Starting Points: overfishing

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Sep 20, 2009

Tuna Town in Japan Sees Falloff of Its Fish - NYTimes.com

OMA, Japan — Fishermen here call it “black gold,” referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars.

The cold waters here once yielded such an abundance of bluefin, with such thick layers of tasty rich fat, that this tiny wind-swept seaport became Japan’s answer to California’s Napa Valley or the Brie cheese-producing region of France: a geographic location that is nearly synonymous with one of its nation’s premier foods.

So strong is the allure of Oma’s tuna that during the autumn fishing season, tens of thousands of hungry visitors descend on this remote fishing town, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. On a recent Sunday, dozens of tourists, filmed by no fewer than three local television crews, crowded into an old refrigerated warehouse on a pier where Oma’s mayor presided over a ceremony to slice up a 220-pound bluefin into brick-size blocks for sale.

“This is a pleasure you can only have a few times in your life,” said Toshiko Maki, 51, a homemaker from suburban Tokyo, as she popped a ruby-red cube of sashimi into her mouth.

But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations.

Just a decade or two ago, each boat here could routinely catch three or four tuna a day, fishermen say. Now, they say Oma’s entire fleet of 30 to 40 boats is lucky to bring in a combined total of a half-dozen tuna in a day.

The problem, they say, is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or China. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks. According to local newspapers, there have been repeated incidents of small fishing boats from Oma and other ports intentionally cutting such trawl lines.

“I’m furious at Tokyo’s bureaucrats for failing to protect our tuna,” said Hirofumi Hamahata, 69, the president of the Oma fishermen’s co-op, who has worked as a commercial fisherman since age 15. “They don’t lift a finger against the industrial fishing that just sweeps the ocean clean.”

Such flares of temper are rare in normally reserved Japan, and especially in conservative fishing communities like this one. But this is a town fiercely proud not only of its tuna, but also of how it catches them: in two-man open boats, using hand-held lines and live bait like squid.

Mr. Hamahata described catching tuna in this traditional way as a battle of wits against a clever predator that he called “the lion of the sea.” After hooking one, the contest becomes a battle of strength: he said it typically took one or two hours to pull a big tuna close enough to the boat that it could be stunned with an electric charge.

In one Hemingwayesque battle, Mr. Hamahata said he fought for 12 hours with a huge bluefin that finally broke free.

Despite such difficulties, Oma’s fishermen said they preferred their generations-old fishing method because it allowed them to catch just large, adult fish, leaving the smaller young ones to sustain local stocks.

Fishing experts say the overfishing is a result of a broader failure by the Tokyo authorities to impose effective limits on catches in its waters. Indeed, Japan, which consumes some 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of top-grade tuna caught worldwide, has lobbied hard against efforts to limit tuna catches, such as are now being proposed by European countries for the Atlantic Ocean.

“There are too many entrenched interests whose objective is maximizing profit, not sustainable use,” said Masayuki Komatsu, an expert on the fishing industry at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

In Oma, catching a big tuna has become rare enough — and the market price high enough — to be cause for celebration. On a recent evening, family members rushed to the pier to greet one boat that had caught a 410-pound bluefin, whose tear-shaped body had to be hoisted off the boat’s deck with a forklift.

Moving quickly to gut and ice the fish to preserve its value, workers from the fishing co-op presented the footlong dorsal fin as a trophy to the captain’s wife, who said it was the first catch in 10 days. The workers said the fish would fetch more than $10,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.

“Catching a tuna is like winning the lottery,” said another fisherman, 23-year-old Takeshi Izumi, who said his boat had yet to catch a tuna this season.

To maximize prices, Oma has registered its name as a trademark that can be used only with tuna brought ashore here. This has made Oma a brand that is gaining recognition even outside Japan. In March, a sushi chef from Hong Kong paid some $50,000 to buy half of a 280-pound Oma bluefin.

The prices can be even higher: In 2001, a Japanese buyer paid a record $220,000 for a 444-pound Oma bluefin.

One unfortunate side effect, said the town’s mayor, Mitsuharu Kanazawa, was that few of Oma’s 6,200 residents can now afford their own town’s tuna. However, he said the fish have been a boon to the town’s economy, pumping in some $15 million a year from fishing and tuna-related tourism.

After a popular 2000 TV drama featured Oma, the town increased tourism by starting a three-day tuna festival every year in mid-October, which now draws 15,000 visitors a day, as well as hordes from the Japanese media, Mr. Kanazawa said.

“We Japanese have a weakness for brands,” said Ryuko Nishimura, 43, a homemaker from Kuroishi, a three-hour drive away. “It makes the tuna taste two or three times more delicious.”

But with tuna now in danger of perhaps disappearing, the mayor said the town was struggling to find another local product to keep the tourists coming.

“We tried kelp and abalone,” Mr. Kanazawa said, “but nothing has the appeal of tuna.”

Aquaculture's Rise Brings Both Optimism, Concern - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

Aquaculture Boom Raises Concerns

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 20, 2009

By the end of this year, the world is projected to reach an unheralded but historic milestone: Half of the fish and shellfish we consume will be raised by humans, rather than caught in the wild.

Reaching this tipping point is reshaping everything from our oceans to the livelihoods and diets of people across the globe. It has also prompted a new round of scientific and political scrutiny, as researchers and public officials examine how aquaculture is affecting the world's environment and seafood supply.

"Hunting and gathering has reached its maximum," said Ronald W. Hardy, who directs the University of Idaho's Aquaculture Research Institute and co-authored a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We've got to grow more."

The drive to bring fish "from egg to plate," as Hardy puts it, has the potential to answer a growing demand for seafood worldwide, as well as reduce some of the imports that compose more than 80 percent of the fish and shellfish Americans eat each year. But without technological advances to improve efficiency, it could threaten to wipe out the forage fish that lie at the bottom of the ocean's food chain and potentially contaminate parts of the sea.

And consumers will have to accept that they are eating a different kind of fish than the ones that swim wild: ones that might have eaten unused poultry trimmings, been vaccinated, consumed antibiotics or been selected for certain genetic traits.

Although there is still debate about farming's share of the world fish supply -- the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates it stood at 44.3 percent in 2007, whereas the PNAS study says it will reach over half in a matter of months -- no one questions that aquaculture has grown exponentially as the world's wild catch has flattened out. In 1970, farmed fish accounted for 6.3 percent of global seafood supply.

This trend reflects global urbanization -- studies show that as more people move to cities, they are consuming more seafood -- but it is changing the world's seascape as well. Vessels now venture to the Antarctic Ocean to catch the tiny krill that have sustained penguins and seals there for millennia, and slender poles strung with farmed oysters and seaweed jut out of Japan's once-pristine Matsushima Bay.

Chinese freshwater fish farms are replacing traditional agricultural plots there, according to Karen Seto of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Nature Conservancy senior scientist Mike Beck said some Chinese bays are so crammed with net pens that they are no longer navigable.

Moreover, fishermen such as Shannon Moore, who catches salmon in Washington state's Puget Sound, worries about how farmed fish's parasites are affecting wild stocks. "These young wild critters are pretty small, and they can ill afford to have these hitchhikers on them," Moore said, referring to parasites that plague juveniles migrating near Canadian fish farms.

But aquaculture's proponents suggest that farming represents the best chance of giving people a chance to make a living off the sea. Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, noted that three-quarters of his group's members are either current or former commercial fishermen, and although the average age of Mainers with a fishing lease permit is 57, the average for those with a fish-farm permit is 33. "It's really the next generation of watermen," Belle said.

Jane Lubchenco, who used to write about aquaculture's environmental impacts as an academic before taking the helm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced this month that her agency will come up with a national policy to address fish farming. "It's important that aquaculture be done in a way that's sustainable," she said in an interview.

America now ranks as a minor player in global aquaculture: It accounts for 5 percent of the nation's seafood supply, but the $1.2 billion in annual production is 1.5 percent of the world's total. In 2006, China supplied 62 percent of the world's farmed fish and shellfish, according to FAO.

But farms are expanding in traditional U.S. fishing strongholds, such as New England, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, and freshwater fish farms continue to operate in states such as Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. Freshwater species such as catfish, trout and tilapia still dominate the nation's farmed fish production, but such niche products as oysters with regional appellations and sustainably raised shrimp and caviar now fetch a premium in the United States.

Michael Rubino, who directs NOAA's aquaculture program, said he envisions a future in which the country is "producing seafood from a range of technologies, with wild catch on one side, aquaculture on another, and a whole range in-between."

This prospect has set off a flurry of activity and experiments, as scientists and entrepreneurs try to resolve the environmental challenges fish farming poses. The biggest one involves a fundamental quandary: one needs to feed many small fish to bigger fish to produce ones consumers crave.

One-fourth to one-third of the world's fish catch is landed just to produce the fish oil and fish meal that fish, poultry and pig-farming operations demand, depleting stocks of forage fish such as anchovies, sardines and menhaden. Aquaculture has become more efficient. In 1995, it took an average of 1.04 kilograms of wild fish to produce 1 kilogram of farmed fish, according to the PNAS study, and in 2007 it took 0.63 kilograms to achieve the same result. The sector's share of global fish-oil and fish- meal supplies has doubled in the last decade, as the industry has boomed.

Patricia Majluf, who directs the Center for Environmental Sustainability at Cayetano Herida University in Lima, Peru, watched fleets decimate Peruvian anchovetta stocks in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, setting off an environmental chain reaction in which the area's seabird populations crashed.

"There was no supervision, no control whatsoever," said Majluf, adding that it took a change in government in 2006 to institute a more restrained fishing policy that guarantees at least 5 million tons of anchovies remain in the sea to sustain the ecosystem. "Since then, you're seeing this amazing recovery."

"We've got to solve the feed problem," said Stanford University professor Rosamond L. Naylor, the PNAS study's lead author. "We've got to come up with an alternative that breaks the connection between aquaculture and wild fishing of forage fish."

Hardy experiments with everything from pulling out corn protein right before the corn is fermented into ethanol to stringing together algae to form the omega-3 fatty acids people expect from their fish.

Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Natural Resources Committee and plans to introduce legislation in the near future to help establish a national aquaculture policy, said the current situation "requires a comprehensive response" from the federal government.

"There are commercial demands; we can't ignore that," Capps said. But she added: "Doing it at all means doing it carefully."

Jul 31, 2009

Unpopular, Unfamiliar Fish Species Suffer From Become Seafood

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

If the slimehead were still a slimehead, it wouldn't be in this kind of trouble.

An arm-long fish with the look of a prehistoric fossil, the slimehead lived in obscurity a quarter-mile deep in the ocean. The fish was known mainly to scientists, who named it for its distinctive mucus canals.

But then, in the 1970s, seafood dealers came up with a name that no longer tickled the gag reflex. This was the beginning of the "orange roughy."

And, very nearly, the end. With this tasty-sounding name, the slimehead was widely overfished.

On Thursday, a long-awaited report on the world's seafood stocks declared that 63 percent of these species are below healthy levels.

The seafood study, released online Thursday in the journal Science, is one of the most comprehensive looks at the contents of the world's seas. An international group of scientists examined an unprecedented amount of data about harvests and fish populations from the Bering Sea to the Antarctic, and they studied thousands of species from the Atlantic cod to the Australian jackass morwong.

Some of those worst-hit were fish that have been renamed to make them more marketable. For threatened animals on land, a more attractive name might be a blessing. But for these creatures -- slimeheads, goosefish, rock crabs, Patagonian toothfish, whore's eggs -- it was a curse.

That fishermen have turned to them shows what's left in the ocean. Today's seafood is often yesterday's trash fish and monsters.

"People never thought they would be eaten," said Jennifer Jacquet, a biologist at the University of British Columbia. "And as we fish out the world's oceans, we're coming across these species and wondering, 'Can we give them a makeover?' "

The study's lead author, Boris Worm, was following up on a study that predicted that if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world's seafood stocks would collapse by 2048. He said the latest study actually revealed something surprising: a reason for optimism.

About half of the depleted species might actually have a chance to recover, the scientists found, if given enough protection.

But, Worm said, species such as slimehead still illustrate what's gone deeply wrong.

As the world's catch has grown more than fivefold since 1950, he said, overfishing has spread from "rivers to coastal areas to the [continental] shelf to the deep sea." As they went farther and deeper, fishermen have brought back fish that people didn't have recipes -- or even words -- for.

"We didn't even consider fishing [for] these things 15, 20 years ago," said Worm, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada. Today, he said, "we have another choice. And that is rebuilding what we've lost off our doorstep."

The depleted stocks include familiar fish such as the Atlantic cod, which has been fished so heavily that the Georges Bank population off New England is at 12 percent of healthy levels. The Gulf of Mexico's red snapper stocks are at 6 percent of what scientists say they should be.

To fill the void, some seafood vendors have fraudulently sold cheaper fish as grouper or snapper.

But in other cases, they have given the fish a more palatable name -- preying, environmentalists say, on the arm's-length relationship Americans have with their seafood.

The most famous case involves the Patagonian toothfish and the Antarctic toothfish -- drab, yard-long creatures from the cold waters near the South Pole. In the 1970s, they were rechristened "Chilean sea bass," although they are not, biologically speaking, sea bass.

The toothfish's new name and the firm, oily meat found a huge market. In recent years, environmentalists have said both toothfish are now threatened with heavy fishing, including by "pirate" fishing boats that ignore conservation laws.

The slimehead had similar troubles. Environmentalists say they live long -- 100 years or more -- and reproduce slowly, so it takes a long time to replace fish that are caught.

And along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, fishermen used to toss back a toad-colored fish that looked like it was 30 percent mouth and 50 percent stomach: the goosefish. Then somebody noticed that the tail meat could be cut into tasty fillets. Then, someone thought of "monkfish." Harvests jumped five times from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and the fish's numbers dropped.

"You went from unexploited, discarded fish -- bycatch, essentially -- to a targeted species that became overfished," said Thomas Munroe, a zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The fish was the same as it was as a goosefish."

Federal officials say Chilean sea bass imports are now certified to make sure they came from sustainable operations, that orange roughy are better protected and that monkfish have recovered to safe levels.

But Seafood Watch, a guide produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, still recommends that consumers avoid Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and monkfish.

Other names have been invented more recently. A few years ago, a Maine seafood dealer renamed the Atlantic rock crab the "peekytoe crab." He's sold hundreds of thousands of pounds since then. A species of sea urchin -- a ball of green spines that Maine lobstermen used to call a whore's egg -- have found a niche in U.S. sushi restaurants under its Japanese name, uni.

Early next year, look for what might be the biggest test yet of the seafoood market's response to a new name. Catfish farmers are going to introduce especially large, thick fillets to white-table restaurants under the name "delacata."

The naming of seafood is policed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which keeps a Seafood List of acceptable market names. One of the more recent additions: snakehead can now be sold as "channa."

But FDA officials said that, in practice, they don't punish many restaurants for calling fish by unsanctioned names. "It is not a high priority . . . unless it involves a food-safety hazard," said Spring Randolph, a consumer safety officer.

At the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, President John Connelly said the seafood industry works to police itself -- recently going after a California restaurant that was selling a Vietnamese cousin of the catfish as "white roughy." But he said there's nothing wrong with giving new names to unfamiliar creatures.

"A company is always going to find a name that customers are comfortable with," Connelly said. "A cattleman, for instance, doesn't sell 'bull testicles.' They sell 'Rocky Mountain oysters.' "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073002478.html

Jun 5, 2009

Global Problems Briefs #1

US Corporations Size Up Their Carbon Footprints (series of news stories)
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009061_692661.htm?link_position=link1

It's Not Too Late to Save the Tuna (news)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124416336079787523.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Cape Verde's Largest Island Struggles to Balance Tourism, Development (news)
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-04-voa56.cfm

Pharma's New World Order (news)
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/June/05060902.asp