Is Tuna Penning Sustainableff

Is Tuna Penning Sustainable; by Major Tony Abela from Malta Star

We have last week that there are some definite advantageous with Tuna Penning, especially if it is taken seriously and under strict monitoring and control. So why where ever you look at the tendency is that the general public and the environmentalists and their NGO groups are against it and to say the least very worried about it.

One of the main factors for this situation is the fact that it appears that nobody can, within reasonable accuracy, state what are the harms and hazards that might results from this type of aquaculture, and even worst what are the long-term environmental impact effects, which may result from tuna penning.
One very strong known fact is that in the long term, tuna penning will further dwindle the wild tuna world population to that extent that the tuna, especially, the blue and yellow fin tuna, will get exterminated. Why is this? Therefore this leads to a very basic issue – is tuna penning sustainable?

One has to look at the details of the tuna penning methods and can easily realise that we are interfering with the natural reproduction process of the wild tuna population. The technique known as 'tuna penning' isn't strictly aquaculture, since no juveniles are bred and the farming isn't sustainable. Instead, tuna are taken from the wild, enclosed in nets and dragged to shore where they are corralled in pens and fattened on an oil-rich diet. The aim is to supply the insatiable Japanese market, which prefers oily tuna for sushi. Because penning is covered neither by legislation governing aquaculture, nor fisheries regulations, the industry is open to exploitation.

Around the world, fishermen facing declining quotas for high-quality bluefin tuna are discovering that one way to maximize the return on their reduced catch is to add value to it, only in a novel way: catch ‘em live and fatten ‘em up.

The notion of capturing bullion tuna and holding them for the market has been around for a quarter of a century. It started in St Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1976 but stopped a few years later when the giant Atlantic bluefin tuna altered their migration path. Since then, various forms of bluefin aquaculture have been developed, the best known in Port Lincoln, Australia, but with operations spread around the world in Croatia, Malta, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Japan and Mexico.

Speaking at the 19th Annual Fisheries Week of the Azores in year 2000, Professor François Doumenge, director of the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, reported that farmed bluefin production had increased exponentially from 4,130 mt in 1997 to 17,750 mt in 1999. Doumenge, an authority on bluefin aquaculture and economic development, has been researching tuna since the early 1960s and estimates that in the future, 80% of the world’s bluefin could come from aquaculture. “What we see now is the start of the phenomenon,” he said. “Tuna aquaculture is up and running at prices that are profitable. In the next two years, tuna aquaculture will develop.”

An ad hoc Working Group of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) agreed a definition for this practice in order to be sure that the same process it had in mind when considering the Bluefin Tuna Farming.

The agreed definition is the following: “Tuna farming currently involves the collection of wild fish, ranging from small to large specimens, and their rearing in floating cages for periods spanning from a few months up to a few years. Fish weight increment and change in the fat content of the flesh is obtained through standard fish farming practices. Confinement of captured fish during short periods of time (2-6 months) aimed mostly at increasing the fat content of the flesh, which strongly influences the prices of the tuna meat on the Japanese sashimi market, can also be referred to as ‘Tuna fattening’. Future tuna farming practices may evolve to encompass a closed life cycle, i.e. the rearing of larvae in laboratory conditions”.

So by this definition, it stands to reason that the natural breeding and reproduction of wild tuna is grossly interfered with and instead of increasing the number of wild tuna we are definitely hindering their multiplication, as in the pens the tuna will not regenerate new tuna fish as if it would have done if left in the wild. To quantify this effect we have to look at some statistics to see how many wild tuna is being caught in its infancy or early in its lifetime.

The preference for farmed tuna is evident in their increasing exports to Japan, which shot up from 200 tons to about 4300 tons in just three years.

Another part of the problem is that tuna farming falls in between the definitions of a standard fishery involving capture of wild stock, and true aquaculture where fish are bred and reared in captivity. It is considered a post-harvest practice and therefore falls outside the regulations put in place by GFCM and ICCAT. This situation has resulted in an unregulated growth of tuna farming. Last year, the 12 tuna farms operating in the Mediterranean region produced 11,000 tons of tuna, compared to almost nothing five years ago. This is more than half of the world's total.

“Tuna farming in the Mediterranean is not true aquaculture but just an added final step of a standard fishery which relies on the already overexploited wild tuna stock. This new practice is expanding the market for bluefin tuna, resulting in a further increase in fishing effort,” says Dr Sergi Tudela, Fisheries' Officer at WWF Mediterranean Program.

On 14 February 2002 the WWF (World Wildlife Fund)warned that a massive expansion in tuna farming threatens to decimate the already over-fished wild tuna in the Mediterranean, and called for better control of this harmful new trend.

Last year, the 12 tuna farms operating today in the Mediterranean region - many of them subsidized by payments under the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy - produced 11,000 tons of tuna, compared to almost nothing five years ago. This is more than half of the world's total.

According to WWF, some fish caught for farming are juveniles that will the wild and renew the wild stocks of this already threatened species. WWF urges the governments around the Mediterranean and the European Union (EU) to decrease the fishing effort on the wild tuna stock, and to regulate this new trade when reforming the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) this year.

”Blue-fin tuna is the new 'foie gras' of the Mediterranean, resulting in a real 'gold rush' in the region,” said Paolo Guglielmi, Head of the Marine Unit at the WWF Mediterranean Program Office. “If nothing is done, wild blue-fin tuna will completely disappear from the Mediterranean Sea within the next years, perhaps with no possibility of rebuilding stocks.”

”The highly migratory blue-fin tuna is already threatened by direct fishing in the Mediterranean. This so-called tuna farming avoids every regional and international rule set-up to conserve and manage the fishery,” said Dr Simon Cripps, Director of WWF's Endangered Seas Program. “Governments must urgently take action to close yet another loophole within European fisheries management and step-up controls on this growing practice while there is still time.”

The Mediterranean tuna farms are found in Spain, Italy, Malta and Croatia. Other countries concerned with tuna farming include France, Tunisia, Turkey and Algeria. For example, the French fleets supply 70 per cent of farmed blue-fin tuna in Spain.

On April 11, 2002 the WWF launched a new report where it was stated that tuna farming in the Mediterranean, 'tuna penning', or caging of tuna for fattening, is severely threatening the dwindling populations of wild tuna. In view of this threat, the conservation organization calls for a moratorium on the development of new tuna farms in the Mediterranean, until its environmental impacts, particularly on the tuna stock are addressed at the international and national levels.

to be continued next week .........

Source: Written by Major Tony Abela, Malta Star