Greenpeace ships step in to stop bluefin tuna being fished to extinction © Hilton/Greenpeace
Today, or at 11.59pm tonight, to be exact, the purse-seining season for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is being closed. A week early.
I'm back on land now, having left the Arctic Sunrise in the Med. In London, we've had a flurry of media calls, excited by what they think is the "good news" that "bluefin fishing is being banned" in the Mediterranean.
So I thought, as well as putting the record straight with any journalists who'll listen, that I should maybe explain to everyone else what exactly is happening. And whether it is indeed "good news".
Bluefin tuna have been fished in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean for centuries. Just a few decades ago, they were being caught off Brazil and in the North Sea by sports fishermen. But even that level of fishing had its toll. Atlantic bluefin numbers dwindled and their range decreased, so now you'd be very hard-pushed to find bluefin off Scarborough or Recife.
At the same time, the 'new' technique of purse-seining emerged and a new market for bluefin sushi opened up in Japan. This led to a huge increase in targeted fishing with big nets and technologically-advanced methods to take off in the Mediterranean in particular, catching fish for export to Japan. It made economic sense to target those fish when they were most accessible, which just so happened to be when they migrated into the Mediterranean to spawn, once a year.
Bluefin became big business. In just a few decades the already-depleted bluefin population has been almost fished out. Best estimates suggest present stock levels less than 15 per cent of those before purse-seining started. Things do not look good. And the fault for driving the species to the very brink of extinction can be landed squarely at the purse-seining industry.
Cut to today, and the massive overcapacity of bluefin fishing in the Mediterranean, and the depleted stocks, have led us to a strange situation. Bluefin quotas are the lowest they have ever been, and the season the shortest it has ever been - a mere calendar month. But with so much focus on the quota, and so much bad press already on the overfishing and illegal fishing that has decimated this species, 2010 sees fishing countries eager to show they are Doing Things Properly.
So today's announcement by the EC is just procedural. Having monitored the catches of the EU's bluefin-seining fleet, they have ascertained that they have caught their allocated quota. So they are calling back the fishing boats. Leaving them out there, and allowing them to fish, would mean the EU overshooting its quotas and having to release the fish.
What has surprised me is the speed with which the quotas were filled. Not just that they have done it with a week to spare, but that, up until last week, the weather had been preventing fishing, and only a small proportion of quotas had been met, despite there being significantly less boats chasing the fish.
This shows just how good they are at catching the fish in a short space of time, and just how powerful the bluefin tuna catching machine is when it gets going. Little wonder that this method has to be so strongly restricted, and little wonder it has wrought such damage. And that, of course, is precisely why Greenpeace has been trying to stop it.
So the news isn't good news. It's bad news. Rather than keeping the purse-seining vessels chained up in port, the EU has gone out and fished up its quota, making a mockery of its alleged position to support an international trade ban at CITES in March.
The take home message, in case you need one, is, "More endangered bluefin successfully caught by European fishermen". Not much to be cheerful about then...
