Big money stripping seas bare

By STEPHEN KHAN and KATHY MARKS

In the exclusive sushi restaurants of Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka, hungry diners eagerly watch and wait. Maki and futo rolls are passed by as customers sit patiently with chopsticks poised. Then, on the appearance of one dish, they pounce. The tuna has arrived.

In nigri form - served on a small ball of rice - tuna rules the sushi world. Of the total worldwide catch of 1.2 million tonnes of tuna, the Japanese consume 600,000 tonnes. But one variety stands out above all others - thunnus thynnus, the mighty bluefin.

Its quality ensures it is the most expensive tuna, with prices reaching $2000 a kilogram. One fish fetched as much as $90,000.

Rarity is another factor in its spiralling price. The Japanese love bluefin so much they have almost eaten it off the face of the Earth. By the late 1990s, stocks were down to an all-time low - less than 9 per cent of those in 1960. Yet it appeared salvation was at hand. Like salmon and trout, tuna was supposed to be saved by the fish farmers. Tuna farming, though, would differ in one significant way from the industry known in New Zealand.

While farmed salmon are born and raised in captivity, the tuna are captured at sea by trawlers pulling purse sein nets capable of swallowing an airliner. They are then carefully brought to shore for fattening.

It seemed, in theory, the ideal, sustainable solution. The tuna pens have flourished, becoming latter-day Klondykes for fishermen in Australia, along the southern Spanish coast of the Mediterranean, and in Mexico.

In the late 1990s, Port Lincoln was a struggling fishing community on its last legs. Now the remote Eyre Peninsula in South Australia reputedly has the highest number of millionaires per capita in the Southern Hemisphere.

Tuna now drives the economy in Port Lincoln. The fish-rich waters off the town of 13,000 people are dotted with farms, and the £100 million ($295 million) a year bluefish tuna industry is the largest employer on the Eyre Peninsula.

The industry has brought untold wealth to a group of Croatian fishermen, who now own extravagantly ornate mansions on the hills overlooking Boston Bay.

Every summer Port Lincoln's tuna farmers sail out 160km to ambush schools of southern bluefin tuna migrating across the Great Australian Bight. They catch them in giant circular nets and tow them back to Boston Bay, where they are transferred to pens 8km offshore and fed until they are fat enough to be turned into sushi.

When the price is right on the Japanese markets, the tuna are harvested and whisked by plane to Tokyo. Port Lincoln, once a depressed and run-down town, has acquired hotels, restaurants, cinemas and a new marina that includes a waterfront residential development.

While being fattened, the tuna consume vast amounts of fish. Three times a day, feed boats moor beside the farms and flick in a few tiddlers to see if the tuna are hungry. Then they lower frozen pallets of fish into a feeder cage in the middle of the pen. The tuna cruise up and lie beneath the cage, waiting for the fish to thaw and drop into their mouths.

For the tuna, it is the closest thing to being hand-fed. In the wild, they eat only once a week and must work hard for it. One feed boat alone leaves port every morning loaded with 20 tonnes of pilchards, sardines, herrings and anchovies, chosen for their high oil content and mainly imported from California.

Six boats carrying armed security guards patrol the farms every night. With 1800 tuna in each pen, the farmers cannot afford the theft of their valuable captives.

The farms are also monitored by biologists employed by the main Japanese tuna importers, who are based in Port Lincoln during the season.

The Croatians who dominate the Port Lincoln tuna industry have been examining ways of applying their farming techniques to other large-fin fish species, such as yellowtail kingfish, King George whiting, mulloway and snapper. The "tuna barons" have also exported their expertise to Croatia, where their relatives have established operations to farm the northern bluefin.

The move has been welcomed by communities desperate for work and by Japanese traders, who know they can easily shift thousands of tonnes of the creatures.

There is just one problem. Wild stocks of bluefin have continued to decline.

Now the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) is warning that raising the fish in captivity could be exacerbating the problem, rather than solving it.

The waters off the coasts of Spain, Sicily and Croatia have proved ideal for rearing captive tuna. They may also prove to be the species' graveyard. WWF says Japanese imports have risen by a factor of 21 per cent over the past three years.

The spike in tuna farming threatens to destroy the already overfished wild tuna in the Mediterranean, WWF warned, noting that the practice is not subject to stringent controls. With Libyan, Turkish and Maltese farmers keen for a larger slice of the lucrative market, the prospects for stock recovery look bleak.

On a trip to tuna farms near Alicante in Southern Spain, aquaculture expert Don Staniford was able to see tuna being fattened up for the sushi knife.

Staniford is deeply concerned about the future of the bluefin. "The idea that raising tuna in captivity could help wild stocks recover is frankly ludicrous," said Staniford. While it takes 3 tonnes of wild fish to produce 1 tonne of salmon and 5 tonnes of wild fish to produce 1 tonne of cod, it takes a massive 20 tonnes of wild fish to fatten up just 1 tonne of tuna for market.

The effects on wild fisheries were devastating, he warned. Yet the European Union continues to fund the expansion of tuna farms in the Mediterranean. Such subsidies could lead to commercial extinction of the endangered bluefin tuna within just a few years, WWF International warned this week.

The conservation group said tuna farming jumped 50 per cent last year in the Mediterranean to reach 21,000 tonnes. A catch at this level "is not compatible with the conservation of a healthy bluefin tuna population".

The rapid expansion of the industry since the late 1990s has been aided by EU subsidies of up to £15 million ($44 million), according to the report.

The WWF argument was rejected this week by the European Commission, which argued that tuna farming was conducted under strict conditions and its output was limited by national fishing quotas.

Gregor Kreuzhuber, spokesman for the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Fisheries, Franz Fischler, said the method used was irrelevant to the amount of fishing that took place. "It is not a free-for-all. Tuna that has been caught and is subsequently fattened is deducted from the overall quota of fish that can be taken from the sea."

But environmentalists a argue that some fish are not even logged for quotas as they are not actually landed. "Some fish are caught, put in pens and shipped to Japan without being registered," said Staniford.

"The experience of fish farming in other species is that rearing fish in high-density cages increases the concentration of pollutants in the flesh. There are now serious questions about the impact of pen-reared tuna on human health."

- INDEPENDENT