Skipjack tuna and bycatch caught in the net of a purse seiner using fish aggregation devices (FADs)
Walmart’s own brand of tuna might be low cost. But it comes at a high price to our oceans.
That’s because what you’ll find inside a can of Walmart’s ‘Great Value’ tuna has been caught in the some of the most destructive ways imaginable. These destructive fishing practices unnecessarily kill tens of thousands of sharks, sea turtles, rays and other sea creatures every year.
It doesn’t have to be this way — even for a company as big as Walmart. Continue reading →
On Saturday, March third, the nation erupted in a flurry of fishy flash mobs, when eight cities across the country hit the streets, grocery stores, and beaches in protest of Chicken of the Sea’s destructive fishing methods. Signs like “Make FADs a Passing Fad” and die-ins demonstrating the incidental catch of sharks, turtles and seabirds highlighted the fishing practices that are devastating ocean ecosystems. Watch this video to see how Chicken of the Sea catches tuna: FADs and Long-lines: Two Dirty Little Secrets.
In New York City, twelve activists stood frozen in Madison Square Park holding signs with messages including “Unsustainable Fishing is Unacceptable” and “Chicken of the Sea Needs to Stop Destroying our Oceans”. Passersby whipped out their smart phones to look up the company and find out more from websites like tunasecrets.com.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a stoic procession marched down 3rd Street Promenade, a bustling outdoor mall, to the Santa Monica Pier, where families and couples enjoying a Saturday morning were met with a line of activists holding red and white signs and standing at the waters edge. A giant banner made a straightforward point: “Chicken of the Sea Destroys Oceans”. They stood in place for fifteen minutes while beachgoers snapped photos and rethought their weekly shopping lists.
Pole and line caught tuna arrives on UK supermarket shelves. Coming soon to yours?
Today we have good news! Thanks to campaigning by Greenpeace and our supporters, leading Italian tuna brand Mareblu has decided to abandon destructive fishing methods in favour of sustainable practices by agreeing to source tuna only from pole and line and FAD free purse seining operations by the end of 2016. The move is a huge victory for our Tonno in trappolacampaign and is a significant first shift in the Italian tinned tuna market. Mareblu has shown that when a company really wants to commit to taking action to save our oceans, it can do it. Now that the standard has been set, there can be no more excuses- all other major brands and retailers must follow.
Greenpeace is running a long-term global campaign to make the tuna industry sustainable, to reverse the decline of key tuna populations and stop the wasteful killing of millions of sharks, rays, turtles and other marine species which are currently caught as bycatch due to destructive tuna fishing practices still used by fishing operations. Continue reading →
Skipjack tuna and bycatch caught in the net of a purse seiner using fish aggregation devices (FADs)
Greenpeace has been working to get the tuna industry to stop using fishing methods that catch unacceptably high amounts of bycatch – particularly of imperiled species like bigeye tuna, sharks,rays, and many others. Chicken of the Sea has been fighting us on this every step of the way, unfortunately, instead of acknowledging the problem and acting responsibly. Continue reading →
Yesterday in La Jolla, California Greenpeace activists paid another visit to the Chicken of the Sea Headquarters. To highlight the massive impact of their destructive fishing practices, activists delivered an equally large tuna can.
I’ve just returned from a dive beneath a giant floating catastrophe, an ugly lump of death-dealing metal floating in the high seas. No, it wasn’t a warship. This particular lump of metal was a fish aggregating device, or FAD, that we happened upon on the high seas by a mix of luck, good eyes and some sketchy old data.
Along with seven of its foul fetid friends it now sits stinking and dripping on the poop-deck (that’s the bit at the back) of the Esperanza, Greenpeace’s largest ship and my home for the last few hot weeks. My usual home is in Sydney; and my usual work-day is spent negotiating with Australian tuna brands and retailers mostly about dropping FADs from their suppliers and making sure they know where the tuna in every tin comes from.
Being out on the ship in the waters of the Pacific (where nearly all our tuna comes from) adds a whole new perspective to what I do.
I’ve seen the destruction caused by fishing vessels called longliners catching the tuna that ends up in Japanese sashimi markets. But the biggest catches come from a different style of fishing vessel: Purse seine boats use giant nets to fish for skipjack tuna – the main species that ends up in the 40,000 tonnes of tinned tuna we gobble up in Australia each year.
This is what the FADs are used for. They can be great missile-like metal hunks anchored to the seafloor or free-floating islands of flotsam and jetsam lashed together, with sonar devices and radio beacons attached making them easy for fishing boats to find.
When they do find them, and set their mammoth net around them, every creature larger than a tadpole is caught up and crushed by the sheer weight of marine life that makes up the average catch. The biggest haul I’ve witnessed was 82 tonnes. Imagine being at the bottom of that. Very little survives.
The reality of this monstrous exercise is truly brought home when you dive beneath one of these FADs, as I’ve been lucky enough to do. Charles Clover’s quip ‘killed alongside your tinned skipjack is almost the entire cast of finding Nemo’ is proved dead-right.
Sharks, barracuda; trigger, bat and flying fish are inevitably schooling around all the FADs we find. Even the odd turtle popped up for some of the dives, but – sod’s law – never when I happened to be wearing my togs. Seeing FADs in action, brings home the enormity of the changes the tuna industry has made in recent months in Australia.
When we released our tuna ranking in August we were happy to announce the first major and widely available brand in Australia to drop the destructive use of FADs in favour of pole and line tuna – Safcol. Tuna caught by pole and line is the most sustainable option available when it’s done well. Pole and line fishers rarely catch anything but tuna, and because they’re caught one at a time, with special straight hooks, any juvenile fish can be thrown back alive.
Most tuna is still caught using FADs. So every tin of regular tuna, swapped for a pole and line option is saving marine life.
It’s tremendous then that there are now numerous pole and line options available to us. Once someone shows that it can be done, as Safcol did, then industry starts to change. All the major supermarket chains in Australia now have their own brands of pole and line tuna. Coles were first to follow Safcol with a range of pole and line caught tuna, then Aldi and Woolworths. IGA will bring out its own version before the year is out. I expect more will follow. Perhaps the biggest news was when Greenseas announced all of its tuna would be FAD-free by 2015. 2015 is too far away and we hope it happens sooner. But it’s a start. Now it’s up to the remaining brands, like John West, to better Greenseas’ commitment.
It’s incredibly satisfying to have been a part of the changes and to have witnessed the power of consumers who don’t want their tuna to be wreaking havoc on Pacific marine life. Tuna companies are listening. Now it’s up to these companies to continue their reform and make ALL their tuna sustainable. And to do it urgently.
Every tin of tuna caught the old way is most certainly responsible for killing the types of marine life I saw swimming over recent days. So please, choose a sustainable option. And write, phone and harass the brands still selling tuna caught using these dirty oceanic death traps.
