Tuna fishing suspended in Japan
"Tuna fishermen from Japan's largest fisheries co-operative have suspended operations temporarily in a bid to replenish dwindling stocks of the fish.
About 230 Japanese vessels will stop fishing for periods totalling more than two months over the next two years.
Tuna stocks globally have fallen dramatically in recent years as more people opt to eat sushi and sashimi in an effort to be more healthy.
The suspension is expected to cut Japan's catch of tuna by 5%.
"The main reason for our suspension is sluggish fishing offshore," the co-operative said in its website";
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/7537011.stm
To be honest, while i welcome the news, i don't think these measures are anywhere near enough. Tuna take at least 12 years to sexually mature (and its these mature large adults that are the most targeted by fishermen), how on earth is not fishing them for a few months going to help the fish to replenish their stocks?
"“The bluefin tuna is really a symbol of the myopic greed in some parts of the fishing industry,” said Steven Teo, a biologist at the University of California at Davis and a member of the team that discovered Atlantic migrations of bluefin.
“It isn’t greed that’s driving this, it’s mismanagement” by other nations, said Rich Ruais, the director of the East Coast Tuna Association, which represents tuna fishermen. “The U.S. fishermen are blameless in this crisis. We’ve followed the science. We’ve done so much more than our fair share to conserve this resource, and we don’t get the credit from environmental groups that we should.” American fishermen have lost at least a billion dollars by limiting their catch over the decades, he estimated, while fishermen from other nations have continued to overfish.
The United States delegation urged a three- to five-year moratorium on bluefin fishing in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean at the international tuna commission’s annual meeting last fall. Ruais fully supported this measure, but described the proposal as “dead on arrival” due to the European community’s lack of a conservation ethic.
Even if fishing were halted, it may already be too late for the tuna to recover. “Sometimes when we overfish the population, it can change to a different regime,” said Teo. “The whole ecosystem can change so much that it’s very hard for the population to recover.”;
http://scienceline.org/2008/03/07/env-locke-tuna/
"Some varieties of tuna, such as the bluefin and bigeye tuna, Thunnus obesus, are threatened by overfishing, which dramatically affects tuna populations in the Atlantic and northwestern Pacific Oceans. Other areas seem to support fairly healthy populations of some of the over 48 different species of tuna —for example, the central and western Pacific skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis—but there is mounting evidence that overexploitation threatens tuna populations worldwide. The Australian government alleged in 2006 that Japan had illegally overfished southern bluefin by taking 12,000 to 20,000 tonnes per year instead of the their agreed 6,000 tonnes; the value of such overfishing would be as much as USD $2 billion. Such overfishing has resulted in severe damage to stocks. "Japan's huge appetite for tuna will take the most sought-after stocks to the brink of commercial extinction unless fisheries agree on more rigid quotas, wildlife campaigners warned today" stated by the WWF.[2]";
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuna
Japan takes the most tuna of all, and has had a history of deliberately overfishing the fish even when there are clear quota's as to how many fish it is supposed to catch. Japan owes it to the rest of the fishing nations to make up for this by severely having its quota's reduced on the whole- by over-fishing the tuna, it not only was bad towards the fish itself, but by overfishing the fish it pretty much stole fish that should have been there for other countries etc.
But, to be honest...
In an ideal world, i really think tuna fishing should be banned for at least 13 years- Japan was forced to stop hunting whales for quite some time at one point as so to help whale stocks recover, so why can't the same be done for tuna? Yes it might be a big money making fish, but if we all keep on fishing it the way we currently are, its not going to be around in the next 50years.
Who wants tuna to go the way of the lobster? Once upon a time lobsters used to be so numerous that people used them as fertilizer on their fields- now days though lobster numbers are nothing like they used to be and are an expensive dish served only on classy restaurants etc.
I think people can start to help out the tuna problem more by taking a few more easy measures. For example, i think that tuna sushi should no longer be sold in cheap sushi variety pack trays- not everybody likes tuna, and i don't think people should just wastefully by the sushi for a few other types of sushi in the variety tray. I think if people want to eat tuna sushi/sashimi it should be sold separately- with this measure, i think it would help cut down on a lot of tuna waste.
I don't think tuna should be sold as an ingredient in pet food either- pets don't need to eat it and there's plenty of other fish substitutes that we can serve up instead that i'm sure the animals won't complain about.
