tuna

It's all gone a bit tuna crazy in the media over the last couple of days. What with the launch of The End of the Line, the Nobu protests and the Pret a Manger announcement, coverage of the plight of bluefin tuna has accelerated faster than one of the mighty fish themselves (which as we all know by now, is quicker off the mark than a Porsche 911).

Update, December 2009: John West introduces new sustainability policy »

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.

Sugababes star Amelle Berrabah helps to promote our 'Endangered Sushi' message outside Nobu London © Dennis Gill

The End Of The Line has certainly been getting the rich and famous agitated on the often-overlooked issue of fish. The film's narrator Ted Danson has been a long time campaigner on oceans issues but in the past couple of weeks many more famous faces have been getting interested in fishy things.

Young diners at Nobu get the bluefin message

The newspapers and blog sites have been full of Nobu's bluefin shame over the past week or so. And quite right too. The spotlight of the imminent release of The End Of The Line which features the plight of endangered bluefin, is putting the celebrity-favourite restaurant under increasing pressure.

On Friday Greenpeace ran a full page advert in the London Evening Standard, and the story of celebrities' bluefin backlash has been reported from Hello! to the New York Post. So today seemed an ideal time to pay Nobu's London restaurants a visit too. And that's just what we did.

The End Of The Line author Charles Clover talks to us about his book, the film and the plight of the ocean.

What's the film about?

It's an adaptation of my book, exploring how fishing is currently the most destructive human activity on 70 per cent of the planet's surface.

Fishing with modern technology is wiping out whole ecosystems we have barely started to understand. It's driving species such as the bluefin tuna towards extinction, undermining the food security of billions of people and damaging the oceans ability to act as a sink for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – all to provide us with delicious things to eat.

A detail from today's Evening Standard advert

Update: we visited Nobu London last night to ask why bluefin is still on their menu

The advert above appeared in today’s London Evening Standard, and does so amidst increasing pressure on the swanky Nobu sushi restaurant chain. The issue of course is that Nobu continue to serve bluefin tuna, which is officially listed as an endangered species by the IUCN. That makes it equivalent to serving up gorilla, tiger or rhino on a plate.

Bluefin tuna are as endangered as rhinos and tigers

The celeb-favourite sushi restaurant Nobu is back in the media spotlight this week, but with column inches devoted to bluefin tuna rather than A-list diners.

This female Caribbean Reef Shark in Roatan apparently survived a finning - most do not © CC yukikokubo

Tesco have just announced that they're going to stop selling shark fins in their stores in Thailand.

This follows some bad press on the issue and subsequent lobbying by the Shark Trust to clean up their act.

Sharks are a dividing issue with people – some people love them and are fascinated by them, others are terrified of them. Whilst sharks have an ferocious and fearsome reputation, and any shark attack or alleged sightings of man-eating great whites off Cornwall make the news, we rarely hear of the impact we humans are having on sharks. And we are having an enormous impact.

So I’m 'it' today, and in truth I'm behind with some blogging about the campaign anyway, so it’s about time I wrote something.

As the oceans' campaigner in the office I tend to get asked a lot of very different things in any one day – and quite frankly don't have time to deal with or consider every single oceansy thing that crosses my email box. Over 70 per cent of the planet = a lot of issues…  the issues that are variously piled up on my desk include marine reserves, whaling and over fishing.

And we can work on those with the public, our active supporters, colleagues in other countries and other groups, retailers, industry, politicians, journalists, artists, celebrities and any combination of the above. It's my job to basically do whatever it takes to make oceans campaigning happen – which can lead to very different 'typical days' in the office indeed.