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Updated Saturday, March 20, 2010 11:54 am TWN, By Malcolm Foster, AP

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Japanese fish dealers welcome tuna ban rejection

But environmentalists say ICCAT has repeatedly failed to enforce catch limits — and that the quotas themselves are insufficient.

“ICCAT is not able to manage sustainable fishing,” said Wakao Hanaoka, ocean campaigner with Greenpeace in Tokyo.

“For Japanese consumers, this is the wrong direction,” he added. “Consumers here love to eat sushi and want to pass this along to the next generation, but what the Japanese government is doing is totally opposite to this.”

Junichi Hakuta, a 52-year-old fish wholesaler at Tsukiji market who relies on tuna for half his business, acknowledged that he was worried about declining bluefin stocks, but said the media attention to the issue would contribute to conservation efforts.

“There is a problem with overfishing, and ICCAT needs to enforce its catch limits more strictly,” Hakuta said as motorized carts whizzed by carrying containers filled with squid, fish and clams in ice water. “The whole world needs to work on this. We need to protect our resources. So I see this as a good result from the meeting.”

Coming amid criticism of Japan's whaling program — as well as an Oscar award for the film “The Cove,” which depicts the dolphin-hunting village of Taiji in southwestern Japan — the tuna issue has caused some fishermen to feel that aspects of their culture are being attacked.

“It's wrong — people telling us what we can and can't eat,” said Yukio Unagizawa, a wholesaler at Tsukiji market. “Foreigners eat cows. ... Catching dolphins is part of that village's tradition.”

The tuna vote was a hot topic in hundreds of fishing villages that dot Japan's coasts. While fisherman that ply local waters generally opposed the ban, some said they could benefit from it because of a likely spike in prices of domestically caught tuna.

But Ichiro Murayama, an official in the fishing cooperative in the small town of Katsuura, near Taiji, said that was a short-term view. A move to prohibit trade in certain areas could make it easier to ban others, he said.

“This wave of putting restrictions on the fishing industry is getting stronger,” Murayama said. “This is a trend that could lead to banning tuna fishing even in coastal waters.”

A major daily, the Asahi newspaper, also wondered about the future of the declining bluefin.

“How will various countries cooperate to manage tuna resources? The immediate crisis has passed, but the biggest issue remains unresolved,” it said in an analysis.

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