The Crisis of Overfished Tuna Stocks in the Indian Ocean

Speaker 1
The
Speaker 5
short answer really is no. As Lucy just said, these are wild animals and they're not an infinite renewable resource unless they are fished sustainably. So if we don't start managing the tuna stocks around the world more carefully, especially in regions like the Indian Ocean, where both yellowfin tuna and big eye tuna are overfished at the moment, and where a lot of our tins in the UK actually come from, we could see a total stock collapse. And that could have some terrible implications for the wider ecosystem and, of course, for the coastal communities in the Indian Ocean that depend on healthy tuna stocks for their own food security. It's quite interesting. When I speak to people about tuna and about the overfishing that's taking place in the Indian Ocean, many people often assume that it's the kind of the Chinese distant water fleets often, given the size of their fleet, that catches the most. And they're often really surprised to hear that it's actually the EU fleets, mainly the Spanish and the French owned vessels that are catching more tuna in the Indian Ocean than anyone else.
Speaker 1
I thought these fishing vessels, especially those from Europe, had to have monitors on them to tell us what they were doing and where they were doing it at all times. Yes,
Speaker 5
you're absolutely right. They certainly should. And that tracking software that you're referring to is called AIS. It's the Automatic Identification System. And we've been tracking them ourselves for a number of years, since 2018. And anyone can. There's a great platform called Global Fishing Watch, which allows anybody from the comfort of their own homes to see where fishing vessels are going and what they're up to. But we've noticed that some of these vessels went dark. I mean, one for actually nine months straight, switching off those trapping systems so that they can't be seen by us or by other vessels. And that's really quite concerning for a number of reasons. The first and foremost being that it's dangerous. This is an anti-collision tool, first and foremost, but it's also become increasingly important for transparency and for fisheries management. And our most recent report that we put out showed them still going dark for months at a time, despite the fact that they are under investigation at the moment by the European Commission for this activity.

Rise of the Tuna

Rare Earth

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts