Cloud over Bluefin tuna despite price
A bluefin tuna sold for a record US$3.1 million ($4.6m) at the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s new fish market, but behind the celebrations hides a worrying tale of overfishing and dwindling stocks.
Kiyoshi Kimura, who owns the Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain, paid 333.6 million yen for the 278kg fish. It was the first auction to be held at Tokyo’s new Toyosu fish market after last year’s the move from the famous Tsukiji market.
The price at the predawn auction was nearly 10 times higher than the price paid at last year’s auction — albeit for a considerably smaller fish — and roughly double the previous record, also set by Kimura, in 2013.
The fish was caught off the coast of northern Japan’s Aomori prefecture by fishermen from the small town of Oma.
Bluefin tuna is highly valued for its taste in sushi restaurants, but decades of overfishing have sent stocks plummeting.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species classifies the Pacific Bluefin tuna, or Thunnus orientalis, as “vulnerable,” with a decreasing population.
“The celebration surrounding the annual Pacific Bluefin auction hides how deeply in trouble this species really is,” said Jamie Gibbon, associate manager of global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“Its population has fallen to less than 3.5 per cent of its historic size and overfishing still continues today.”
In response to the growing scarcity of the fish, Japan and other governments agreed in 2017 to strict quotas and restrictions on fishing, in an attempt to rebuild stocks from 20 per cent of historic levels by 2034.
That has caused considerable unhappiness and some hardship in Oma. Oma tuna is known as the “black diamond” of tuna, because fishermen still use traditional manual fishing methods, rather than trawling, allowing them to catch the fish intact.
But to stick to the quota, fishermen there decided to go slow in the summer and concentrate instead on fishing in the autumn and winter. They initially found tuna harder to find than usual and catches low. December’s catch was better.
Hundreds of Japanese fishermen protested against the new quotas outside the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in June.
Gibbon lamented that Japan and other countries were already lobbying for higher catch quotas for 2019, just one year into the 16-year recovery plan, while also noting reports of Japanese fishermen discarding and not reporting dead bluefin to avoid exceeding their quotas.
Pacific Bluefin tuna can reach 3m and 550kg.
They have two main breeding grounds, off the coast of Japan. Most remain in the western Pacific all their lives, reaching from Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the north to New Zealand in the south. But others, when they reach one to two years of age, make a 11,000km migration to waters off California and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, returning after two to four years to spawn in the same western Pacific waters where they began life.