(Huffington Post)
Time to Boycott Tuna Again?
By MARK BITTMAN
Mark Bittman on food and all things related.
TAGS:
BOYCOTTS, CANNED TUNA, DOLPHINS, TUNA FISHING
I wish I'd been in La Jolla a couple of weeks ago to see the green inflatable airship flying overhead with a cartoon mermaid on one side. She was curvy and blonde, with a cigarette in her mouth and a bloody fish impaled on her trident. Around her was text that read, "Chicken of the Sea: Carnage in a Tuna Can."
Are we looking at another tuna boycott? Many readers will remember 1988, when biologist Sam LaBudde went to work as a cook on a Panamanian tuna boat and secretly shot film that showed dolphins dying in nets and being crushed in winches, as many as 20 for every tuna. The video was shown to a Senate subcommittee and sparked a consumer boycott of canned tuna. Two years later, Starkist — then owned by Heinz — announced it would no longer buy any tuna caught by methods that threatened dolphins. Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea quickly followed suit, and "dolphin-safe tuna" was born. (Strangely enough, the World Trade Organization just ruled against dolphin-safe tuna labels, but that's another story.)
Canned tuna was then the most popular fish in America; it's been replaced by shrimp, but we still eat a billion dollars' worth a year. And Greenpeace USA — creators of the flying, cigarette-smoking mermaid — has launched a campaign to reform the canned tuna industry. Indications are it will succeed, because its demands have already been met in the U.K. But if it doesn't, a boycott may be in order, and one member of Congress has already called for one.
The day after the flying mermaid's voyage, the environmental organization delivered a 700-page petition to San Diego-based Chicken of the Sea imploring the company to abandon fishing practices that maximize bycatch — the "accidental" catch of non-targeted fish — and deplete dwindling stocks.
Much canned tuna is skipjack, and much of that is caught using fish aggregating devices (F.A.D.'s), purse seine nets and longlines. An F.A.D. is simply a buoy, or even a log (really, it can be almost anything that floats), cast by a boat into the water. Small fish find them and use them as shelter from larger fish; the larger fish then come to hunt, and soon enough the F.A.D. is at the center of a small, dense ecosystem.
Most F.A.D.'s are equipped with radio beacons that relay their position back to the boats; some also have biomass sensors to indicate how many fish are in the neighborhood. When a boat believes that the fish population around an F.A.D. has reached a substantial mass, it comes back with massive purse seine nets, scooping up the entire surrounding ecosystem. And although skipjack is the target, the nets pull in sharks, billfish like sword and marlin, and young yellowfin and bigeye tuna, which often comprise as much as 20 percent of the total catch. (Need I point out that killing young fish cripples future stocks?)
Longlines, which are often used for albacore tuna — also canned — are similarly indiscriminate. Miles of line stretch from buoy to buoy with baited hooks hanging down every few yards. (Stop for a moment and imagine what "miles of line" look like.) Turtles get snagged on the hooks and can't return to the surface to breathe. Seabirds think the hooks are fish, dive down, and get caught. And again, the bycatch is tremendous. (Industry-wide, the bycatch of industrial fishing is as high as 25 percent.)
All of this, says Greenpeace's Casson Trenor, one of the central figures of the tuna campaign, is bad enough, but the group would also like to see a ban on fishing in what are know as "high seas pockets," four areas of ocean just beyond the territorial waters of a handful of Pacific island nations. Because these waters don't belong to any particular state, tuna boats — often from wealthier nations like Spain, Taiwan and the United States — swarm in these pockets, operating without quotas, catch limits or access fees. Despite some regulations, the area is effectively lawless, and the largely tuna-based economies of those nearby Pacific islands take a huge hit as a result.
Last week Congressman Eni Faleomavaega, the representative from American Samoa, welcomed Greenpeace and called for a full ban on F.A.D.'s and high-seas-pockets fishing, and asked Americans to refrain from buying any products from Chicken of the Sea or Bumble Bee. (Faleomavaega exempts Starkist because they have not, like the others, exported tuna cleaning jobs to Thailand; Greenpeace doesn't see Starkist as much different, but isn't actively calling for any boycott.)
A boycott wasn't a necessary component of Greenpeace's recent victory in the U.K.: just months ago, the last major holdout — tuna giant John West — joined the rest of the big players in that canned tuna industry in a commitment to stop using F.A.D.'s with purse seine nets, and switch to pole and line fishing. Chicken of the Sea is owned by the same Thai parent company as John West. Clearly, if one major subsidiary can succumb to pressure and shift its practices, so can another.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace is pouring on the pressure; Trenor is currently in the Pacific islands to film and potentially interfere with tuna boats using F.A.D.'s in one of the high-seas pockets, especially U.S.-flagged ships with proven links to Chicken of the Sea.
"We're not against canned tuna," wrote Trenor in an e-mail. "Americans, like all consumers, deserve access to a supply of affordable and convenient protein. But we also deserve to know the truth behind the methods that are employed to produce it, and to make an informed choice as to whether we wish to support those methods. The bottom line is that the tuna companies can do things better."
Sam LaBudde's dolphin video was the first of its kind, and in a pre-YouTube era. Now we seem immune: keep in mind that despite the fairly regular release of shocking livestock cruelty videos, we haven't seen any widespread boycotts of factory farmed meat. But if you think about it, the F.A.D. and purse seine strategy is just another form of animal confinement. It's not "farming," but it's industrial. And if Americans can be persuaded to change their buying habits to prevent one form of animal cruelty, there's hope for another.
And it may take more than a damning video, a sinister mermaid blimp and a petition to shift the practices of the canned tuna industry; even a rogue crusader in Congress (representing an area of which most Americans are barely aware) might not make a dent.
It's going to happen, though. The U.K. did it, and sooner or later so will the U.S. We made dolphins safe. Turtles, sharks, sea birds, young yellowfin and bigeye should be next. It's an easy fix, one that might not require a boycott. If it does, however, it'll be an easy one to support. And it will show us the way to what should come next.
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