Deadline or longline for the bluefin tuna

Prince Albert II of Monaco calls for suspension of bluefin tuna catch in the Mediterranean:

Suspend fishing to save bluefin tuna

"What ICCAT's own scientists have been saying for a number of years is that the sustainable catch is only about half of what ICCAT set as the allowable catch and possibly less than a quarter of the best estimates of the real catch."

"As delegates were gathering in Barcelona for the World Conservation Congress, the latest findings from the scientific group were just becoming public. They are now saying that collapse is looking dangerously close and the spawning biomass of tuna - a key measure of reproductive ability - is around a third of what it was 30 years ago. The scientists have also shown an immediate moratorium would help tuna stocks to recover. As a next step, they want the Mediterranean completely closed to tuna fishing fleets during the spawning months of May, June and July."

A seafood "snob" has second thoughts:

A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish

"Already, for instance, the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna population has been severely depleted, and commercial fishing quotas for the bluefin in the Mediterranean may be sharply curtailed this month. The cod fishery, arguably one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, is in serious decline. Most species of shark, Chilean sea bass, and the cod-like orange roughy are threatened."

More: "But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back — dead — as “bycatch.”)"

So: "This sounds almost too good to be true, but with monitoring systems that reduce bycatch by as much as 60 percent and regulations providing fishermen with a stake in protecting the wild resource, it is happening. One regulatory scheme, known as “catch shares,” allows fishermen to own shares in a fishery — that is, the right to catch a certain percentage of a scientifically determined sustainable harvest. Fishermen can buy or sell shares, but the number of fish caught in a given year is fixed.

This method has been a success in a number of places including Alaska, the source of more than half of the nation’s seafood. A study published in the journal Science recently estimated that if catch shares had been in place globally in 1970, only about 9 percent of the world’s fisheries would have collapsed by 2003, rather than 27 percent."

Message: MANAGE the fishery. Be STRICT. Eat mor chikn.