Japan's latest fear: No more tuna
By James KanterSunday, June 24, 2007
PARIS: Europeans may claim a leadership role when it comes to fighting global warming, but they get black marks from environmentalists - and even from Washington - for failing to control their fishing fleets in the Mediterranean and other coastal waters.
In particular, U.S. officials want the European Union to do more to stop the overfishing of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, a highly migratory, warm-blooded species that can grow to nearly a ton.
A single fish can bring in tens of thousands of dollars amid the boom in demand for dishes like sushi.
Europeans must "get control of their fleets, and if they reach their quotas they've got to shut down the fisheries," William Hogarth, director of the fisheries service of the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, said in a recent interview.
"We don't have that from Europe yet," he said by telephone. "We don't even have the basics."
Bluefin tuna spawn both in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mediterranean. The fish do not interbreed, but they mix extensively in the North Atlantic, meaning that European catches may consist of significant numbers of bluefin tuna originating in waters around the United States.
How much mixing of fish takes place still is a disputed matter. But Hogarth said the mixing was a critical factor in the decline of fish stocks around the United States.
"It's a great injustice," he said of European overfishing. "Unless you can get control of the eastern stock, then the western stock can't recover due to the mixing."
Yet the United States also has a poor record on fish stocks, in particular by letting cod become overfished and perhaps irreparably depleted.
Tuna experts like Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute, a nonprofit conservation group based in New York, put a sizable part of the blame for the collapse in western Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks on the United States, which, he said, continues to allow fishing in spawning areas of the Gulf of Mexico.
"The U.S. is delighting in shifting the blame to Europe," he said.
Yet he and other conservationists reserve some of their harshest criticism for the Europeans.
As part of a so-called recovery plan approved this month, EU governments decided to put expert observers on 20 percent of each country's vessels over 15 meters, or 50 feet, to check catches and spot vessels using illegal fishing practices. EU governments also pledged to ban the use of aircraft to locate shoals of tuna.
But conservationists sharply criticized that plan, largely because the bluefin tuna quota shared among Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain was set at about 17,000 tons.
That is the maximum amount recommended by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or Iccat, an international organization made up of more than 40 member countries.
But it is roughly twice the limit stipulated by the commission's own scientific advisers.
"This is not a recovery plan," said Sergi Tudela, head of the fisheries program for the WWF, also known as the World Wide Fund for Nature, in the Mediterranean. "It is a collapse plan."
Ireland and Britain also criticized the EU plan because it failed to penalize fleets in countries like France and Italy that already had overfished, and because drift-net fishing, banned since 2002, is still being used by some EU fleets.
Conservationists like Safina are calling for an Atlantic-wide, five-year moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing, and for the closing of spawning areas in the Gulf of Mexico to fishing techniques that could kill bluefin.
Hogarth, the U.S. fisheries official, said that American fleets hauled only a small fraction of their quota last year because of low stocks and that any measures taken by Europe looked like they would be too little, too late for global stocks of bluefin tuna.
"We're catching only about 12 to 14 percent of our quota," Hogarth said. "There are just no fish here."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/24/business/tuna.php
さて、”No more tuna”という”Japan's latest fear”は、黄力穎「用鹿肉馬肉、那還能叫寿司？」（『東方早報』2007年６月26日）という記事に描かれている。この中では、1973年に「水銀汚染」をきっかけに鮪不足が起こったときに、試行錯誤の末、鮪にいちばん味や食感が近い代用品としての「煙薫的鹿肉和生馬肉」を考えだし、「如果金槍魚短缺的情況継続悪化、他将再次用鹿肉和馬肉做寿司」という菊地さんという寿司屋の話が出てくる。また、「日本国家寿司
称其為寿司了」という言葉も紹介される。また、伊森博格という人によると、本来東京に来るべき鮪が紐育や上海に行ってしまい、そのことは「日本的国家尊厳遭到破壊」を引き起こすという。
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