Tuna in troubled waters

Tsunenori Iida's family has been buying and selling tuna for seven generations at the world's largest fish market in Japan. Six mornings a week for 43 years, Iida has been casting his eyes and running his fingers over the torpedo-shaped carcasses of bluefin tuna, the most precious fish in the seas. They are brought to Tokyo's Tsukiji market, where a dawn auction sets the global price.

Alas, for Japan, which wolfs down a quarter of the global tuna catch, and for the rest of the world, an increasingly voracious appetite for sushi is driving the supply of the plump beauty served raw perilously low.

Japan, after years of overfishing a species that is as much a sacrament as food, is feeling the pinch more than any other country. As of this year and for the next four years, the country's annual fishing quota has been slashed in half for the bluefin tuna, found in the waters of the southern hemisphere. And its quota for the Atlantic bluefin has been cut by almost a quarter.

Bluefin, fished to the brink of extinction in some areas, is the largest tuna, producing the most succulent sashimi-grade flesh, which is eaten raw either as sushi (with a dollop of rice) or on its own, as sashimi.

Soaring prices

Wholesale tuna prices, up 20 per cent in the past year, are so high that restaurants cannot pass on the full cost to customers.

Still, tuna remains on the menus because there is no real choice. Without a sizeable slab of rich red flesh on prominent display, a sushi restaurant in this country loses face — and customers. "If you have good tuna, you have a reputation of being a proper restaurant," said Izumi Niitsu, who manages Kihachi, a restaurant in Tokyo.

Niitsu now sells his highest grade of tuna (the higher the fat content, the higher the grade) at about $5 a piece — about the size of a matchbox. His wholesale cost for such a piece, he says, is often more than his customers pay.

"When customers order tuna after tuna, my heart sort of pounds," said Niitsu, who tries to cover his tuna losses by gently encouraging customers to enjoy species of raw fish that he sells at a profit.

Across Japan, quotas are squeezing the supply of sashimi tuna and soaring prices are reducing demand. In the first quarter of this year, imports fell 24 per cent compared with the previous year, according to one recent industry report. Another report says that for all of 2006, household consumption of sashimi tuna fell 20 per cent.

Yet as the Japanese eat less sashimi-grade tuna, the Americans, Europeans and Chinese are eating more. In the United States, the second-largest market for fresh tuna, imports have continued to rise this year. That, in turn, is driving up demand and prices.

At a recent Monday-morning auction, Iida bought an average bluefin, weighing 341 pounds, for $9,500. "The price was higher than the quality of the fish justified," he grumbled.

Since 1950, the global catch has risen more than tenfold, to more than 4 million tonnes in 2002, 2003 and 2004. A report this year by the World Wildlife Fund said that the tuna fishing fleet is now far larger — in some cases 70 per cent larger — than is needed for a sustainable catch.

The consequences have been severe, especially for the bluefin tuna. The population of the southern bluefin has been reduced to about 8 per cent of levels before industrial fishing took off in the 1950s, according to a UN report.

Unbridled fishing

Japan admitted last year that its fleet had caught one third more southern bluefin tuna than it was entitled to under an international quota.

"We have to change our appetites to protect these fish," Iida said.

Last year, before the quotas were cut, so many tuna carcasses were wheeled out to the auction floor that they had to be stacked on top of each other.

Those days, Iida said, are gone forever. "We now need a very rigid regimen to show the world that we can control ourselves. Instead of eating tuna twice a week, the Japanese are going to have to settle for twice a month," he said.

Iida, though, still has to find a way to deliver a tonne-and-a-half of tuna a day (worth about $180,000 at recent auction prices) to customers who have relied on his company for decades.

To deliver the goods, Iida buys as many quality tuna as he can get. If not, he relies on his freezer. Tuna frozen with special "flash" methods can be kept for up to a year with little or no change in its taste.

He adds that by selling from his freezer, he can average out costs and slowly pass price increases on to customers.

The World Wildlife Fund and others say that much more regulation is needed to protect the fish. But Japan has won some measured praise for abiding by reductions in its tuna quota and for finally realising that overfishing is a national problem.

Iida believes a permanent change in Japanese attitudes and consumption can save the tuna and preserve his country's tuna-centric culture. "If we do that, I don't think they [will go] extinct."