Japan’s Fisheries Agency announced on 30 January that it will set a record low total allowable catch for Japanese flying squid (Todarodes pacificus) of 57,000 metric tons (MT) for the 2020 fishing season, following the poor 2019 harvest.
The TAC for the season, which runs from 20 April, 2020, to 21 March, 2021, is 15 percent lower than that for the 2019 fishing year, which was the previous low. Japan’s landings of frozen squid in 2019 fell to 80 percent that of the previous year, and was the worst since 2007.
Japan sets TACs for nine fish species: Pacific saury, Alaska pollock, sardines, mackerel, Southern mackerel, horse mackerel, squid, and snow crab – and recently for juvenile bluefin tuna. But it will shift more fisheries from a total allowable effort (TAE) system to a TAC system as part of a sustainability-oriented reform of its fisheries law. However, except for a few species such as bluefin tuna, the country has usually set TAC well above the actual harvest levels, so that it rarely acts as a real limit on fishing.
There was a 67,000 MT limit for squid in fiscal year 2019, but the catch from April to December last year was only 21,000 MT, or just a third of the quota. Though statistics are gathered on a fiscal-year basis, the squid season runs from summer through fall.
A comparison of prices of fresh Japanese flying squid at Tokyo’s public markets shows an increase in the high price from JPY 821 (USD 7.48, EUR 6.90) per kilogram at the end of August 2018 at Tsukiji, to JPY 864 (USD 7.87, EUR 7.27) at Toyosu.
There are three major reasons for the reduced catch in 2019: water temperatures in the squid breeding grounds in the East China Sea have been lower than usual, leading to a lower survival rate unsuitable for the hatching and growth of squid; Chinese and North Korean vessels have increased illegal fishing in Japanese waters on the Yamato bank in the Sea of Japan; and the number of large Japanese squid fishing vessels has declined by half in the last decade, to about 60.
Japanese processors are looking for new sources of processing materials. Utilizing the neon flying squid (Japanese: akaika; scientific name: Ommastrephes bartramii) as a substitute is one possibility. Meanwhile, the mayor of Hakodate City, Hokkaido met with the Russian consul in Sapporo in May 2019, and Hakodate companies proposed to establish a joint venture in Far East Russia to fish and process squid. Squid is already being imported from the Russian Far East as well as from other countries.
Photo courtesy of Chris Loew/SeafoodSource
