"To all tuna exporters - We are urgently in need of fresh tuna which will be exported to South Korea. I need complete company profile and product lists with specifications. Minimum 20-foot container per month."
An internet trader requires few details from fish pirates who want to make a deal, possibly involving transhipment to avoid detection and bypass quota controls. Unregulated, unreported and illegal fishing plays havoc with official catch statistics and presents a huge challenge to monitoring bodies concerned about the demise of Atlantic bluefin tuna caught in the Mediterranean.
Fishing fleets can avoid documentation of illegal catches by transferring them directly to massive reefer vessels and cold containers without ever landing them at EU ports. Other operators bypass control mechanisms through tuna ranching.
High speed swimmers, the bluefins live mostly in surface waters ranging widely in the Atlantic. When chasing prey the tuna's muscle movement is able to warm their blood allowing them to dive deep, up to 1,000 metres, and hunt in cooler waters. They can sustain temperatures down to 3°C but prefer a minimum surface temperature of 24°C for breeding. Four-year-old tuna spawn for the first time in the Mediterranean while another branch of the bluefin does not reproduce until eight years after hatching.
Migration to spawning grounds around the Balearics, the Tyrrhenian Sea and in the central and eastern Mediterranean runs from April to July.
The tuna migration has always been relied upon as a natural resource. The rapid spread of "tuna farms" in the Mediterranean over the past decade has been a factor in driving the Atlantic Bluefin fishery to the edge of collapse as serious regulation may come too late to save it.
Most of the tuna pens can be traced to EU purse-seine fleets which chase the tuna and transfer unreported catches to nets towed by tugboats. Unlike the traditional fixed traps, which captured only adult fish, purse-seiners move with the tuna and catch juvenile bluefins before they are old enough to spawn.
Lucrative market
The live fish are hauled to tuna ranches located off the shores of Spain, Turkey, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, Malta, Tunisia and Libya. Harvest time, when the price is right, can come up to two years after they were caught. A tuna can be worth more than a Mercedes Benz. A quick kill is preferred by buyers or the flesh of the stressed fish will turn pale, lowering the price.
The fish change hands with no accompanying documents through eight or more dealers between where they come out of the water and where they are eaten, across continents and time. This makes it extremely difficult to keep track of how many tuna were caught, where and by whom, leading to huge distortions in national catch data.
The transfer of live tuna to pens for fattening has been the perfect way for unscrupulous operators to launder over-quota tuna bound for the lucrative Japanese market. Japan has already overfished its own Pacific Bluefin tuna. With tight regulations in place the traders have been turning to the Mediterranean to satisfy the craving for fresh raw tuna (sashimi) or tuna with vinegared rice (sushi).
With a single bluefin worth as much as $150,000 on the Tokyo market, UN experts say Italian and Russian organised crime is involved. A purse-seine boat can cost up to $500,000. The world conservation body WWF has alleged that mafia-owned fishing operations launder money from other activities and exploit official fishing subsidies.
Operators have been pushing for quick and maximum profit before enforcement closes in. Even the EU fisheries committee is exasperated at how long this is taking, despite years of recommendations from scientists to close the net, and has sent a letter of protest to Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg.
In April Commissioner Borg was in Morocco to discuss closer co-operation to strengthen sustainable fisheries. EU countries are still flouting the driftnet ban five years after the official phase-out. Last month the Moroccan government enacted a tough law aiming to punish fishermen who continue to use illegal and destructive driftnets in its waters.
Taste for toro
Farmed tuna, fed on mackerel and other oily fish, is higher in oil content than wild tuna, which makes it desirable for sushi. Yet some European sushi restaurants are spurning tuna as an ingredient because they are unable to provide customers with information on where their meal came from, or how it was caught.
Sushi first appeared in Japan as a 19th century street snack for commuters in cities. An article on Japanese food in a 1929 American ladies' magazine daintily skirted the subject of eating raw fish as too delicate for Western sensibilities.
After World War II, the US occupation of Japan brought a cultural shift away from the lean fish traditionally preferred by the Japanese towards fatty cuts of tuna. American habits also influenced the Japanese toward eating red meats. Originally the West shunned tuna, catching it only to use as pet food.
Toro, and especially the superior Otoro, made from shavings of pink flesh from the tuna's underbelly, melt like butter in the mouth. The greater the fat content, the greater the price on the Tokyo fish market. The more endangered tuna are becoming through over-fishing, the more diners will pay for a tiny morsel of this dying breed.
Ancient nets
"The bluefin were to ancient Mediterranean peoples what the buffalo were to the American plains Indian," writes Theresa Maggio on the ancient Sicilian ritual of bluefin tuna fishing. Today the mattanza, a ritual tuna harvest once practised in Sicily and Sardinia, has dwindled to a subsidised curiosity for tourists.
Tuna fishing was probably introduced to Sicily in the ninth century with the Arab conquest. The swift killing of netted tuna was surrounded by ritual and song. These traditional songs sung during fishing are so old that they have become partially incomprehensible to the very fishermen that have sung them for generations. The head man of the operation chosen by the community for his experience and knowledge of the tuna migration harvest, is known as the Rais.
The method came to Malta under Grand Master Pinto in 1748 where the first tonnara net made out of coconut fibres was laid at Mellieha Bay. Surviving until the 1960s, the traditional trapping of tuna in Malta came to an end when the fishermen were told by a British adviser to adopt the methods of Hong Kong fishermen and switch to long-lining.
Until the first half of the 20th century there were hundreds of these tuna nets in the Mediterranean. The timeless migration of the tuna was sustained because the hunters did not pursue the fish but waited each year for them to swim into their chambered nets. The biggest tuna always swim first so a good catch was ensured while giving a chance to juveniles to spawn and return the next year.
The last Sicilian net fishermen at Favignana and Bonagia have hung on fiercely to traditional ways for some years but now seem unable to survive the competition. Two years ago the nets at Bonagia, near Trapani, were kept ashore in protest at a nearby tuna farm in 2005. The old trapping area in Carloforte in Sardinia has been converted to a historical tourist attraction.
For the past decade or more, industrial companies have employed big boats with expensive military equipment to locate, catch and fatten tuna. Traditional fleets using techniques from ancient times are no match.
Spanish connection
The first bluefins swim into the Mediterranean each April from their Atlantic feeding grounds. The traditional tuna fishing industry has been practised along the south coast of Spain for thousands of years.
After spawning in different areas, the tuna are seen again by Spanish fishermen in mid-July as the fish return to the Atlantic once more. The use of ancient underwater labyrinths on the Atlantic side of the Straits of Gibraltar, made with rocks to trap the huge fish during migration, was passed down through the ages.
The fishermen of Barbate claim they still use the ones left behind 3,000 years ago by the Phoenicians which were also used by the Romans and Arabs. In the Roman era factories made Garum sauce, made of tuna, wine, vinegar, pepper, olive oil, and water, carried by soldiers as a source of protein.
South of Barbate and closer to the straits, the old fishing village of Zahara de los Atunes boasts an emblem showing a large bluefin swimming below the 15th century Castillo de las Amadrabas. The castle was built for protection against pirates and later used by local fishermen to store their tuna fishing equipment.
Tourists are invited to "eat the best red tuna from the almadraba" (an Arab word for fight or struggle) caught with traditional nets anchored to the seabed. The nets remain in place for about six weeks in June and July waiting for the tuna to pass again as they leave the Mediterranean after spawning season is over.
Traditional fishermen have been struggling to compete against international companies as the last of the commercially viable tuna stock is fished out of the Mediterranean sea.
At an international trappers' seminar in 2005, around 400 fishermen working on tuna traps in Spain and Morocco reported that their catches had dropped by 80 per cent over the previous six years.
Representing 1,300 jobs supported by nine traditional traps on either side of the straits, they proposed measures to save the tuna and preserve their way of life. They called on ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna) to set up an urgent recovery plan and improve documentation to avoid illegal trans-shipments of fish by the purse seine fleet.
At Cartagena a series of tuna farms now operates utilising neither local skills nor traditional technology.
They use French purse-seiners to tow captured tuna to the farms. Joint ventures between Japanese trading firms and large-scale Spanish fishing companies have set up the holding pens to fatten up the tuna for a higher price. Tuna pens have sprung up around Maltese shores after the first one was bought to the islands from a Spanish company in 2000.
Globalisation of sushi
The first American sushi bar opened in Los Angeles in 1964. A description of "How sushi went global" (Global Policy Forum) paints the transition from ancient to high-tech fishing methods:
"Two miles off the beach in Barbate, Spain, a huge maze of nets snakes several miles out into Spanish waters near the Strait of Gibraltar. A high-speed, Japanese-made workboat heads out to the nets. On board are five Spanish hands, a Japanese supervisor, 2,500 kilograms of frozen herring and mackerel imported from Norway and Holland, and two American researchers.
"The boat is making one of its twice-daily trips to Spanish nets, which contain captured Mediterranean tuna being raised under Japanese supervision for harvest and export to Tsukiji Fish Market."
Highly mobile French and Spanish fleets have abandoned their traditional fishing grounds to chase after the last of the tuna in the Eastern Mediterranean, formerly considered a refuge for the hunted fish.
Last year Greenpeace activists on board the Rainbow Warrior confiscated driftnets, banned by the United Nations and European Union. They were threatened by pirate fishermen wielding machetes who attempted to board the ship.
Vessels fishing by purse-seine are not doing anything illegal provided they abide by the regulations, but successive transhipments of their haul will almost certainly drive tuna off the fisheries map.
Besides being depleted by modern-day pirates, the migrating tuna face other hurdles. When Israel bombed a Lebanese power plant last August the resulting spill of oil into the sea was a disaster on the scale of the 1999 Erika incident.
According to the Athens-based UNEP Mediterranean Action Plan, tuna eggs and larvae from a nearby spawning ground, which normally float on the surface of the water, may have been wiped out by oil pollution.
(To be concluded)