Blog: Oceans

So, what's been going on since our tinned tuna league table was released on an expectant world at the weekend? Quite a bit as it happens and already you've helped us score another small but vital victory over the worst of the tuna companies, Princes.

Update, 9 March 2011: both Princes and Asda have committed to removing tuna caught using fish aggregating devices in combination with purse seine nets from their supply chains by 2014. Read more >>

Having got wind of our new tinned tuna league table (see below) and the fact that it was going to come last, Tesco has done a spectacular u-turn. After being the subject of a Greenpeace investigation, it has radically improved its policy on the fishing methods it will permit for its own-brand tuna.

We're only a few days in to 2011, but already this year is shaping up to be a big one in our campaign to end the plunder of the oceans.

Oceans campaigner Oliver Knowles, Greenpeace delegation lead at the recent ICCAT meeting in Paris, sums up his feelings about the rather poor outcome.

This year, ICCAT had the opportunity to do two things: rescue bluefin tuna from the edge of commercial extinction and salvage its reputation for inaction. It has now failed on both counts.

Once again, ICCAT's 10-day meeting has resulted in a new fishing quota for bluefin, this time of 12,900 tons - a tiny reduction on last year's quota of 13,500 tons. Come May, sanctioned by the very organisation which is supposed to "conserve" tuna, destructive purse-seine fishing vessels in the Mediterranean will cast their nets again on this hugely depleted species.

Let's put a marker down here and now - the governments and delegates at this ICCAT session must be noted in history as those people that have failed this magnificent species.