What’s In A Fish?

I’ve just caught my eye on this headlined article about the recent plan of the European Union to curtail or even impede the fishing of bluefin tuna in the european side of the Atlantic and towards the Mediterranean seas where most of them actually thrive.

This move is apparently the result of environmentalists’ reports that stocks of the highly-priced tuna specie is fast dwindling and would soon be extinct if fishing for such would not be drastically brought down to unprecedented (low) levels.

Tsk..tsk…we used to worry solely of dolphins and whales disappearing from our seas, (along with for-rich-only sturgeons in the Black Sea) but now, the luscious tuna would soon be on our list. Statistics shows that bluefin may not be the only tuna specie that would be at risk of extinction but also the more prevalent ones like the yellowfin and skipjack, two species that the Philippines is a major exporter of—-about half-a-billion dollars worth of shipment to the United States and Japan.

In a year, the entire catch of tuna reaches nearly 3 Million tons and with such gargantuan magnitude, environmentalists from the WWF sees intense overfishing and cries out the need for a general limit to fishing quotas across the globe.

I wonder if this present tuna debacle would soon affect the rack prices of my favorite Century Tuna’s over at my favorite grocery store just a block away. Over the years, I have seen the steady rice of canned tuna to nearly double of what it had cost some five years ago. It used to be around somewhere 17 bucks per pop but now, it can go as high as 30 pesos. I often squirm seeing those ever-changing white sticker price tags pasted on them tuna cans.

I could say that I am a tuna fanatic and I want to eat it uncooked, with chunks and chunks of it dipped in savory oil or brine, and steamy rice on the side. Forget about chickenjoys or mcburgers, but when I feel the need for real hearty meal, I’d just be hiking off to that grocery store I had mentioned above and eat to my heart’s delight.

An uncle once told me that in America, tunas are merely consumed as cat food. I wonder if this is true. Do you think that American cats are so privileged kind that them mewwing lots had made Uncle Sam as this nation’s number one importer of tuna products? I don’t think so.

Apparently, the ever-growing demand for Japanese concoctions called sushi and sashimi are behind the present overfishing issue of tunas from the world’s ocean. Japan consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s tuna catch.

Japanese appetite for raw fish now not only becomes responsible for the whale extinction scare, but also of the present threat to tuna’s dwindling stock in the seas.

Tsk..tsk..all I can say is that “God save the tuna in our seas”.