Manfred Kayser

restaurants. Japan consumes about 80 per cent of Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna. The country has been accused of stifling efforts to enhance protection of the tuna stocks. In negotiations last year, a bid by Monaco, backed by several other European countries, to introduce a ban on commercial fishing of Atlantic bluefin tuna failed because of perceived support from several smaller nations for Japan’s opposition at last year’s meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. Although they cut fishing quotas, conservationists believe such measures do not go far enough, particularly in the light of illegal fishing becoming ever more lucrative as Tokyo prices soar. The WWF has warned that, if fishing continues at current rates, the Atlantic bluefin tuna will be ‘functionally extinct’ in three years. But such concerns appear to have little impact for Japanese consumers. Market officials are accustomed to seeing prices rise during the year’s opening auction at the Tsukiji fish market, but the new record was still unexpected. The tuna sold last month was one of 500 bluefin brought for the first auction of the year. It was caught in waters off the northern island of Hokkaido. Today, Pacific bluefin are very rare. From 1976 to 2006, stocks fell 90 per cent because of increased fishing pressure, prompting the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to add them to their list of threatened species. “The custom of eating raw fish is spreading throughout the world, so that it is no longer an era where Japan is consuming all of the limited supply of tuna,” an auction manager told the Guardian. But Japan remains the major market. They go to the supermarket and are fooled into thinking everything is available in abundance, says Wakao Hanaoka, an ocean campaigner for Greenpeace Japan. “But it is not possible for the Japanese to continue to eat tuna at this rate.”