Tuna laundering
There’s an interesting story about Tuna over at the Greenpeace International blog today.
On the tail of the Rainbow Warrior’s recent tour of the Mediterranean MaltaToday has been served with seven libel suits for daring to publish the facts about one of the great fisheries scandals in the region: tuna laundering.
Last year, Malta exported 12 million kilograms of tuna to Japan — the world’s most lucrative market for prized tuna belly meat. There’s just one wee little accounting problem, in that MaltaToday reports that’s about 6 million kilograms more than the country’s licensed tuna ranchers could actually produce.
Through a complicated shell game of ship re-flagging, unlicensed ranch expansion, dodgy catch transfers and illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing, the Mediterranean tuna fishing industry is decimating their own livelihoods, bringing Bluefin tuna to the brink of commercial extinction — a fact that we’ve been demanding action on for some time, and which was a major feature of our recent ship tour in the Med.
The regulated catch is bad enough: the European Commission and the regulatory body which govern tuna quotas have consistently ignored warning from their own scientific advisers and set legal quotas well above sustainable levels. But the legal catch is only part of the story.
And when MaltaToday decided to investigate the less-than-legal aspects of the local tuna industry, they stepped on some powerful tuna-touting-toes. The Maltese company Azzopardi and pals decided to wage a war on tenacious investigative journalism. The result, as one might imagine (but apparently Azzopardi did not anticipate) has been a series of damning articles on the company’s illegal business ventures and dodgy dealings, a front page spread and a major editorial which concludes “This newspaper will stand up and be counted and will not bow down to pressure from this powerful industry.”
Now THAT’S the kind of journalistic courage we like to see.
Here is the latest editorial from MaltaToday, including a promise to bring in Greenpeace to attest to the tuna industry’s crimes against the environment.
Tuna is one of the fish listed in our NZ Red Fish List. There’s three criteria for a fish to be listed in the Red and Tuna definitely falls into two of them:
- They are commonly sourced from overfished and depleted stocks, or are being fished at such a high rate that stocks are being depleted rapidly
- The fishing methods used to catch the fish are often highly destructive to other oceans creatures and/or habitats.
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Hi people, activists and voluntary greenpeace.
I´m a voluntary on Brasil, Porto Alegre.so my question this.
What continues a groups greenpeace in New Zealand?
Sorry my little english i am studant, please help me.
tank´s
jonas Lumertz, lutando firme contra os opressores que tentam nos destruir.
tuna fishing should not go on the fish have rights even more than us humans they were here before us and should be a long time after its just not fair that the world revoles the wrong way!?!
thanks. i love greenpeace what you do rules i am curently writing a letter to john key (nzs prime minister) about the orangutans and how the people are killing them just for palm oil. i love greenpeace and plan to become an actavist one day
yours sincerley
future green peace actavist
annie
Humans are considered to top of the food chain, we have an advantage in that we can go anywhere other creatures live, and we have many abilities that other creatures do not. So what do we do, we abuse that privilege for material gain.
How would it be if one of the other creatures of the world got the upper hand so that we became the hunted. Would we then complain that we were being overerly hunted and slaughted. Many humans live for today and to hell with tomorrow. It is not us that will suffer, but future generations. Remember when we ate fish! FISH, whats that?