Looting the Seas I

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Fishing nets – worth upwards of $100,000 each – are drawn onto a dock once bluefin are transferred to ranch cages. Felix Sanchez

Along the Mediterranean coast of France, in the city of Montpellier, prosecutors are quietly putting on trial an ancient French tradition — the fishing and trading of the majestic Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna, a sushi delicacy sold in restaurants from New York to Tokyo. The still-secret proceedings accuse some of France’s most prominent fishing masters of illegally catching several hundred tons of the prized bluefin, a fish so severely plundered in the Mediterranean that this year it was proposed for listing as an endangered species alongside panda bears.

Bluefin tuna is one of the sea’s most valuable species, a highly migratory fish that can weigh more than 500 kilograms and live 40 years. One large fish can fetch more than $100,000 in Japan, which consumes around 80 percent of the global bluefin market. The widely hunted bluefin has also become a bellwether, the latest threatened species in a feeding frenzy that has seen the disappearance of as much as 90 percent of the ocean’s large fish.

Behind the demise of the bluefin is a kind of Wild West of fishing, in which fishermen, traders, and regulators have for years widely ignored the rules. “Everyone cheated,” said Roger Del Ponte, one of the six French fishing captains facing criminal charges. “There were rules, but we didn’t follow them. It’s like driving down the road. If I know there are no police, I’m going to speed … They didn’t care, then all of a sudden, boom!”

The fishermen, for their part, say they were part of a culture that manipulated national catch figures to shield France’s bluefin fishing industry from international scrutiny. They charge that the real culprit is missing in the courtroom: their nation’s Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

In fact, in what has become one of the world’s most notorious fisheries, France is just one player — and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

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Looting the Seas I

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Bluefin fishing port Sète is nicknamed the “little Venice” of France for its cobblestone-lined channels. Kate Willson
Cobblestone walkways line the quiet canals of Sète, a French community of 40,000 nestled along the Mediterranean about 85 miles west of Marseille. It is a picturesque place, bounded on one side by Mount Saint Clair and the other by the clear turquoise water of the sea. But there is more to this seemingly sleepy tourist town. 

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Looting the Seas I

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Bluefin ranching: The advent of fattening tuna in coastal ranches revolutionized the bluefin trade. Marcos Garcia Rey
In the final days of 1996, the air was cold and seas rough around the southern Spanish port of Cartagena. A boat belonging to the Tuna Graso sea “ranch” — a joint venture between Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and Spain’s Ricardo Fuentes & Sons — had just pulled aboard a huge 300-kilo bluefin tuna from one of its underwater pens. That single fish was worth $17,000 to the company, and would fetch far more at auction in Tokyo. 

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Looting the Seas I

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A tourist eats tuna sushi near Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.  Kyodo /Landov
Mount Fuji rises across the bay from the 16th century port of Shimizu — a sight fit for a post card. The town has seen better days — its businesses shuttered, fishing boats driven into bankruptcy, and the only department store closed. But the city’s core business — marine and overland trade — has assured its survival. Shimizu is the primary port of landing for tuna in Japan.

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Looting the Seas I

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Bluefin tuna are dragged live to sea "ranches" in the Mediterranean, where they are fattened for months before being shot in the head and shipped to Japan. Felix Sanchez
Nearly 50 countries that trade in high-priced Eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna voted Saturday to transform an archaic paper-based system into an electronic fish-tracking database that will make it harder for fleets to smuggle plundered bluefin into market.

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Looting the Seas I

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As part of their continuing effort to take a lead in managing global fisheries, officials with the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration told Congress earlier this month that they’ll work with six countries – singled-out for their lack of enforcement — to cut down on illegal fishing around the globe.

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Looting the Seas I

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ICIJ’s Looting the Seas investigation, on the $4 billion black market in bluefin tuna, has attracted worldwide attention since its release this weekend. The series reveals how for a decade officials turned a blind eye to massive overfishing of Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna — source of the world’s most coveted sushi — and manipulated national catch figures to protect their overbuilt fishing fleets.

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Looting the Seas I

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The Center for Public Integrity on Sunday launched a new e-reader designed to make reading long-form investigative projects easier on digital platforms. The Treesaver e-reader debuted with a global investigation by the Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists into the plundering of the majestic bluefin tuna population by an international black market.

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Looting the Seas I

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As regulators gather in Paris in mid November to decide the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna, 'Looting the Seas' reveals the sorry saga of illegal over-fishing that has led to plummeting global stocks. ICIJ reporter Kate Willson and colleagues discover that attempts to save bluefin stocks are still threatened by crucial missing data, and there's evidence that governments across the Mediterranean connived in the growth of a vast Black Market, worth US$4 billion over the last 10 years. As the global appetite for sushi spreads beyond Japan, is it too late to rescue stocks of one of Nature's most noble fish, prized by the Romans, and today worth often thousands of dollars each?

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