"Mitsubishi [the car maker], holds a tight grasp of a 40% share in the world market for Bluefin tuna"

"Is importing thousands and thousands of pounds of Bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean to Tokyo fish markets. They also have a massive freezer, where they have acquired a stock reserve of Bluefin tuna. As the number of fish reaches a record low, the price of tuna meat will continue to rise. Mitsubishi will be able to greatly profit off of the extinction of Bluefin tuna because of their reserve stock".

https://www.projectcensored.org/mitsubishi-profits-worlds-tu...

Any conservation effort will simply fail in this conditions.

Is a few hundred at most with stones and sticks against megacorp Goliath. Tuna will be either domesticated or extinct. And is not easy at all to domesticate.

how long can you conserve frozen tuna without losing its qualities ?

You need to count on the absence of accidents also. This was disclosed when the 2011 tsunami hit, cutting the electricity in several coastal cities, and a part of the tuna stored by Mitsubishi was spoiled

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/japan-bluefin-tuna_b_2504942

In a deep freeze, I'd say several years if not indefinitely.

Would have benefited from mentioning nascent tuna farming, which is proving hard, and the probable use of whale catch as a distraction from wholesale tuna overfishing by japan: the opprobrium whale price being paid, the tuna profit is huge, flying under the radar.

There’s a pretty significant difference in tuna stocks between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Japan sources tuna from the Pacific, and for high quality fish that fetches astronomical prices, it has to be caught via long-lining. Purse seiners may turn up bluefin from time to time, but they’re not set up to store and deliver it the way a long-liner is.

Anyhow, skipjack is the most common species of tuna in the Pacific and those are doing reasonably well. The countries with fishing waters are all part of a multi-nation compact that limits the number of fishing days that can be sold. This limit (as well as other limits on fishing techniques) serves to ensure that it’s not being overfished.

Stripped of the conspiracy theory my point of substance is that I still believe Japan exceeds its tuna quotas routinely and is imperilling the pacific populations.

skipjack is barely even a tuna.

Pacific bluefin is absolutely being overfished, even if the much bigger threat is lack of feeder fish due to the triple threat of climate change, pollution, and overfishing.

> skipjack is barely even a tuna.

In what regard? Culinary, or?

Not even in the same genus

> Japan sources tuna from the Pacific

Japanese companies are buying a lot of net caught Mediterranean tuna also since 2000 at least

I can confirm this. Tunisia's tuna fishing quota is almost entirely bought by japanese companies

If you were told that a certain type of food was not going to be available in a few years, wouldn't you go out of your way to enjoy it while you could?

It is human nature. I'm not defending it, just observing.

Ahh chinese traditional medicine, a blight on our poor animal friends.

> a blight on our poor animal friends.

Let's not forget that most of the world kills and eats our animal friends when they can just eat plants instead.

For most of us, animal products are no more necessary than Chinese traditional medicine.

There's a massive difference between farming protein sources of domestic animals for nutrition and paying people halfway around the world to kill severely endangered animals for fake quackery and bullshit.

I think the point here is that they are equally unnecessary, not necessarily equally bad.

Of course some people truly do depend on animal protein. Almost anyone reading this almost certainly doesn’t.

That makes it seem at least a little bizarre that we ridicule TCM yet continue munching animals on a daily basis.

If you’re only concerned about conservation then farming wouldn’t be a concern at all. It just depends on where you’re looking from.

Well, as long as there are people insisting on calling animals “protein sources”, instead of what they are (living, feeling beings) how can we expect anyone to develop the empathy required to see killing animals “for quackery” – or any other reason for that matter – as wrong?

Ah, but paying people halfway around the worlds for fishing endangered animals for meat is so much better. All the destruction if amazon for beef pasture is worth it. You could gave eaten some beans instead.

In the context of industrial western narions, there is nothing behind this argument except arrogance and superiority complex.

Yep. Most human activity is a blight on animals.

The major destructive agriculture is the one that is done to feed animals not the one for humans.

If you get rid of animal farming you'll also get rid of a substancial amount of agriculture (not all of it if course, humans will still need to eat, but not as much as cows, pigs, chickens etc combined)

You don't need to feed grain to domestic animals. Humans have raised cattle on natural grass for thousands of years just fine.

I’m not sure where you live, but in North America almost everyone is eating meat from intensive livestock operations. By almost, that’s over 90% of all meat produced… I’m going to guess less than 1% of North Americans who eat meat manage to completely avoid these meats. The vast majority are primarily eating these meats.

Humans raise animals on grass, but relatively few animals. If we only eat grazed cattle, then very few people will get to eat it — or — we would all need to eat far less of it.

Further, evidence of grazing storing carbon effectively has been largely debunked, and it’s clear now that grazing land would likely be best left to the wilderness, allowed to be restored as forest or meadow or whatever it was. We stand to gain far more from allowing natural ecology develop and thrive than from eating more steak.

No you cannot scale up grass fed meat, you should not, and the entire idea is so full of holes it can barely hold itself anymore.

> No you cannot scale up grass fed meat

I'll need a citation on that, because the world certainly doesn't lack grazeable grass.

(Cattle is fed farmed grains today because it's more efficient logistically, not because there's a shortage of grass.)

Except now you have a population of over 8 billion people. Things stop working when you scale to that level.

So either we go back to the same total population we had thousands of year ago or we start thinking how we can be more efficient with our food.

Animal husbandry is farming, isn’t it? Or is the dictionary definition getting a little stale?

"Agriculture", they meant.

what is the basis for this exrraordinary doublethink?

Hands-on knowledge of farming and its costs, probably.

Since when our species become herbivorous?

Omnivorous maybe

No thank you.

I'm confused, Wikipedia lists the Atlantic Blue Fin Tuna as "least concern". Is the author being dramatic or is the wiki page inaccurate?

That being said, the part about people speculating on animal extinction was new to me and saddens me deeply. One wonders in what way such a person views themselves, I can't imagine it being very favorable.

> people speculating on animal extinction was new to me and saddens me deeply.

At least they’re honest about it. The people responsible for the extinctions just shrug and either ignore it or lie.

There’s no way to point to your warehouse of bear gallbladders and say anything other than, “These are gonna be worth a ton once all the bears are dead.”

That seems like politics rather than science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_bluefin_tuna#Conserva...

The Monterey Bay Aquarium fish guide puts bluefin in the “avoid” section: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/recommendations/download-consum...