Premium tuna fetches $100,000 US in Tokyo auction

[agentaqua]

Premium tuna fetches $100,000 US in Tokyo auction</u>

Mon Jan 5, 6:54 AM
By The Associated Press


TOKYO - Two sushi bar owners paid more than $100,000 US for a Japanese bluefin tuna at a Tokyo fish auction Monday, about ten times the average price and the highest in nearly a decade, market officials said.

The 128-kilogram premium tuna caught off the northern coast of Oma fetched 9.63 million yen ($104,700 US), the highest since 2001, when another Japanese bluefin tuna brought an all-time record of 20 million yen, market official Takashi Yoshida said.

Yoshida said the extravagant purchase - about $370 per pound ($817 US per kilogram) - went to a Hong Kong sushi bar owner and his Japanese competitor who reached a peaceful settlement to share the big fish. The Hong Kong buyer also paid the highest price at last year's new year event at Tokyo's Tsukiji market, the world's largest fish seller, which holds near-daily auctions.

Typical tuna prices at Tokyo fish markets are less than $25 US per pound ($55 US per kilogram). But bluefin tuna is considered by gourmets to be the best, and when sliced up into small pieces and served on rice it goes for very high prices in restaurants.

Premium fish - sometimes sliced up while the customers watch - also have advertising value, underscoring a restaurant's quality, like a rare wine.

Thousands of tuna were auctioned at Monday's festive new year sale, which often brings unusually high prices.

"It was the best tuna of the day, but the price shot up because of the shortage of domestic bluefin," Yoshida said, citing rough weather at the end of December. Buyers vied for only three Oma bluefin tuna Monday, compared to 41 last year.

A similar size imported bluefin caught off the eastern United States sold for 1.42 million yen ($15,400 US) in Monday's auction.

Due to growing concerns over the impact of commercial fishing on the bluefin variety's survival, members of international tuna conservation organizations, including Japan, have agreed to cut their bluefin catch quota for 2009 by 20 per cent to 22,000 tons.

 

[Cuba Libre]

quote:members of international tuna conservation organizations, including Japan, have agreed to cut their bluefin catch quota for 2009 by 20 per cent to 22,000 tons.

ya right-- and who does the counting??? [V]




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[The Fish Assassin]

An Artical about the Japan Tuna Crisis:

The New York Times and International Herald Tribune reported the other day that a shortage of tuna is forcing Japanese chefs to start using substitutes in sushi and sashimi - cheaper fish, even avocado rolls. Why are we not sympathetic? The reason is that Japan is merely reaping the whirlwind it and other nations have sowed.

The real issue here is not the deprivation of Japanese taste buds but the decline of the tuna. Along with sharks and other ocean-dwelling species, tuna have been in free fall for decades, in part from rapacious overfishing by big industrial fleets, of which Japan's is by far the most aggressive.

Obviously, rising consumption is also to blame. The Japanese - whose per capita fish consumption is the largest among industrialized nations - are right to point out that the appetite for sushi and sashimi has rocketed in the United States and in increasingly affluent countries like Russia and China.

The only answer is a system of global discipline. With that in mind, an international commission representing dozens of fishing nations agreed last year to a 20 percent reduction in annual tuna catches in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Japanese, for the sake of their own future, should be asking for an even tougher regime.


Take only what you need.

 

[chris73]

I hear you, Assassin! But all good thoughts are probably fruitless here because the Japs have a historical and traditional RIGHT to catch a certain amount of tuna and they will RIGHTFULLY insist on this ancient RIGHT, right?

 

[cuttlefish]

Cheap shots aside, bluefin are going down.
Tuna under pressure
Researchers blame "ubiquitous’ demand
By GREG WESTON
Sat. Jan 3 - 4:46 AM

Despite reduced quotas and strict protections, Canada’s Atlantic bluefin tuna stock faces depletion due to international mismanagement and demand for sushi meat from the prized fish, researchers say.

"There’s a sushi economy around the globe that’s evident in any North American supermarket or town. It’s ubiquitous," says Barbara Block, a Stanford University professor of marine sciences who has studied bluefin tuna for 25 years.

Bluefins, which can weigh up to 675 kilograms and grow up to four metres in length, are a lucrative commodity on the international sushi market. In 2001, a 201-kilogram bluefin was sold at a Tokyo fish market for a record-breaking US$173,600. Despite growing sushi demand in countries like China and Russia, it is estimated that 75 per cent of bluefins caught globally are exported to Japan.

"You work out the per-pound price, and they’re worth their weight in gold, so it’s not surprising that there’s such intensive fishing pressure," says Shana Miller, science and policy co-ordinator of Tag-A-Giant, a bluefin tuna research and policy foundation. "In the western Atlantic, it’s pretty well accepted that the population has declined by over 80 per cent in the last 30 years. In the eastern Atlantic, the decline isn’t as severe, but recent declines are just astronomical, in the order of 15 per cent per year, because fishing pressure has increased so much," says Ms. Miller.

Ms. Block says the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the organization that manages global tuna stocks, is mishandling the bluefin fishery. In November, the commission lowered the annual quota from 28,500 to 22,000 tonnes, despite advice fromscientists for a maximum of 15,000 tonnes.

"It’s outrageous. It’s extraordinary and embarrassing for (the commission) when it’s so clear the bluefin is in trouble, much like the cod was, that the scientific commission told them they had to cut their quotas, and they actually didn’t do it. It tells us that (the commission) is not capable of managing the future of bluefins." Ms. Miller says illegal fishing, particularly by countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, pushes the actual catch much higher than the quota.

"This year, the catch will probably end up being in the 60,000 . . . tonne range. (The commission’s) member nations in the eastern Atlantic have shown no ability to comply with the quotas, so even if they did reduce the quota, we could very well see another 60,000 . . . tonne catch," she says.

The Tag-A-Giant Foundation is the result of a program started in 1996 to monitor the movements of bluefin tunas using electronic tracking tags. In October, the 1,000th tag was implanted in a tuna off Port Hood.

Leading the field team was Mike Stokesbury, director of research at Dalhousie University’s Ocean Tracking Network. Mr. Stokesbury says the information gathered by the program is essential to properly managing bluefins, which account for about $11 million of Nova Scotia’s annual fisheries revenue.

"Back when the program started, people knew very little about the oceanic movements of bluefin tuna. We need as much information as we can get," he says.

Ms. Block, the scientific adviser to Tag-A-Giant, says the contribution of fishermen is vital to the protection of the industry.

"The future of bluefin is at stake in the North Atlantic right now. Canada has a really important role in the science, and the Canadian fishers who have been out there helping both American teams doing the tagging up there should be commended."

( gweston@herald.ca)

 

[Dogbreath]

I eat Sushi a lot will be going again tomorrow night so I've done my share of damage.

Bluefin is hard to find in/around Vancouver most places don't carry it too expensive and Yellowfin is getting the same way.

Lots of Albacore though and IMO it's at least as good as YFT if not better.

That woman is right when she says demand is ubiquitous, everywhere I've been people at Tuna raw and many have just started the past 20 years or so.

The idea that the Japanese are somehow solely responsible for diminishing Tuna stocks is both stupid and ignorant as anyone who's seen the fish markets in Seoul and New York City can tell you.

Yes Tsukiji moves a lot of product so it gets a lot of press it doesn't mean the people who run it are evil demons plotting the end of the world.

Most of the Tuna I've seen taken in the Eastern and South Pacific are targeted by small scale longliners crewed by people from third world hellholes like VietNam, the Philipines and Burma, guys making $200/month if they're lucky.A guy I fished with in Tonga two years ago now captained a boat like that for 3 months he's an ex-commercial fisherman from Ladner said it was a gawdawful way to make a living and I believe him.

The fish was landed for shipment to Asia for the most part but not Japan since the quality was low.

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[Cuba Libre]

Dog breath-- you will find this interesting:

quote:The western Pacific is the most important tuna fishing area in the world. In recent years almost two
million metric tons (t) of albacore, bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin have been landed annually, more than
half of world tuna catch. Effective management of this large resource is critically important and requires
a thorough knowledge of the important tuna fisheries of the region. Although a fair amount of tuna catch
data from the various fisheries operating in the area is available, information on the dynamics of the
various tuna fleets is much more difficult to obtain. For an understanding of these fleets, it is important to
be aware their history, interest groups, various factors affecting their operation, and forces influencing
their future. This report explores these subjects for one of the important tuna fleets in the western Pacific.
About 80% of the tuna in the western Pacific area are caught by purse seine gear. Interests from
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines and the United States operate the major purse seine fleets. These
seiners, numbering about 200 vessels in the region, catch about a million tons of tuna annually. There are
currently about 30 U.S. flag purse seine vessels operating in the region. In the 1990s the U.S. vessels
landed between 144,000 to 203,000 t, or from 15 to 25 per cent all tuna caught by purse seine gear in the
western Pacific.

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