Ban bluefin? Forbidden fish tempts even more

We’ve talked about the egregious overfishing of bluefin — possibly with mafia participation — and the difficulty of farming the extremely valuable fish from the egg up. According to a recent WWF analysis, if overfishing continues, stocks will collapse by 2012.

On to the news. Thursday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for a trade ban on bluefin. As it turns out, there’s an ongoing discussion over whether to list bluefin under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

CITES means no international trade in bluefin whatsoever—a game changer for sure. But prohibition is a more complicated proposition than it initially seems. Here’s the conundrum: Does a ban really work in bluefin’s favor?

Bans can have unintended consequences. Scarcity can raise demand, and higher demand can stimulate black market trading. You ban bluefin trading and you may boost incentive to harvest it illegally.

Rebecca Lent of the National Marine Fisheries Service gives the following example:

When Kenya burned a 20-foot-high pile of poached ivory in 1989— 12 tons of tusks from over 2,000 elephants — did they inadvertently stimulate demand by lessening supply?

Then there’s South Africa, which has argued that it has too many elephants, and has proposed culling herds and selling ivory legally on a limited basis. (The profits would go to conserving the remaining elephants.) Here’s the worry: Does legally sold ivory stimulate poaching as well? Call it “ivory laundering”: tusks sold legitimately may create cover for poached ivory to enter the market.

Conservationists argue about this stuff back and forth. And analysis hardly seems to clarify the matter. South Africa did end up selling ivory from culled elephants. Here’s one assessment of the result:

According to the Environmental Investigation Agency, a non-governmental group based in the United Kingdom, elephant poaching has increased since the sales. According to the United Nations, it has not. According to simple economic theory, however, it should have decreased.

In other words, we often don’t know how bans — or limited permission, as the case may be — help or hurt the animal in question. But the lesson is clear: think twice before banning.

When it comes to bluefin, absent meaningful regulation from ICCAT — often derided as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas — some organizations have taken matters into their own hands. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, for example, just launched a certification-type program for bluefin — a way, ostensibly, to keep illegally fished tuna from the market.

“If governments can’t make progress, industry itself will make progress,” says Ms. Lent. “There are industry people out there who are aware that they’re going to lose their market, that people are so much more conscious now.”

But for this approach to work, you’ve got to raise consciousness — to make people aware of the problem. And on that front, the more dramatic the efforts, the better. Last year, undercover Greenpeace agents caught Nobu, a London restaurant partially owned by Robert De Niro, serving bluefin. They ran DNA tests on their dinner to prove it.  (Nobu apparently kept on serving it.)

Greenpeace also compares eating bluefin to eating tigers every chance it gets. It’s a psychological approach, an attempt to change bluefin’s place in the popular imagination, to make it inedible — to transform it from cold fish (who cares) to unique, magnificent predator (how could you!).

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, meanwhile — the New Yorker profiled him some time back — says: “We must intervene and we must take whatever risks are required to drive these criminals from the sea. [He's talking about tuna fishers.] We have the experience and the courage to take on these thugs, all we need is the support.”

And the rumor mill is a-churning. One accuses Mitsubishi, which has a 40 percent share of the bluefin market, of stockpiling frozen bluefin in anticipation of the predicted stock collapse. The story appears all over the Web, often with no sourcing for the allegations. As far as I can tell, they come from this documentary — End of the Line — which I haven’t seen.

But when you think about it, in purely economic terms, stockpiling a product that’s predicted to disappear isn’t a crime; it’s good business. Yet somehow it just looks bad. And that’s sort of the point, the strategy. NGOs and activists are laboring politicize bluefin.

As for Mitsubishi, the corporation says something interesting in a publicly available opinion paper:

MC [Mitsubishi Corporation] is committed to sustainability in all of its activities including the sourcing of bluefin tuna and will actively engage all concerned parties to put into place effective and necessary measures…. Our goal is to source all of our bluefin tuna in an environmentally sustainable manner and from sustainably managed fisheries.

They’re feeling the heat, it seems, and they’re sort of conceding in advance to an ISSF-like certification. That could be huge. Eliminating illegal fishing would cut bluefin harvest by half, which is still around double what the scientists recommend, but better than the “fishing as usual” scenario—roughly quadruple what they advise.

But that problem of scarcity — and immense potential profits — stimulating a black market keeps popping up. In 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a “bluefin tuna scandal,” a back door that circumvented regulations and led directly to Tokyo’s fish markets. Tens of thousands of tons of illegally caught bluefin passed through it, earning the fraudsters some $2 billion.

Posted by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Pile of ivory photo courtesy of the Guardian