Million-dollar tuna a warning sign of overfishing

It’s the world’s biggest fish market, a sprawling hive of forklifts, labourers and rundown buildings stretching across an area the size of over 40 soccer pitches down to Tokyo Bay. By the end of the year, after 75 years serving the Japanese capital, Tsukiji will close, replaced by a larger complex a few kilometres away. Long after it’s gone, however, they’ll still be talking about the million-dollar tuna.

Lotteries come in all shapes and sizes but few more unlikely than Daisuke Takeuchi’s 222kg slimy prize. A tuna that size is often worth the price of a luxury German car. But the bluefin that fisherman Takeuchi hauled from the Pacific last December was bid up to an eye-popping 155 million yen (€1.3 million) at this year’s first auction in Tsukiji. “I’m speechless,” he told reporters. The sale climaxed years of inflated prices for the season’s first tuna. A 269kg bluefin went for over $735,000 (€549,000) in 2012, trouncing the previous year’s Tsukiji record by over $260,000. Journalists have been flocking to the market since January 5th looking for explanations. Some blame China, which has developed a taste for tuna that may one day eclipse Japan, the world’s largest consumer. Zanmai, the Japanese sushi chain that bought Takeuchi’s fish, outbid an upmarket Hong Kong consortium, prompting Japanese nationalists to celebrate that the tuna had stayed at home.

Tsukiji’s traders are mostly silent, however, on another likely cause of the inflated price – overfishing. Decades of ruthlessly exploiting what Japan calls the king of fish have left stocks near collapse. The Pacific bluefin biomass “is near historically low levels and experiencing high exploitation rates above all biological reference points”, said an unusually stark warning this month by the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean.

Endangered

Global stocks have plummeted by 90 per cent in the last 30 years, and the Atlantic tuna, among several species, is now critically endangered. The ISC report notes that the population of the Pacific bluefin is down a staggering 96 per cent from their unfished level. Conservationists say the historic January auction was a shot across Japan’s bows, not a cause for celebration.

“It’s a sign of things to come,” says Wakao Hanaoka, Oceans Campaigner for Greenpeace Japan. “Unless there is proper management, the price will keep climbing.”

Every year the Japanese consume about three-quarters of the world’s bluefin catch; 80 per cent of tuna caught in the Mediterranean ends up on Japanese tables. Annual spending on bluefin per household in Japan has actually fallen by over a third since the late 1990s, according to the Japan Fisheries Agency. The stagnant economy is as much to blame, however, as growing public awareness of the tuna’s perilous state. Every day thousands of consumers can be found at kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi restaurants across Tokyo tucking into a dish that has become a mass-produced treat: two small pieces of the prized, fatty hon-maguro (bluefin) can still be had for under €5.

Tuna was once considered so worthless it was thrown back into the sea by fishermen or converted into cat-food. But in the 1980s, the world began copying the Japanese method of eating it on top of a finger of vinegared rice, and consumption exploded. Today it is the planet’s most valuable fish, even attracting the attentions of the Italian and Russian mafia, who control much of the Mediterranean trade.

Media attention

Analysts say Sushi Zanmai, the Japanese restaurant chain that paid for Takeuchi’s tuna, lost over 100 million yen on the deal. Dividing the 222kg tuna into 10,000 cuts recovered just a fraction of what it cost. But the auction also brought enormous media attention. Many restaurant branches show large pictures of Kiyoshi Kimura, the company’s president, beaming happily above the tuna’s carcass. The purchase brings Kimura’s chain prestige, and buckets of “free” advertising.

And what about Takeuchi, the fisherman? Not surprisingly, the catch has made him a star in the isolated coastal town of Ooma-cho, hundreds of miles northeast of Tokyo. For some, his success has become a symbol of revival from the tsunami that devastated the northeast coastline in March 2011, but the benefits will flow mostly to him. Even after the local fishing co-operative, Tsukiji wholesaler and taxman get their cut, he takes home a cool €570,000, according to business magazine Nikkan Gendai.

Struggling fishermen across Japan will look with not a little envy on that windfall. Ironically, they are helping to make it less likely they will ever experience it.