In fish-crazed Japan, where eating seafood is a vital part of the nation’s culture, conservation groups are working with companies to persuade more Japanese to eat certified, sustainably caught seafood. If they succeed, it could have a significant positive impact on the world’s fisheries.
For the past nine years, seafood industry executives and marine conservationists have met in a European or North American city to talk about sustainability at the annual Seafood Summit.
This year, they’ll meet in Hong Kong. It’s a sign that market-based efforts to make fishing and aquaculture more environmentally friendly are spreading from Europe and the US, where eco-labeling schemes like the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) were first launched, to Asia, where most of the world’s fishermen, fish farmers, and seafood consumers live.
So far in Asia, wealthy, seafood-loving Japan is leading the way. Yes, Japanese fishing boats still hunt whales under the guise of scientific research. Fishermen continue to kill dolphins in Taiji’s now-infamous coves, and Tokyo sushi lovers still feast on endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna. But at the same time, consumers and corporations here are becoming some of the first in Asia to put their buying power to work for the cause of sustainable seafood.
Signs of the nascent revolution could be found on a recent afternoon in the sprawling fish display of a chain grocery store in Nagano Prefecture, three hours from Tokyo. There, nearly hidden among the piles of attractively packaged seafood and the red flags blaring The more you buy, the cheaper it seems!, sat several dozen Styrofoam trays of salmon and trout roe, salted mackerel, and salmon steaks bearing the MSC logo, signifying that the fish had been sustainably caught.
Fumiko Yamaguchi, 81, who purchases fish at the store every day, said she’d never noticed the small blue-and-white label. She is worried about the state of the world’s oceans, however. Programs about overfishing are on TV all the time lately if we harvest too many fish there won’t be any left, she said, adding that fishermen and government regulators, not consumers, must fix the problem.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that more than 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited, or recovering. Like Yamaguchi, many Japanese are aware of those dismal figures. Yet eating seafood is a central part of national food culture so much so, says Greenpeace Japan’s oceans campaign manager Wakao Hanaoka, that some people think they have a right to eat it, and they don’t want outsiders telling them not to. That, along with other cultural and institutional factors, means the notion of sustainable seafood still faces an uphill fight in Japan.
If more Japanese consumers embrace seafood sustainability, they could have a significant impact on ocean ecosystems. The Japanese eat 6 percent of the world’s fish harvest, 81 percent of its fresh tuna, and a significant chunk of all salmon, shrimp, and crab. Japan also imports more seafood than any other country and caught 4.2 million metric tons of fish in 2008.
The Christian Science Monitor