Greenpeace United Kingdom recently announced that several UK retailers made the commitment to switch their tuna supply from net-caught to pole-and-line tuna – what atuna.com is calling "an admirable and noble decision", but one, which might prove not be fully realistic considering today''s tuna catching capacity.
According to the Greenpeace, some of the companies supporting the change are Sainsbury, Marks & Spencer, Co-Op, Morrisons and Pret a Manger.
Less than 10% of world tuna catch is done by pole-and-liners nowadays. A large scale shift to the method would implicate a major turn around within the global tuna industry and would require major financial investment in training and personnel by fishing companies and the construction of new vessels fitted for pole-and-line fishing.
The number of pole-and-line vessels among the world tuna fleet doesn’t reach 2000 boats (mostly small vessels) and annual catches are close to 400,000M/T – world’s tuna catches are around 4.4 million M/T per year. Most of the world catches are done by Japanese pole-and-liners and it is consumed within their local market.
From every tuna caught, only 40% of the meat goes inside the can. This means 160,000M/T of tuna meat from pole-and-line fisheries. The UK alone imported 124,000M/T of canned tuna in 2008. atuna.com is asking, what if the rest of the world decides to starts buying to pole-and-line as well? The Japanese already consume currently more than 50% of the today's pole and line catch.
The UK's top canned tuna suppliers include Mauritius, Ghana, Philippines, Seychelles, Ecuador and Thailand - countries processing tuna almost 100% caught by purse-seiners.
The Maldives, one of the suppliers, well-known for its pole-and-line activity and “we catch - one by one” logo appears to have exported only 1,089M/T of canned tuna to United Kingdom last year, less than 1% of total UK canned tuna imports
One of the major problems of pole and line fisheries has been that they can only take place in coastal regions - close to shore. Unlike purse seiners, pole-and-line vessels cannot move across thousands of miles of ocean looking for skipjack schools. When there is no fish in their coastal zones for weeks or even months, coastal fishermen cannot deliver their tuna to the canneries, making such a processing plant quite inefficient and unreliably in its deliveries.
