Fuck. No fishing ban on bluefish tuna — species expected to die out:
The conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which closed in Doha on Thursday, could not agree to a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. No limits will be set for the fish to end up in Japanese sushi.
The rejection in the Qatari capital has already been dubbed “Tunapocalypse Nowâ€. Five species of hammerhead shark suffered a similar fate at the summit in Doha. They didn’t make it onto CITES’ ‘Appendix I’, the list of species in which international trade is banned. Fins of these sharks are a common ingredient in Asian soup, but the rest of their body is often tossed overboard.
Japan, which annually spends hundreds of millions of euros importing bluefin tuna, emerged as the victor in Doha. North African nations such as Libya and Tunisia, whose regimes profit from the tuna trade, were also satisfied with the convention’s outcome. The big losers are the US and the EU, even if some European countries, namely France, Spain and Malta, are home to sizable tuna industries that will doubtlessly have celebrated the convention’s results.
Everybody loses
All things considered though, everybody loses. Scientists now regard, as a real possibility, the extinction of the Atlantic blue fin tuna and some species of shark. They have predicted a sudden and irreversible drop in population levels in the coming years. This happened to the, once immense, Atlantic cod population that used to live off the North American coast in the 1990s.
Emphasis mine. It’s no good just cursing the Japanese for this; as the article points out, the same sort of thing happened to cod, through the greed of American, Canadian, British etc. fishers. To be honest, even if the ban had gone through it would still have been like slapping a plaster on a gaping chest wound. Fishing in general is just not sustainable as we’ve known for decades.