WASHINGTON — An international fisheries group set up to protect Atlantic tuna has done the opposite and driven one species of the fish, the bluefin, to the edge of extinction, environmentalists said Thursday.

On the eve of a 10-day meeting in Brazil of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), environmentalists accused the group of ignoring the advice of its own scientists and setting fishing quotas for bluefin tuna that have drastically depleted stocks.

... Lieberman said ICCAT has for decades set quotas above what its own scientists have recommended for bluefin tuna.

Those quotas are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets, which over-fish the species.

Combined with illegal fishing, this has caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.