Yesterday, some of my colleagues met with executives from Princes to discuss the problems with their tinned tuna. It was the first meeting for several months and certainly since Princes came bottom of our league table. Needless to say, there was a lot to discuss.
It was, by all accounts, a cordial enough meeting, but despite nearly 26,000 emails being sent to Princes’ director of sustainability (plus various meetings and phone calls, the tuna league table and accompanying report) there was no big announcement. At the time of writing, it is still clear that Princes is still the worst tuna company out there. But they’ve undertaken to go off and think about things some more.
And they have a lot to think about.
This has just been underlined by a story in the Daily Mail, explaining how Princes is the only company in the UK to sell bigeye tuna. Bigeye is listed as 'vulnerable' on the IUCN Red List of Species which means it "is facing a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term future".
That Princes is knowingly targeting a threatened species for commercial exploitation is unconscionable enough, but that's without considering Princes' sustainability statement, which says:
I'm not quite sure what "red status" means. As Princes has insisted it doesn't deal with species listed as critically endangered, perhaps it's referring to this diagram on the IUCN's website. Who knows?
Regardless, bigeye tuna is listed on the IUCN Red List, the main purpose of which is to "catalogue and highlight those plants and animals that are facing a higher risk of global extinction (i.e. those listed as Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable)". It's also on supermarket shelves, although you wouldn't necessarily know it because Princes fails to mention anything about tuna species on its labelling, though in fairness this is something it says it will rectify later this year. Labels don't change what's inside the tin, though.
So there's a huge difference between what Princes says in its sustainability policy and what it's actually selling. And of course, this isn't the first time Princes has been caught telling untruths: a few weeks ago, it was forced to admit that sustainability claims on its tins were (ahem) unsustainable. How will Princes solve the bigeye problem – rewrite their sustainability policy?
If Princes don’t do something soon to change their practices, then it's not just bigeye tuna that will be vulnerable.
