Want to make a fortune fast? Haul out your rod and reel and catch a bluefin tuna, coveted by the finest sushi chefs everywhere, and fly it to Japan. In early 2008, a big bluefin went for more than $55,000 (U.S.) at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. A year later, another record for a single bluefin was set at the same market - $105,000 (U.S.).
The seemingly outrageous prices for the fish make more sense when you realize that the Atlantic bluefin is nearing its last days. As the population dwindles in the Eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, prices for the ever-lonely fish go up. But the values are more than a grim reminder that classic supply and demand economics still function in some industries; they are also an indictment of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the organization charged with sparing the Atlantic bluefin from oblivion.
The ICCAT was supposed to be the bluefin's saviour. Instead, it has become the fish's executioner, making the commission a contender for the world's most counterproductive environmental group. Its nickname is the "International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas."
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Earlier this week, the organization's 48 member states, which include Canada, agreed to drop the bluefin's total allowable catch to 13,500 tons in 2010 from this year's 22,000 tons.
While the 39-per-cent reduction was the ICCAT's biggest, marine scientists and environmental groups say it's still not low enough to tilt the odds in the fish's favour. "The limit probably should have been smaller," says Canadian Brian MacKenzie, a professor at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark. "The population is at record-low abundance. In fact for 30 years, the stock has set record lows every year."
When the ICCAT was born 40 years ago, the bluefin was already in trouble. North Atlantic catches peaked in the early 1960s - since then, the bluefin has disappeared from the Black Sea and all but vanished in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Bay of Biscay. They are in short supply in the Western Atlantic, off Canada and the United States. The Eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean are their last holdouts, or were, until overfishing of the legal and illegal variety put the bluefin on the verge of endangered status in those waters too.
A report written a year ago by a group of scientists led by Mr. Mackenzie, called "Impending Collapse of Bluefin Tuna in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean," concluded that even if a near-complete ban on bluefin tuna fishing "were implemented immediately in 2008 and enforced until 2022, the population will probably fall to record lows in the next few years."
The ICCAT is a strange beast. Its secretariat, based in Madrid, does a fine job collecting data on tuna stocks (as well as Atlantic billfish and shark stocks) and hosting annual meetings in exotic locations - a seaside resort in Recife, Brazil, was the site of this month's event. But it is the member countries that, through consensus vote, decide whether to heed the scientific advice or go for the political compromise and preserve fishing jobs in Spain, Italy and other bluefin-mad countries.
Politics has always won. It won again in Recife, in spite of the hefty allowable-catch reduction. The press release would have you believe otherwise.
Three years ago, when the commission realized that the scientists' warnings about the alarming butchery rates of sexually mature bluefins were not exaggerated, it implemented a "rebuilding" plan for the fish. The quota, which had been just under 30,000 tons a year, started to come down, but not nearly as fast as it should have. Indeed, the ICCAT's own scientific committee at the time recommended a 15,000-ton catch.
The Recife release says the 2010 quota, at 13,500 tons, is "in line" with the scientists' recommendations. That may be true, but those recommendations were made three years ago, when the bluefin's recovery potential was better. And while 13,500 tons is the lowest quota in the commission's history, the scientific advisers said an 8,500-ton limit "would have higher probabilities of rebuilding the stock by [the target year] 2023."
Given the bluefin's dire state, a fishing moratorium would have been the only sensible decision. "ICCAT is not taking scientific advice," says Joe Powers, the Louisiana State University marine fish-stock professor who used to be the chairman of the commission's assessment committee. "If you had zero catch, you'd have much less risk."
The ICCAT is also setting the recovery bar fairly low. Last year's objective was to ensure a 50-per-cent probability that the bluefin would recover by 2023, giving the fish coin-toss odds of survival. This year, the figure was upgraded to 60 per cent, putting it into Russian roulette territory. Why not implement a quota that would give it 90-per-cent odds?
It seems that the memories of the member countries are exceedingly short. By the early 1990s, reckless overfishing had destroyed the Newfoundland cod fishery. A near total moratorium on fishing has failed to restore the stocks. Bluefin tuna stocks face a similar disaster scenario. The ICCAT is learning too late that saving fish and pleasing short-term commercial interests are conflicted double mandates. Or maybe it won't admit that until the last bluefin has been auctioned off in Tokyo for a million bucks.
Eric Reguly is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Rome.
