If you're reading this in the UK, you ran out of fish today.
Basically, the UK eats more fish than its waters produce and, thanks to some nifty fish-counting from the clever folks at NEF, that equates to the 4th of August being the day we use up our year's fish supply. In comparison to the EU as a whole, we fair a month better but then we are a country with quite a lot of seas, certainly in comparison with, er, Austria and Romania. Yet, for almost five full months we are relying on fish from somewhere else. And that might be okay, if there was plenty of it to go around. But of course, as the old saying should go, there aren't plenty more fish in the sea.
Posted by jamie — 12 July 2010 at 2:55pm
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I was gearing up to write something on the interesting new report by the New Economics Foundation (Nef) on how the EU is becoming more reliant on fish from other parts of the world, when my attention was drawn to a piece by the BBC's Richard Black who explains far more eloquently than I ever could what 'fish dependence day' is.
Nef has compared the amount of fish caught within the EU with the amount we consume to find out when - if we only ate our own, EU-caught fish from January 1 - we would have to start using fish supplied by other countries. This year, that day was last Friday 9 July or 'fish dependence day' and, like the global ecological debt day which Nef also computes, it's getting earlier each year as we import more and more fish. Or eat more. Or both.
Posted by jamie — 14 June 2010 at 4:08pm
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The crews of the Arctic Sunrise and the Rainbow Warrior have once more come to the aid of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. Although the fishing season has ended early because the quotas have been reached, there are still large cages out there filled with fish caught over the past couple of weeks. These cages are bound for tuna 'ranches', where the fish will be kept and fattened up, before being slaughtered.
Yesterday afternoon our activists again tried to free the endangered tuna from one of these cages.
Today, or at 11.59pm tonight, to be exact, the purse-seining season for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is being closed. A week early.
I'm back on land now, having left the Arctic Sunrise in the Med. In London, we've had a flurry of media calls, excited by what they think is the "good news" that "bluefin fishing is being banned" in the Mediterranean.
So I thought, as well as putting the record straight with any journalists who'll listen, that I should maybe explain to everyone else what exactly is happening. And whether it is indeed "good news".
The fishing boats are here. The tugs and support vessels are here. The French navy ships which are monitoring/protecting the fishery are here... but the fish aren't.
Perhaps it's just not warm enough yet. Perhaps they're looking in the wrong places. Perhaps the fish are late.
The worst possible scenario for everyone is that the fish have gone.
Posted by Willie — 24 May 2010 at 4:17pm
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There's a well-known model of how
dodgy big business deals with campaigns against them. To summarise, it goes a
bit like this:
Company X gets some bad press for
doing something wrong, especially bad press if it kills lots of charismatic
megafauna;
Company X initially retaliates
saying, 'It's all lies, honest';
Company X then admits it isn't all
lies, but comes up with some way of kicking the issue into the long grass,
usually some commission or foundation (ideally with a word like 'conservation'
or 'sustainable' in its title) or some interminable period of gathering
research, in the hope it all blows over and people forget what they were upset
about.
Posted by Willie — 18 May 2010 at 3:41pm
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When good things go bad: a purse-seine in action
Greenpeace is not against purse-seining, which
may surprise some people. Sure it's a big industrial-looking fishing operation,
involving huge nets and catching lots of fish. But that's not always a bad
thing.
If we are to assume we're still going to
catch and eat fish, then purse-seining as a method is probably going to be
something that continues. Purse-seining
involves setting a large circular wall of net around fish, then 'pursing' the
bottom together to capture them. Where purse-seining is best used is with large
single-species schools of fish, that shoal tightly together. Examples like
herring or mackerel
spring to mind. These can be caught relatively 'cleanly' by
purse-seining.
Posted by jossc — 22 February 2010 at 6:44pm
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For those of you who missed Saturday's edition of one of Radio 4's most popular programmes, 'From Our Own Correspondent', you missed a great piece on the desperate plight of Pacific tuna. Focusing on overfishing by EU and Asian nations around the Cook Islands, it covered the story of our very own ship Esperanza busting a Japanese purse seining vessel which was fishing illegally in Cook Island waters.
Posted by Willie — 16 December 2009 at 3:36pm
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It’s nearly Christmas …. And as I write this it's even snowing outside the Greenpeace office, so maybe it’s time for a little goodwill and some good news.
Way back in 2008 we published a league table ranking the major tinned tuna suppliers in the UK on a number of environmental criteria. Back then big brands John West and Princes were languishing at the bottom of the pile. When we updated that league table in June 2009, we reported some significant process from many of the UK's big retailers – with Sainsbury’s, Co-op, M&S, Waitrose and Asda all increasing their commitments to more responsible sourcing of the tuna in their cans.
Posted by Willie — 16 December 2009 at 2:57pm
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You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere someone decided to name a roller-coaster 'bluefin'. The ups, downs, twists, and turns are certainly hard to follow in this fish's political fortunes, and at the end it could end up making us all feel quite sick.
Post the farcical ICCAT meeting we have seen a follow-up meeting of ICCAT’s Pacific counterparts, whose jolly gathering in Tahiti showed a similar lack of ability and spine when it comes down to making useful or necessary decisions.