A Tough Catch

Deadly Catch: Dwindling Tuna Supply Faces Insatiable Demand

Overfishing of tuna is taking its toll not only on the fish population but on firms and consumers. And the only way to salvage the tuna trade is to protect the species.

Global Demand and Supply of Tuna

Global demand for tuna has been rapidly increasing over the past decades.

• Nearly 6 million tons of tuna were caught worldwide in 2008, a staggering rise from 600,000 tons in the 1950s.
• Global tuna imports have increased from less than 3 million tons annually in 1976 to more than 3.5 billion tons in 2009.

 However, some species of tuna are not replenishing fast enough to keep pace with the increasing demand for the fish worldwide.

• Atlantic bluefin tuna could disappear from the Mediterranean by 2012, the World Wildlife Fund estimates. Meanwhile, the population of southern bluefin tuna found around Australia is approximated to have decreased more than 90 percent since the 1950s and could continue to decline. Japan consumes around 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of bluefin caught worldwide annually.
• The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation says that half of the world’s 19 non-bluefin commercial tuna stocks are likely to become or already overfished.  
• The number of breeding tuna in the eastern Atlantic dropped more than 74 percent since the late 50s, with the steepest decline occurring in the last decade. Meantime, the population in the western Atlantic plunged more than 82 percent between 1970 and 2007.
• Skipjack, the raw material for canned tuna, comprises 60 percent of worldwide tuna catch.

 Going Out of Business?

Given the steep decline in the global population of tuna, people earning a living from trading the fish may also go out of business. Boat owners, cannery workers, exporters, porters, truck drivers and fishermen stand to lose from depleting tuna supply. The fishermen are particularly hard hit by the drop in tuna population: fishing gets harder and the pay gets less.

To Ban or Control Tuna Trade

To help the population of tuna recover from relentless fishing, Monaco has proposed to register the Atlantic bluefin on Appendix 1 of the United Nations’ Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. The proposal aims to temporarily ban the trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna and transfer enforcement from the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, to governments. The proposal was co-sponsored by all but six European Union member states and the U.S., and was due to go before CITES for approval in March 2010

The move to ban tuna trade, even a temporary one, does not sit well with fishermen and exporters. David Martinez Cañabate, adjunct director of Ricardo Fuentes & Sons in Cartagena, Spain, says illegal tuna fishing activities can still be controlled, and that a ban would lead to the loss of jobs.

Other policies have been proposed or implemented.

• European Union member states rejected a proposal by the European Commission in 2009 to temporarily suspend the global trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna. These states include Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Spain, Italy and France, which all have thriving tuna markets.
• In Japan, however, the Fisheries Agency refuses to enforce quota on domestic tuna fishermen, saying that local tuna is not overfished.
• In the Pacific, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission is monitoring the number of tuna species such as the skipjack, which the commission says is still plentiful. But Miguel Lamberte, a ports man in General Santos City, or the tuna capital of the Philippines, claims that the supply of local skipjack declined 50 percent in 2008. Inadequate resources coupled with the proliferation of boats hamper efforts by Pacific governments to track tuna fishing activities.

 Breeding Tuna

Aquaculture of tuna, or farming tuna, is one of the measures undertaken to help find a common ground between protecting the fish and addressing the demand for it. 

First implemented in 1996 in the Mediterranean, tuna ranching now dominates the Atlantic bluefin tuna industry. There are some 70 registered tuna ranches in the Mediterranean, where bluefin quota is dragged to cages to be fattened for six months to a year. Tuna ranches are also found in Mexico, Japan and Australia.

Critics, however, claim that more tuna are being brought to the ranches relative to the quota, or catching underage tuna. ICAAT adopted for 2009 a regional quota that surpassed its own scientists’ recommendations by nearly three times.

Spanish firm Ricardo Fuentes & Sons is also investing in ways to help bluefin reproduce and grow in captivity. It supported a trial run by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography to inject Atlantic bluefin tuna females with synthetic hormones to set off egg-laying response. Of the 150 million eggs the institute helped to create in 2009, some 3 million were attempted to be hatched.

Of those, some 50 were expected to survive to the weight of one gram, or 50 days old.

Japan’s Kinki University also bred and raised bluefin in pens in 2002, while Australian fishing company Clean Seas successfully bred southern bluefin in a land-based tank in 2008.

Aquaculture of tuna, however, creates a lot of waste, experts say.

Source:

Krista Mahr, “A Tough Catch”, Time Magazine, November 9, 2009, pp. 34-39.