopters, blimps, plushy costumes, and media centers, Greenpeace needs a cause to get donors excited — not excited enough to do independent research, but just enough to write a check and move on. That’s why Greenpeace is always talking about whales, and tuna, and tigers, and pandas — what media experts call “charismatic megafauna.”

Notice how they don’t talk about dolphins anymore. Why? Because innovations in tuna fishing like FADs made canned tuna dolphin-free decades ago.

No, the best problem for Greenpeace to attack is one that features an attractive animal and an impossible solution. That way they can raise money for years to come and never actually solve the rhetorical “crisis” they created.

Followed to their logical ends, Greenpeace’s solutions would put companies out of business, and perhaps that’s the goal. But it’s not a sustainable one for Greenpeace, because without the big bad companies to rail against, supporters won’t write checks. So, look for Greenpeace to continue its full-blooded fundraising effort via a half-hearted sustainability campaign.

Gavin Gibbons is the director of media relations for the National Fisheries Institute, the nation’s largest seafood trade association. As NFI’s spokesman, he has been featured in everything from the Washington Post to USA Today and has been the voice of fisheries issues on CNN, NPR, and the Fox Business Network. He is also a featured blogger for AboutSeafood.com andSeafoodSource.com.

from The Daily Caller
February 22, 2012

By Gavin Gibbons

On the surface it is easy to regard campaigns by the global environmental activist group Greenpeace as amusingly irreverent or, as PR Week, the trade magazine for public relations professionals, described one such recent attack against the toymaker Mattel, “compelling.” But if any news outlets would ever take a hard, scrutinizing look inside Greenpeace’s media relations tactics, they’d find a method rife with irresponsible harassment, inaccurate claims, and wildly unrealistic demands.

It turns out, for instance, that the broadside against Mattel was based entirely on Greenpeace’s misrepresentation of lab results that the activists claimed “show that packaging used by leading toy brands regularly contains Indonesian rainforest fibre.” But following that Greenpeace declaration and the fawning media coverage that resulted, the very lab that Greenpeace had enlisted denounced them as frauds. “We have not and are unable to identify country of origin of the samples,” the CEO of Integrated Paper Services, Bruce R. Shafer, said publicly. “We are unable to comment on the credibility of the statements Greenpeace has made regarding country of origin.”

The company that sourced the paper materials to Mattel, Asia Pulp & Paper, went even further, pointing out that some 95 percent of the packaging materials came from recycled paper and that the remaining 5 percent is sourced from environmentally certified forests around the world. So, not only was the paper environmentally upstanding, Greenpeace’s PR effort was, as AP&P put it, “completely unsubstantiated and false.”

A similar sort of attack by Greenpeace is currently underway against America’s most well-known canned tuna brands, each members of our trade association. Greenpeace is demanding, bizarrely, that all tuna be caught one at a time with a fishing pole. Seriously. Greenpeace has no answer for what this would cost consumers or the fuel, boats, and labor needed to pursue this antiquated method, one that could never hope to meet global demand.

And although Greenpeace insists it wants a “serious dialogue” on tuna sustainability, here are just some of the outlandish tactics they have been using:

● Posting online videos of violent and sexualized caricatures of the tuna companies’ cartoon mascots, all of which can be readily viewed by children.

● Manipulating unwitting people on street corners to place harassing, scripted phone calls to company switchboards.

● Dressing up a staffer in a plushy shark costume to accost parents and children in supermarket parking lots to tell them that “Nemo” may be killed.

● Encouraging their Facebook followers to place scripted robocalls to tuna companies, many of which include accusations of “rape,” “thievery,” “piracy” and assorted other threats.

Apparently that’s what passes for clever PR thinking at Greenpeace these days. But these are hardly exceptions. Recent campaigns of theirs against other companies have depicted popular children’s characters decapitating a tiger with a chainsaw, shooting a caged polar bear in the head, or having costumed children blown up from space by a “Volkswagen Death Star.”

But the tuna companies are taking a stand on principle. Along with conservationists like WWF and established governing bodies, we are taking part in the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation to protect the long-term viability of the world’s fisheries. Greenpeace, unsurprisingly, has refused a seat at the table.

That’s likely because causing immediate — and well-publicized — commercial harm to the companies they target is their real objective. That’s what gets them media attention, which translates into financial donations. Presumably it also strikes anxiety into future targets of Greenpeace bullying which, like the toymakers, are more likely to cave quickly than confront the accusations, no matter how patently false.

In the same issue in which Greenpeace’s destructive Mattel campaign was praised, PR Week editor Steve Barrett urges that “engagement, trust, and authenticity” ought to be core values, especially in “cause-related” activities. Readers might wonder when the magazine, or any other enterprising journalist for that matter, will apply those standards of examination to Greenpeace for a change.

But when we pointed out to Barrett that Greenpeace falsified lab results in the attack on Mattel — according to the very lab Greenpeace had hired — thereby deceiving the public (and, by extension, his own readers), Barrett was untroubled. “You can’t hide the fact that it got bucket loads of coverage — i.e., objective achieved for GP,” he wrote to us. “We don’t take moral/ethical/political stances … on the PR activities of campaigning groups.”

I somehow doubt the companies being fraudulently targeted would agree. But here’s another important public relations principle that we would encourage our fellow communicators to consider: Don’t let anyone stand between you and your customers with a threat.

For our part, we intend to speak directly to consumers about the ways in which self-interested, radical activist groups are co-opting the press in order to mislead the public about one of the most environmentally sound sources of protein and essential nutrients on the market. So far, it’s been going well. The feedback we’ve received from ordinary consumers indicates they are keenly aware how Greenpeace distorts the record and they know better than to listen to people who lurk in parking lots ranting at people. That anecdotal analysis is backed by a core piece of research: We know of no measurement showing that Greenpeace has the slightest impact on seafood sales.

Gavin Gibbons is the director of media relations for the National Fisheries Institute.

Greenpeace USA’s letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal suggests the U.S. and global tuna processors are not aligned on sustainability goals and takes credit for European processors’ commitment to reduce bycatch using FAD free, pole and line or any other sourcing method that has bycatch rates comparable to purse seine fishing on free swimming schools.

The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has said that through the work it is leading to reduce bycatch in tuna purse seine fisheries, the amount of discarded bycatch in purse seine fisheries on floating objects will be reduced by 50% by 2015.

What Greenpeace doesn’t tell you is that most of these commitments, whether made by individual companies or by ISSF, are virtually identical including the timing for achieving them.

The fact remains Greenpeace devotes zero dollars to tuna sustainability research or bycatch mitigation efforts. Greenpeace continues to reject offers to actually participate in sustainability work as part of the ISSF’s Environmental Stakeholder Committee. And Greenpeace continues to raise money for itself off its contrived plight of the tuna campaign. These are all points publically made in the Wall Street Journal Op Ed published on November 8th.

Greenpeace has not only lost its way as an organization, it has lost its ability to see past the choir to whom it so often preaches, before passing the hat to raise a few more bucks. In its letter, Greenpeace insists its tuna campaign is addressing a growing popular concern. Reading the comments string that follows its letter and the comment string that follows the Op Ed of November 8th reveals not only no such popular concern but sound and directed criticism of Greenpeace.

Yesterday, Greenpeace sent out yet another canned tuna campaign fundraising appeal. Keep in mind Greenpeace is a massive, multi-national, environmental activism company that has an annual budget of $300 million and thousands of employees. But still it pleads poverty with its own membership.

In a roughly 11 paragraph email Greenpeace pleads for cash no fewer than five times:

• “Please, rush us your most generous contribution today…”
• “we need to raise much-needed resources to support the campaign…”
• “Please make a donation today…”
• “Help us by… rushing us your most generous contribution today.”
•  “One of the easiest things you can do to help after you make your contribution is forward this email to your friends.”

And how much of those generous contributions are used to fund science that’s focused on tuna sustainability?

That’d be zero.

Greenpeace has historically relied on the shock value of its campaigns to divert attention away from the lack of scientific consensus behind its false allegations. In the case of canned tuna that pattern continues.

The fact is Greenpeace is wrong on the science. Greenpeace itself is not actively working on any science-based tuna sustainability research and Greenpeace is aggressively trying to raise tens of thousands of dollars in donations for “tuna sustainability” based on a manufactured crisis.

Launching blimps, producing violent, offensive videos aimed at children and harassing seafood-company employees, at the office and over the phone, are all part of a campaign designed to dazzle the average consumer with theatrics in order to avoid entering into a science-based dialogue.

This appears to be precisely what happened to New York Times food blogger Mark Bittman, who fell for Greenpeace’s antics and turned their talking points into a September 20 online column. Bittman naively parrot’s Greenpeace’s rhetoric while endorsing with gusto the childish stunts perpetrated by the group.

Listening to Greenpeace’s puppets is one thing but becoming a Parrot is another. Perhaps Bittman and other members of the media should take a look behind the curtain before embracing Greenpeace.

Listen for yourself:

John Geddes

Managing Editor

New York Times

Dear Mr. Geddes,

Today New York Times blogger Mark Bittman asks the question, is it Time to Boycott Tuna Again? His column was based entirely on information provided by the activist group Greenpeace. While we recognize his work was presented as his view, we challenge the New York Times not to let ignorance of subject and a lack of research hide behind the cloak of opinion. It is recognized and appreciated that the Times should maintain strict separation between editorial and opinion content; however, the standards under which both are produced should be universal.

Mr. Bittman writes about the current state of canned tuna sustainability.  He apparently failed to do much research (at least he presents none in his piece) other than repackaging Greenpeace talking points.

Nowhere does he mention the work already being done by responsible, mainstream environmentalists through the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), agroup created through a partnership between WWF, the world’s leading conservation organization, and canned tuna companies from across the globe. Nowhere does he mention the commitments these companies have made, the global recognition they have earned, or the millions of dollars they expend in sponsoring research for conservation groups and the tuna community. This appears an odd omission when opining about tuna sustainability.

Does Mr. Bittman even know about this group or the stakeholders from throughout the environmental community who work with them? Read Full Post »