Over at Environment 360, marine biologist Carl Safina explains why a fishing ban on bluefin tuna is sorely needed:
Twenty years ago, I first proposed a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. The population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico was down by about 80 percent. The population that breeds in the Mediterranean was down by half. Now, things are worse, and the principality of Monaco has made another proposal to ban international trade in this species. It is gaining momentum, and on March 3 the United States announced its support for the initiative. The European Union, which has been wavering in the face of pressure from its fishing industry and Japan, should now end its fence sitting and get behind this proposal.
Such a trade ban is enacted under a treaty called CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). CITES is why, for instance, there’s a ban on ivory (which is why there are still elephants in Africa).
So why is it that the danger to the bluefin tuna populations has been known for decades, yet nothing yet has been doen about it? Money:
Because bluefin tuna fishing worldwide is driven by prices paid in Japan, where individual fish have sold wholesale for up to $175,000, every population is depleted. A population in the tropical Atlantic, which in the 1960s had yielded the highest-ever catches of bluefin anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean, appears extinct. Formerly thriving fisheries in the North Sea are gone. In some recent years, U.S. boats have landed only about 15 percent as many fish as two decades ago. The European population is now in a plummeting tailspin.
Driving all this, remember, is prices paid in Japan. An international trade ban would quell the intensity of the fishing. But a lot of money is at stake.
You would expect an industry that depends on the bluefin tuna for its existence would be careful not to overexploit it, but the irony of the situation is that the closer it is driven to extinct the more valuable it becomes, as long as there are loons willing to pay such absurd prices for a single fish. Sure, once the tuna is extinct the industry will crash, but until then somebody will make huge profits, which is why it was worth it to delay a ban for two decades and still oppose it now.
It’s a dynamic you see time and again in environmental issues, with immediate profits trumping less immediate but clear dangers. It’s why it took two decades to get the bluefin tuna ban back on the agenda again, but also why it took a similar timespan to get an ozone layer treaty, why we’re still trying to get proper CO2 treaties, and so on ad infinitum. In all these examples the danger is clear and understood, the science behind it is uncontroversial, but vested interests (industrial users of CFK gasses in the case of the ozone layer, the fishing industry in the case of the bluefin tuna) are powerful enough to thwart implementation for years or even decades.
This is why we’re currently flooded with newspaper articles throwing doubt on the IPCC reports on climate change –when you look into the accusations there’s little meat to them, but as long as they sow some doubt in the casual reader they help reduce the demand for action. Here in the Netherlands we’ve had the environment minister herself throw doubt on the IPCC and get angry with the scientists to “get the science right”, based on no more than a few minor errors in the reports, but errors which got a lot of media attention.