Tuna are awesome. We don’t get to say that enough, so since
it’s World Tuna Day, I want to make amends. These fish are majestic ocean
wanderers, who have earned their place in history, but today they are sadly the
icons of global overfishing & dodgy fishing methods, and a globally-traded commodity.
Tuna are fish, and they are wild animals. But to many
people, they are simply understood as food. It can be a bit confusing when the
short hand of ‘tuna’ is used, as it covers a whole family of species, from the
relatively-tiddly and widespread skipjack, right up to the majestic but
beleaguered bluefins.
Bigeye and yellowfin tuna are fully exploited or over exploited in all oceans
- they are in serious trouble in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean,
where they were relatively healthy just a few years ago. Stocks of the
magnificent bluefin, the most iconic and valuable of all tuna species,
are on the brink of collapse. In 1999, Greenpeace recorded an 80 percent
decline in Mediterranean bluefin.
In 1999, Greenpeace recorded an 80 percentdecline in Mediterranean bluefin And it's getting worse. Advances in technology mean that large ships - floating factories - are now able to take as much tuna in two days as whole countries can take in a year. Increasing practices of tuna ranching are further aggravating the crisis.
Last year we published our tinned tuna league table, ranking the main retailers and brands on the overall sustainability of their canned tuna. Tinned tuna, which is normally skipjack (the most common variety), is a food cupboard staple in the UK, and we are the second biggest consumers in the world, so we can have a massive impact on improving the sustainability of the fishing that fills the tins.
As well as assessing the information given on the tins (some didn’t even tell you what species was inside!) we also evaluated the impact of how the fish were being caught, and the company's overall sourcing policies.
We already know that John West's website contains plenty of corporate puffery. After all, this is the company that claims to "only purchase fish which is caught with no harm to the marine environment" but which came a dismal last in our sustainability league table of tinned tuna brands. Yes, John West truly is John Worst on tinned tuna.
Tinned tuna is big business - there's a can in almost everyone's cupboard. Here in the UK we can't get enough of it - we're the second biggest consumer in the world after the USA. Globally tuna exports are worth more than any other fish species, at around 2.7 billion dollars per year.
But there are big problems with the way tuna is caught. Our new briefing paper, Tinned Tuna's Hidden Catch, explains how large numbers of sea turtles, sharks and other fish are all being wiped out by the global tuna industry. And tuna is in trouble itself, with some species critically endangered by overfishing.
The UK is the second highest consumer of tinned tuna in the world, consumming the
equivalent of more than 700 million tins of tuna in 2006 alone.
Fishing practices used by the global tuna industry are contributing to the sharp decline of
populations of sea turtles, sharks, rays and other marine animals. Marketing campaigns
attempt to make tuna fishing look like a quaint cottage industry, but the truth is that the tuna
trade is all about big business.