think you guys might find this article from the Economist interesting...
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=8597083
Tuna conservation
Fins with the blues
Jan 25th 2007 | TOKYO
From
The Economist print edition
Japan finds itself on the other side of a conservation debate
FEW Japanese would go out of their way to eat whale meat. Most would defend their country's right to harpoon cetaceans to the edge of extinction. But that is more out of resentment at the cultural imperialism of the anti-whaling countries than any memory of the role whale meat played in feeding a starving nation after the war. But when it comes to tuna, most Japanese would go a long way for a morsel of
o-toro. Now that tuna risk going the way of the whales, the Japanese are among the first to start clamouring for conservation.
At a 60-nation gathering in Kobe this week, Japan urged the world's tuna conservation organisations to join forces in curbing “purse-seine” fishing, which uses large, circular nets that catch everything in their path. Japan, along with Australia and America, also proposed a global monitoring system—in a bid to protect the world's tuna stocks.
Widespread illegal and unregulated fishing has pushed tuna stocks near to utter destruction. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation, the global tuna haul increased steadily from 200,000 tonnes in the early 1950s to peak at 4.3m tonnes in 2003. Catches are now falling and prices rising—thanks largely to an insatiable demand for tuna, canned and raw, from health-conscious Americans and Europeans, and now from affluent Chinese as well. Meanwhile, as tuna prices soar, more fishing vessels put to sea.
In the western Atlantic, the number of mature blue-fin tuna—the most prized member of the species reserved for the best
sashimi and
sushi—that are capable of spawning has fallen by 90% since 1970. In the Mediterranean, stocks of blue-fin tuna have crashed by 80% over the past three years alone. The southern blue-fin has been so heavily over-fished, especially by Japanese fleets, that quotas have had to be lowered by a further 20% all round. In return, Japan has agreed to cut its own blue-fin take by 50% annually for the next five years.
As the biggest consumers of the blue-fin delicacy, the Japanese could find themselves priced out of the tuna market and forced to eat something else. On hand, thanks to the number of minke whales caught annually for “scientific research”, is a whale-meat mountain that at present is going to waste.
