One study suggests oceans will be stripped clean of all fish by 2048. Bluefin is imminently at risk of commercial extinction. The wildlife charity WWF forecasts that breeding stocks of the fish that migrate from the Atlantic to spawn will be wiped out in the Mediterranean by 2012.
Although the legal bluefin catch is set at 22,000 tonnes, conservationists suspect the actual catch is 60,000 tonnes, four times the maximum that marine scientists recommend. After studying catches and sales, Charles Clover, the environmental journalist behind the film The End of the Line, believes that businesses involved in the ransacking are deep-freezing 20,000 tonnes of bluefin a year for later use.
The fisheries body responsible for numbers, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), sanctioned a bluefin catch of 22,000 tonnes this year in defiance of its own scientists who advised no more than 8,500-15,000 tonnes.
WWF said the decision was a "disgrace". In fisheries circles, ICCAT is sometimes referred to as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna. Rules forbidding the use of spotter planes to identify tuna shoals are flouted and boats are thought to have connections to organised crime in Italy.
Willie Mackenzie, a Greenpeace fish campaigner, said: "Mitsubishi are best known in the UK for making cars or electrical goods – and for most people it comes as a bit of a shock to find out they are one of the world's biggest traders in the endangered bluefin tuna. Bluefin tuna are as endangered as rhinos or tigers."
3 comments:
Moocow pumps intensify the greenhouse effect. Would you like anchovies with your steak?
Ok, but if you were on the verge of starvation and had to choose either tuna or Yorkie Dinkie as your means of survival, which would you eat?
I don't eat farmed meat where possible. Rabbit all the way - with the occasional squirrel.
Intelliwench: definitely the tuna. I'd rather eat koala eyeballs before touching the Yorkie Dinky again.
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