A TWO BILLION DOLLAR FISHY BUSINESS

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Revealed: how Japan caught and hid $2b worth of rare tuna A worker prepares

tuna for auction at a Tokyo fish market.

Photo: *PA*

 

Andrew Darby

August 12, 2006

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A worker prepares tuna for auction at a Tokyo fish market.

Photo: *PA*

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Andrew Darby

August 12, 2006

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AUSTRALIA'S top fisheries manager has revealed Japan illegally took $2

billion worth of southern bluefin tuna, effectively killing the stock

commercially.

 

An investigation into the imperilled fishery found Japanese fishers and

suppliers from other countries caught up to three times the Japanese quota

each year for the past 20 years, and hid it.

 

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority's managing director, Richard

McLoughlin, said it was an enormous international fraud. " Essentially the

Japanese have stolen $2 billion worth of fish from the international

community, and have been sitting in meetings for 15 years saying they are as

pure as the driven snow. And it's outrageous. "

 

Mr McLoughlin was speaking at an ANU seminar in a speech recorded and posted

on the internet. The official findings of the inquiry were presented at an

international meeting in Canberra in July, but remained confidential.

 

Mr McLoughlin's revelations raised the prospect yesterday that other

fisheries in the Pacific and Indian oceans were pilfered. There were also

renewed calls for southern bluefin to be protected under international

wildlife law.

 

One of the world's most expensive fish, southern bluefin migrate around the

temperate waters of Australia and grow to about 200 kilograms. A $280

million industry is based on catching the fish in the Great Australian Bight

and cage-fattening at Port Lincoln.

 

The Japanese overcatch was uncovered by Australian industry figures who

scrutinised publicly available market documents.

 

An independent review was ordered after the Federal Government put its

concerns to Japan at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of

Southern Bluefin Tuna. The Japanese also sought a review of Australian

southern bluefin tuna farming.

 

Mr McLoughlin detailed the fraud on August 1 during a wide-ranging speech on

national fisheries reform at a lunchtime seminar to the Australian National

University's Crawford School of Economics and Government.

 

" It's just been revealed that … on a 6000-tonne national quota, Japan's been

catching anything between 12,000 and 20,000 tonnes for the last 20 years,

and hiding it. And has probably killed that stock … And that's one of our

major fisheries in Australia. "

 

At the end of the seminar he was asked how it happened. " Largely it's

[because] the Japanese only ever allowed Japanese observers on Japanese

boats. And essentially it was just plain fraud.

 

 

 

" There were many thousands of tonnes of bluefin a year that were coming in

unreported, or were being caught in Taiwanese or Thai boats that were coming

in through the back door of Japanese business houses; that were going onto

the marketplace recorded as big eye tuna, or you know, northern bluefin or

something like that. So it has been an enormous international fraud …

[discussion of which] has reached all sorts of levels of government at the

present time. "

 

Asked what the solution was, Mr McLoughlin said attempts had been made for

years to put satellite monitoring systems on the Japanese vessels. " They

won't have a bar of it, " he said.

 

Legal catch limits for southern bluefin have been steady at about 14,080

tonnes in recent years, despite indications the fish stock is still in dire

straits.

 

But it is a relatively tiny portion of the Japanese appetite for tuna. The

country imports about 650,000 tonnes of tuna annually, much of it from the

Pacific and Indian oceans.

 

" This is a defining case, " said Glenn Sant, the Oceania director of the

global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, Traffic. " People can no

longer believe what they are told. What we now have to have is

transparency. "

 

At least until the early 1990s there was substantial under-reporting or

non-reporting of catches in the South Pacific, said Sandra Tarte, of the

University of the South Pacific.

 

The findings also raised a red flag over the Japanese whale fishery, said

Humane Society International's Nicola Beynon. " Any countries that are

contemplating lifting the moratorium and letting Japan go whaling must be

concerned about the probability that it will be misreported as well, " she

said.

 

The Bureau of Rural Sciences said the most recent estimate by Australian

scientists of southern bluefin's parental biomass - the quantity of adult

tuna - was that it stood at as little as 4 per cent of its original size.

 

Ms Beynon said the commission had proved itself inept many times over.