So, what's been going on since our tinned tuna league table was released on an expectant world at the weekend? Quite a bit as it happens and already you've helped us score another small but vital victory over the worst of the tuna companies, Princes. On Monday, we submitted a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading about the labelling on Princes tuna tins. It currently indicates that the company is "fully committed to fishing methods which protect the marine environment and marine life", but with only 25 per cent of their stock being caught without the use of fish aggregating devices (Fads) on purse seine nets (and that's an estimate, mind you), this is a bare-faced lie. Knowing the large quantities of bycatch this fishing method leads to, it doesn't sound like Princes really is "fully committed".
I was all geared up to launch one of our email actions where you would have been able to submit your own complaint to the OFT (it was live on our website for a while, and about 300 people managed to send in complaints), but word came through that Princes would indeed change the wording on the labels, which in future will direct customers to its website for sustainability information. An easy thing for them to do, but it's an admission by Princes that it can't stand by the claims on its tins and that it has been misleading customers about the provenance of its tuna.
Also on Monday, there was an official launch event for the league table where eight out the nine ranked companies were represented, along with journalists, other organisations and politicos. And Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall brought a camera crew, filming for an updated edition of his Fish Fight to be shown later in the year.
What was really interesting was the reaction of some of the companies lower down the league table. Tesco's volte-face last week moved them upwards from last position, leaving Princes on the bottom. The mood in the room shifted as speaker after speaker made the point that certain members of the audience still had a lot to do to improve their company's responsibility on the fish front. "You know who you are," was said more than once.
Once the presentations were over, the Princes representatives – at least, the PR guys from Citypress who turned up – fled before anyone had a chance to collar them. It looks like Princes also refused to be interviewed for Hugh's Fish Fight, so it seems no one there is keen to talk in public about the shark-killing problem they have.
The pressure's on. Over 10,000 people have emailed Princes over the last couple of days (have you sent yours yet?) plus huge exposure on Channel 4 and 310,000-plus people signed up to the Fish Fight campaign (it keeps jumping by another thousand every time I refresh the page).
And we've heard from several insider sources that this week has seen commotion within the industry. So there's expectation that Princes and the other companies dragging their feet on bycatch will be expected to change their policies. Among the retailers, Morrisons and Asda really need to up their game.
There's also backing from the US government's tuna fishery policy adviser. John Graves, professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, was quoted in the Sunday Times coverage of our tuna league table (paywall warning):
"The use of FADs, plus purse-seine nets, is very destructive. It generates huge amounts of bycatch among sharks, turtles and any other species swimming nearby. The nets also sweep up many juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tuna which tend to school with the skipjack in the first year or so of life. About 70 per cent of bigeye tuna are killed like this, long before they have had a chance to spawn."
