Tuna: The Hidden Cost of the World’s Priciest Fish

Nearly every day at dawn, John Heitz falls a little bit in love. Leaning over a 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin tuna, the 55-year-old American, whose business is exporting fish, circles his forefinger around its deep eye socket. “Look how clear these eyes are.” He traces the puncture where the fish was hooked, and the markings under its pectoral fin where it struggled on the line. “Sometimes,” Heitz says, “I see a good tuna, and it looks better to me than a woman.”

Heitz, a blond Illinoisan who sports a fading Maui & Sons T-shirt and a tuna tattoo on his bicep, is an out-and-out tuna man. That’s why he lives and works in General Santos City in the southern Philippines, one of the planet’s great tuna-fishing ports. By 6 a.m. on an August morning, the heat at the docks — a raucous, clanging, blood-and-guts tangle of 10,000 buyers, sellers, porters and men whacking rusty knives into silver skin — is unforgiving. Boat crews crouch in patches of shade on deck, smoking and waiting for their wages. The boats’ hulls, sloshing with bloody ice water, are almost empty, only a few shiny bellies lolling in the slush. Porters have already hoisted thousands of tuna onto their shoulders and carried them to the exporters; they swarm around the fat, fresh ones whose slick layer of slime still smells like the ocean, and whose scales gleam with a hint of the yellow flush they had when blood was pumping inside them.

(See pictures of tuna in trouble.)

It’s one of the few quality hauls of yellowfin that has come in all week. Heitz jumps into the scrum of insults and jokes flying between the buyers and the sellers. Quality testers sink metal rods into the fish, pulling out samples of pink meat that they rub between their thumb and forefinger and smell. The biggest and best tuna will go for about $700 wholesale, and get whisked away to be washed, beheaded, gutted and packed with dry ice to catch the 10:30 a.m. flight to Manila. By the next day, the fish will be in Tokyo, Seattle or California. By the next night, its meat will be poised between chopsticks.

(Watch TIME’s video “The Trouble with Tuna.”)

A Worrying Trend
The world’s tuna trade is an awesome 21st century hunt. Ancient Greeks used to stand on bluffs to watch for schools of tuna passing the shore. Today, fishing fleets stalk the fish across thousands of miles of ocean with helicopters, GPS and sonar. In 1950, about 600,000 tons of tuna were caught worldwide. Last year, that figure hit nearly 6 million tons, the prize of a chase that plays out from the Philippines to Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

For some species of tuna, the chase is becoming unsustainable. In September, the European Commission recommended that the E.U. support a temporary suspension of the global trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a majestic cousin of the yellowfin sold for tens of thousands of dollars a head for its coveted sashimi meat. At current fishing rates, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that Atlantic bluefin that spawn in the Mediterranean could disappear from those waters as early as 2012. But the recommended ban was shot down by E.U. member states including Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Spain, France and Italy — all countries with a stake in the trade. “The hunt is relentless,” says Michael Sutton, vice president of the Center for the Future of the Oceans at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. “These are the wolves, grizzly bears, lions and tigers of the ocean. If you take the top predators out, the ecosystem begins to get out of balance.” On land, when top predators like lions or wolves die off, lesser ones like baboons or coyotes flourish, throwing an entire food chain off. The same goes for oceans. Scientists believe stocks of southern bluefin around Australia have likely fallen over 90% since the 1950s and could continue to drop. Of the world’s 19 non-bluefin commercial tuna stocks, half are now overfished or at risk of going that direction, according to the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), a partnership of canning companies, scientists and the WWF.

(Read “The Mediterranean’s Tuna Wars.”)

That’s bad news not just for the oceans, but also for John Heitz and millions of others who make a living from these fish. General Santos earned its motto as the “Tuna Capital of the Philippines” when fishermen could go out in the morning and return at dusk with two or three 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin or bigeye, two tuna species that, like the bluefin, are sold for sashimi. Now, even the smallest of those tuna are at least a two- or three-day trip out to sea. These waters, like so many others, have been fished too hard for too long. “General Santos lives and dies by tuna,” says Heitz. “Now it’s getting less and less. People just have to wake up and smell the coffee.”

General Santos is not the only place dependent on tuna. At 6 a.m., an auctioneer in Tokyo reaches up to ring a brass bell, alerting a group of blue-capped, rubber-booted men perusing rows of gray frozen tuna that the bidding is about to begin. He starts to chant out the tuna’s serial numbers, written on squares of paper stuck to their bellies. One bidder raises his hand with an offer that the auctioneer weaves into his mantra: “4-5, 4-5, 4-5.” That’s 4,500 yen — about $50 — one of many offers made for every kilo of the frozen fish on the block that morning. At Tsukiji, the world’s most famous fish market, tuna are sold at prices equivalent to Ivy League educations. In one of hundreds of stalls, wholesaler Keisuke Morishima dismantles a fresh 271-lb. (123 kg) bluefin snared off Oma, a small Japanese town. Bluefin can live for decades, growing more than 10 ft. (3 m) long, weighing up to 1,500 lb. (680 kg), and with enough muscle to propel them at 40 m.p.h. (65 km/h). Throwing his weight into the fish as he makes a cut, Morishima is philosophical. “Some think it’s endangered, and I understand their position, but what can you do by worrying about it?” he asks. He’d like all his bluefin to come from Japan, but if there are none on any given day, he says, he’ll buy one caught somewhere else.

Read “Europe Moves Closer to Banning Bluefin-Tuna Trade.”

Read “The Danger of Not Eating Tuna.”

The Fish That Became Too Popular
Tuna has been eaten for thousands of years. The Greeks sliced, salted and pickled it, and Mediterranean bluefin was a staple of the Roman soldier’s lunch box. But modern Japan’s taste for the fish, coupled with rising demand in the U.S., Europe and China, has driven the Atlantic bluefin to become “the poster child of overfishing worldwide,” says Monterey’s Sutton. The number of breeding tuna in the eastern Atlantic has plunged over 74% since the late 1950s, with the steepest drop occurring in the past 10 years, while the western population dropped over 82% between 1970 and 2007. The Pacific bluefin, whose habitat spans from the West Coast of the U.S. to Japan, is officially in better shape, but one Tsukiji auctioneer estimates the number of tuna coming in these days is down 60% to 70% from what it used to be. Japan’s Fisheries Agency does not believe its local tuna are overfished and has steadfastly refused to impose a quota on its tuna fishermen. But in August, Masayuki Komatsu, a professor at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, who has fiercely defended Japan’s right to hunt whale, made the heretical claim that because Japan’s bluefin is so depleted “Japanese people must change their mind-set.”

Japan consumes about 80% of the 60,000 tons of bluefin caught around the world each year — and local economies on both sides of the planet depend on it. Off the coast of the Spanish port of Cartagena, hundreds of seagulls swarm the same patch of water six days a week, waiting for a boat to arrive and uncoil a long, plastic tube into the water. As sardines and mackerel are pumped into the deep, the water begins to churn. Hundreds of bluefin tuna, circling in vast cages beneath the water’s surface, duke it out for their daily meal. This is a tuna ranch, a method that started in the Mediterranean in 1996 and now dominates the Atlantic bluefin industry. Today there are 70 registered ranches in the Mediterranean alone (and more in Mexico, Japan and Australia), and the majority of the region’s bluefin quota is caught and dragged to cages to be fattened for six months to a year. The ranch off Cartagena, owned and operated by Ricardo Fuentes & Sons, produces some 10,000 bluefin tuna annually, and this year half of them will go straight to Japan.

(See pictures of bluefin tuna being caught.)

Tuna-ranching has proven to be a good way to do business — too good, some argue. In recent years, many boats have joined in the lucrative business of taking fish to ranches like these, sometimes netting more tuna than they’re allowed to, or catching underage fish that have not had the chance to spawn. “Fattening is the motor that drives overfishing,” says Sebastian Losado, oceans policy adviser for Greenpeace in Madrid. Oversight of this kind of illegal fishing — and more generally, stewardship of the fish — has proven weak. Last November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Madrid-based body charged with protecting the Atlantic bluefin, adopted a regional quota for 2009 that exceeded its own scientists’ more cautious recommendations by nearly three times. Tuna activists read that as a shameless bow to lobbying from countries like France, Italy and Spain, where influential fishermen are loath to see their profits drop. “This isn’t a process controlled by countries,” says Losado. “It’s controlled by companies.”

And by lovers of tuna. In Tokyo’s upmarket Okusawa suburb, the lunch crowd at the sushi restaurant Irifune has thinned out. Katsumi Honda, Irifune’s owner and head sushi chef, rhythmically chops blocks of pink and red flesh behind a counter. Now 68, Honda remembers how, as a boy, his first bite of Japanese hon maguro, or bluefin, inspired him to become a chef. For Honda, it’s the only tuna there is. “Once you experience our natural maguro, you cannot go to a conveyor-belt sushi place anymore,” he says. In 2001, when the yen was still rolling, Honda helped auction a Pacific bluefin at Tsukiji for about $220,000. It was one of the most expensive fish ever sold in Japan. “Maguro,” Honda explains, “has a power to move people.”

(Watch TIME’s video “Bluefin Tuna Catch.”)

Beyond Bluefin
As majestic and imperiled as it might be, all the world’s bluefin catch accounts for less than 3% of the tuna that people eat. For the $175 that a plate of Honda’s maguro runs to, you can buy half a year’s supply of canned tuna from the Ocean Canning Corp. in General Santos. Inside Ocean Canning’s processing plant, rows of men and women in blue smocks skin, bone and pack thousands of fish into cans sent to customers in Europe. Outside, dozens more would-be workers line up at the cannery’s office, applications in hand. If there is one thing that people in General Santos can count on, it’s the West’s insatiable appetite for canned tuna. Global imports have skyrocketed from less than 3 million tons per year in 1976 to over 3.5 billion today. “Demand is very high,” says Mariano Fernandez, Ocean Canning’s general manager. “Raw material is the problem.”

The raw material is mostly skipjack, a small, unglamorous tuna that makes up about 60% of the world’s tuna catch. Of the main commercial species, bluefin, yellowfin and bigeye tuna are primarily sold to the sashimi market; skipjack and albacore land in cans. Over half the skipjack caught each year come from the waters in the western and central Pacific, and while skipjack in the region are officially plentiful, according to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) that keeps track of them, talk to anyone in General Santos and you’ll hear otherwise. Supplies of fresh, local skipjack dropped 50% last year, says Miguel Lamberte, the port’s manager. This August, the amount of both frozen and fresh skipjack being unloaded was at an all-time low, he says. “And it’s still going down.”

To keep the cans filled, large Philippine boats have gone further and further afield — to Papua New Guinea, to the Solomon Islands — where there is still plenty of skipjack for the taking. Fishing is growing faster in this swath of the Pacific than in any other part of the world, says the WCPFC, as ever greater numbers of boats from Asia, the Americas and Europe are leaving depleted waters for these bluer pastures. “We’re getting a lot of boats seeking to come into our region from the Indian Ocean and eastern Pacific because the skipjack is still healthy here,” says John Hampton, manager of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community’s Oceanic Fisheries Program, which studies highly migratory fish stocks for the WCPFC. “There is good money to be made.” But with more boats on the water, many local governments don’t have the resources to keep track of how much fishing is being done in their waters, making illegal fishing or overfishing in protected areas tricky to control.

Read “Can the World’s Fisheries Survive Our Appetites?”

Read “Sashimi on Demand?”

In General Santos and ports like it, when the fish start to go, everyone loses: the boat owners, the cannery workers, the exporters, the porters, the truck drivers. As the day winds down at the port, John Heitz walks between rows of small, unsold yellowfin that look, and smell, like they have seen better days. After the good ones go early in the morning, thousands of fish like these are left over, caught too young to have been given a chance to spawn and too far away to get back to dock in time to sell for a good price. To Heitz, it’s obvious they’re from Indonesia — and most likely have been caught without a permit — but there is nobody here from the government fisheries department to verify that. There almost never is. “All these bad fish kind of stress me out,” Heitz says. “It would be so easy to manage, and they’re just not doing it.”

The fishermen get the worst deal of all: the work gets harder and the pay gets less. Down one lane in a waterfront neighborhood, Danilo Ante sits at home with his girlfriend and four kids between fishing trips. On his last job, Ante took home about $21 for six weeks of work on the high seas. “In the past, there were only a few fishermen,” he says. “But now we get fewer fish because there are more boats on the water.” Even if his boats keep catching less fish, Ante doesn’t have a lot of options in General Santos. “We have to continue. We have to rely on the sea.”

An Endangered Species?
In October, Monaco formally proposed to register Atlantic bluefin on Appendix 1 of the U.N.’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a move that would temporarily ban its trade and transfer enforcement from ICCAT to governments. If trade is shut down, so would be fishing, and the Atlantic bluefin would have some time to recover, much as the humpback whale rebounded after being listed in 1975. Monaco’s proposal, which all but six E.U. states voted to co-sponsor and which has U.S. support, will go before CITES for approval in March 2010.

Even if that bid fails — and many believe it could — just the threat of CITES may serve as a warning to the tuna industry and to governments. Fishermen, understandably, are not thrilled by the possibility of a ban, no matter how temporary. “We’re in a race with the ecologists,” says David Martínez Cañabate, adjunct director of Ricardo Fuentes & Sons in Cartagena, which employs about 1,000 workers. “They want to shut down the fisheries, and we want to show them that the quotas and enforcement are working.” Cañabate acknowledges there is too much illegal fishing, but believes rogue players can still be controlled. A ban, he argues, would come at too high a price. “Wouldn’t it be better to still have the industry?” he asks. “To keep the jobs?”

(See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

Even so, the fishing companies know better than anyone that the only way to save the business is to save the species. The Spanish company has invested in the global quest to get bluefin to reproduce and grow in captivity — a task that has eluded all but a few scientists. In a trial run by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, scientists funded by Ricardo Fuentes have injected Atlantic bluefin females with synthetic hormones to trigger the fish’s egg-laying response. This year, the team helped create some 150 million bluefin eggs, of which they took about 3 million to try to hatch. Of those, “maybe 50 [will] survive to the weight of one gram, or about 50 days [old],” says Aurelio Ortega, a biologist on the project. “We’re still a long way off. Even five years would be very optimistic.”

Some are further along. In 2002, Japan’s Kinki University successfully bred and raised bluefin in pens and is now selling small amounts of the farmed fish. This year, Clean Seas, an Australian fishing company, got its southern bluefin living in a land-based tank to spawn eggs that were raised to be fingerlings — a breakthrough in the growth cycle. The success was so unexpected that Clean Seas had to leave all but a few of the young fish to die; there wasn’t enough room to let them grow.

Aquaculture is not a perfect solution. Farmed tuna have huge appetites — in Cartagena, it takes up to 22 lb. (10 kg) of seafood to add 2 lb. (1 kg) of weight — and they create a lot of waste. But tuna-breeding is one of an expanding list of ideas being rolled out by scientists, activists, chefs, fishermen and entrepreneurs trying to find a happier marriage between the human demand for tuna and the ecosystem. “There is no one silver bullet to end overfishing because there is no one thing causing overfishing,” says Mike Crispino of the ISSF. Major canneries that have signed on to the ISSF, such as BumbleBee, StarKist and Chicken of the Sea, are trying to guarantee that the fish going into their cans come from legal and traceable sources. More and more, customers are being offered ways to play a part too. In San Francisco and Seattle, two restaurants are already running popular sustainable-sushi bars, with menus designed around plentiful, local ingredients. “In the U.S., people think of sushi as being five or six fish that you eat in a particular way,” says Casson Trenor, a former chef who opened San Francisco’s Tataki in 2008 and later helped Seattle’s Mashiko transition into serving better-sourced seafood. In the modern sushi restaurant, says Casson, “we’re not respecting these animals.”

In General Santos, people do respect the tuna. John Heitz points to a few men hauling yellowfin through the water from small wooden boats. “This is one of the few handline fisheries in the world,” Heitz says. It’s not flashy, but it follows the rules, pays the bills and, over time, it will keep these great animals in the water. “By eating a certain product, you’re part of the problem, or part of the solution.” Heitz wants to be on the solution side. Once, when he was scuba-diving off General Santos’ coast, two yellowfin torpedoed past. “It was like a motorcycle was going by,” he says, crouching slightly, staring straight ahead and moving his shoulders back and forth to mimic the fish’s muscular energy. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Unless something changes, he may never see its like again.

— with reporting by Lisa Abend / Cartagena and Yuki Oda / Tokyo

Read “The Sushi Wars: Can the Bluefin Tuna Be Saved?”

Read “How to Eat Sushi During a Fish Scare.”