A report on global tuna values, “Netting Billions 2020: A Global Tuna Valuation,” released 6 October by The Pew Charitable Trusts, finds that with an increase in the amount of tuna landed each year, their end-value is decreasing.
Despite more tuna being caught and sold, the total amount paid by the consumer at restaurants and supermarkets declined by nearly JPY 106 billion (USD 1 billion, EUR 849 million) less than in 2012.
“The tuna business is incredibly valuable, but now we can conclusively see that catching more fish does not necessarily result in greater economic value,” Amanda Nickson, who directs Pew’s international fisheries work, said in a press release.
This echoes the conclusion of another report, “More landings for higher profit? Inverse demand analysis of the bluefin tuna auction price in Japan and economic incentives in global bluefin tuna fisheries management,” which found that greater landings do not always translate to higher profits.
“What we’ve learned is that, more tuna isn’t always good for the bottom line," The Pew Charitable Trusts Officer for International Fisheries Grantly Galland, one of the report’s authors, told SeafoodSource. "The conclusion that I would make then, and also specifically to Pacific bluefin [for which the Japanese are requesting an increase], is that you may not want to raise quotas even if raising a quota or catch-limit is sustainable. We don’t want economic factors to outweigh science, but even when scientists have said raising catch limits would be okay from a sustainability perspective, it might still not be the smart thing to do economically."
The report estimates the catch, dock value, and end-value of fisheries for the seven most commercially important tuna species – including by fishing gear type and region – in 2016 and 2018. It is an update to the first-ever tuna valuation study, which Pew published in 2016.
The 2020 report also advocates adoption of harvest strategies and electronic monitoring for observer coverage of vessels.
The new report found that the top 10 tuna-fishing nations in 2019 were, in order: Indonesia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Spain, Ecuador, South Korea, the U.S., Kiribati, and the Philippines. Species-wise, skipjack and yellowfin tuna, mainly for canning, were the biggest in catch volume, dock value, and end value, though bigeye was also large in terms of value, the report noted.
Most tuna is caught by purse-seine, with longline second, Pew found. Longline is used more in fisheries targeting southern bluefin, while purse-seine is dominant in tuna for canning. The Pacific is the dominant source of tuna, according to the report.
Photo courtesy of Frans Delian/Shutterstock
