Bluefin tuna is much sought after in Japan for sushi dish. Environmentalists strongly demand that the bluefin tuna must saved and there should be international ban on its trade. But the local fishing industry wants France to stay out of any international agreement. French cabinet ministers are divided and a government decision, delayed earlier this month, is expected shortly.
It is true that Mediterranean is the recent home of the stocks of bluefin tuna. In November ICCAT, the intergovernmental body in charge of managing tuna, lowered the total allowable catch to 13,500 tonnes for 2010. France, Italy and Spain together account for about half of this and 80 percent is exported to Japan.
It is informed that Monaco has listed the bluefin tuna by listing the species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). European Union remained neutral in this matter fear the social impact on coastal towns. French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo backs a strict CITES listing which means an outright ban on international trade. Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire told that there should be strict monitoring of the species.
French town Sete feel the difference, as its fishing fleet has enjoyed a 15-year boom in tuna exports, fuelled by Japanese demand for the fish whose red flesh is prized by sushi lovers and commands high prices in Asia. Francois Catzeflis, a biologist at Montpellier-II University and a member of Greenpeace, said that as soon as military sonar equipment was available for civil use, they would buy it.
It is said that the day they ban wild tuna fishing, we will be left with industrial tuna farming. And that’s eating crap. The World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) said recently that tuna could become extinct as soon as 2012 because of the size of the Mediterranean fleet and estimates of undeclared fishing. Scientists struggle to work out how big bluefin stocks are.
