This ties in perfectly with the ideas and themes we have recently been discussing: humans want what they want when they want it.
The New York Times reported yesterday that a large (513 pound) blue fin tuna was caught and sold in Japan recently. How rare is a catch like that in today's depleted ocean waters? Rare enough to be worth $177,000 to a couple of sushi restaurants.
Here's what was reported:
"TOKYO (AP) -- A giant bluefin tuna fetched 16.3 million yen ($177,000) in an auction Tuesday at the world's largest wholesale fish market in Japan.
The 513-pound (233-kilogram) fish was the priciest since 2001 when a 440-pound (200 kilogram) tuna sold for a record 20.2 million yen ($220,000) at Tokyo's Tsukiji market.
The gargantuan tuna was bought and shared by the owners of two Japanese sushi restaurants and one Hong Kong-based sushi establishment, said a market representative on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information.
Caught off the coast of northern Japan, the big tuna was among 570 put up for auction Tuesday. About 40 percent of the auctioned fish came from abroad, including from Indonesia and Mexico, the representative said.
Japan is the world's biggest consumer of seafood with Japanese eating 80 percent of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefins caught. The two tuna species are the most sought after by sushi lovers.
However, tuna consumption in Japan has declined because of a prolonged economic slump as the world's second-largest economy struggles to shake off its worst recession since World War II.
''Consumers are shying away from eating tuna ... We are very worried about the trend,'' the market representative said.
Apart from falling demand for tuna, wholesalers are worried about growing calls for tighter fishing rules amid declining tuna stocks.
The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas in November slashed the quota for the 2010 catch by about one-third to 13,500 tons (12,250 metric tons) -- a move criticized by environmentalists as not going far enough."
What to you think? Is cutting the quota for 2010 by one-third enough? Or should we do more?
9 comments:
I think cutting at all is a step in the right direction, but I think it will not be as effective as they hope. People poach (hunt, not eggs) animals all the time, regulations aren't going to do much to stop these things if demands are still the same. So maybe they should cut it by...oh...half. Soon enough there will be no fish and then people will be hungry. Rather than just say "catch half as much fish!" they should say that and find some new replacement food. Sustainable replacement food. Dirt? Dead skin? Dust? Magma? Something that's regulated. Or maybe we need to start regulating the population instead. Yeh?
It reminds me of that Aldo Leopold saying about...how we belong to the land and the land does not belong to us.
LAURA
I like eating fish. Like, a lot. So sue me if I say that I just want to keep on eating fish. If one species kicks the bucket, throw 'em in a funeral home and give me the next kind; I'll eat it too. I know that this assignment is designed to get me thinking of environmental woes, but it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I will keep on eating fish as long as it's available to me. No, if it gets barred from supermarket shelves, I'm not going to throw on a wetsuit and jump in the Atlantic with a spear in hand, but if I can buy a chicken-of-the-sea can of tuna, I'm going to make a sandwich. And sure, naturalists will condemn me for "not fully grasping the transition from ocean to shelf," but I do understand it, and it hasn't changed my thinking. Sorry.
--BrutaLeviathan
Righto Laura! A good step indeed! I think that all around the world everything being eaten and used needs to be thought about and regulated. Maybe our biggest problem is that we are not thinking about what all the energy and resources we are using. If the amount of fish that is being caught is cut down then the number of home gardens should increase.
If we cut down on the amount of plastic and increase how much we recycle and reuse. Actually I can't even compare the two because Tuna is an animal, it's living and its going extinct because of the unability to conserve that humans have.
Baby steps as they say in the movie "What about Bob?" The only thing is if we take baby steps we may not save our world in time.
-Lui
This is a growing problem with little, and i mean very little hope for rebounding. The fishing industry is a tough and demanding job. It racks in mind boggling amounts of money every year and the demand for fish is greater and greater every year. Without a way to fix this problem the fish in the ocean will be lost forever. The blue fin tuna is one of the most prized fish in the sea. The raw power and blazing speed is a prized game fish and yet its meat has got millions of people hooked (haha). The tuna is being sold at an extrmely high price and soon there will be very few tuna left. It is one major problem, a problem that could very easily not be fixed. we need to do everything in our power to help control the fishing industry.
-Ben
I am confused: is this a economy article or ecology?
I guess I picked up more on the economical issues with the Tuna at the moment.
Thought:
Both Japan and America have been enduring a recession. Japan has hit it the the fishing business given that they are the largest fish consumer.
America, I predict is right behind them with the amount of things we process with fish like tuna in the can and boxed dishes that call for tuna.
With a decline in fish sales, I would think that population would go up. Though this would only mean for the populations of wild tuna. Those inbreeding grounds or on "farms" probably have declined due to a business standpoint: if you are selling less or there is less demand, you decrease your supply or sell it at a cheaper price. Either way, the populations being bred in "farms" has decreased.
The amount of fish that would increase in the wild I would assume is greater with less fishing and especially with such change in fishing rules and guidelines.
As for the 513 lbs fish caught recently: that is debateable as an issue. I mean the fish is there: there aer hungry people. But then again: the beauty of the genetics or evolution... if it got to that size.... this is a prime example of survival of the fittest and yet it dies at a fish net denying its true survival. It is a question of natural course or caught commercially. When we eat it, we may have stopped evolution in its past or this survival of teh fittest. Its defeat has nothing to do with what it had lived for. But then again: really? I am not entirely concerned.... since fish taste good and given the other side of the arguement: bigger fish, less smaller fish to fish. Bigger fish maybeable to provide more efficiently and we then kill less fish and get teh same amount.
Becca
If there is a trend of less tuna consumption then they should for sure drop the quota. There is less of a need for it so why continue harvesting the same amount.
They have been seeing these kinds of prices sense at lest 2001, that says a lot about how long there has been an issue. The fact that it has not changed says they want the fish so much that the price does not mater.
It seams that there is so little of the fish that the only way the business that catch them have to charged huge amounts just so that they can continue to work. Or they would not make the same profit because there is less product to sell.
In the end though catching less may just make it even worse. The people that do the work end up not making enough money to afford the fish them selves. People will have to change there look on how easy it is to lose these important species. As a whole people will have to amend the way they eat.
Gabriella
i think it would help, however they will have to do more. i was completly suprised that a fish could sell for so moch. i more suprised that some one would buy something so pricy that you would eat. although there are those golden vadkas or whatever.
but on the more important end of the stick there soon will be no more seafood. well maybe not too soon, but fish will not last long if we conitnued to fsh at this rate.
we have been talking abou spieces that ar endangered, we need to realize that not every animal can withstand the hning we have been doing over the hundreds of years. slowing down,or cvutting off fishing for a couple years would be one of the many ways you could save these animals.
i only hope that the rst f the world can realize this too.
poaching is another horrible thing that humans have been doing far too long. we need to buckle down and hunt down the poatchers and stop them. they have been getting away with it forever. if we could just stopp all the poatchersthen populations will gop up
sorry for getting off topic, its just what came to mind
~~keely
I am totally a guilty connoisseur of sushi, and tuna. I love fresh sea food, but if its only avalible at this coast Im not sure I will be able to keep eating the tasty fish filled sushi I eat from Yama so often.
Its hard to believe that a fish could sell for the price of an expensive show horse, a fancy car, multiple high end kitchen appliances, a small boat and more. Has the human race really been driven to pay this much for fish!?
If we are going to survive it is in times like these that we see opportunity to set out with a new goal, a motive to save what fish we have left. Of those that were caught, how many more like them were there? Will there be more schools of Tuna like this? Or was that one of the last??? How can we measure on the scale of the earth how many more times we can sit down to a meal of fresh tuna sushi? Do we need to count our meals, or save sushi (among some foods) as a special meal? Will sushi turn into a delicacy eaten only by those who can afford it? We may be seeing these monstrous fish for the last time, if so, do we realize the severity of catching the fish? Will the greater perhaps less informed world see this as an exciting catch, what about in 50 years when it goes in an old record book? What is the trend here?
I dislike being so cynical , but really the truth is its hard to find light of this matter, aside from the fact that this catch was made therefore showing there are some big fish left.
-Caileigh Bryant
Rome wasn't built in a day. All great things take time and hard work to accomplish, and repopulating the ocean of it's aquatic life, and in an even larger sense, regaining environmental stability throughout the world, is no exception. With an environmental problem as great as the one we face today, than no, reducing Japan's quota of fish consumption to one third of what it previously was is not enough. It just means that we have made significant progress, and that is what we need to continue to do.
I'm acually really impresed that a country that was used to consuming so much fish would even try to stop fishing one third of what they had become accustomed to. It's a really significant jump forward. I'll be even more impressed if this rule follows through.
Human beings are creatures of habit. It's not easy to convince a large group (such as the population of Japan) that they need to change, but it can be done. That's not say that it's just Japan that needs to change, or that the world only needs to change it's fishing habits. The environmenatl outlook on the entire planet needs to be altered in a big way.
Any one can destroy. That's easy. But if humanity is going to change for the better, than it's going to change one baby step at a time.
-erika
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