DECLINES IN FISH STOCKS WORLDWIDE_the ecology of exinction

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Are you aware that bluefin tuna sells for on the order of $100 US per pound--to the supplier? While that is probably the most expensive fish, none of them go cheap in Japan. This is definitely a case of "free market" economics.

No, I'm not aware of that, but I doubt the relevance of this datum for two reasons.

1) No one fish species determines the general problem of overfishing, which this thread is about. And no one species determines the profitability of the general fishing fleet, the economics of which I had linked to overfishing. Drawing broad conclusions about either, just from the particular case of bluefin tuna, would be ... well ... fishy.

2) Even if this weren't a problem, your conclusion wouldn't convince me. I know nothing about the economics of fishing for bluefin tuna -- but economics 101 tells us that its $100-per-pound price reflects some combination of consumer taste and the difficulties for fishers of catching it. If consumer taste is the dominant contribution, you may have a point. But if cost of catching dominates -- and you provided no data that it doesn't -- fishers may not make much of a profit even at such a high price. They may still "need" subsidies to make the catch profitable.

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(Just stopping by to say I'm reading along, learning a lot & really enjoying this terrific discussion. Excuse the interruption. Please continue now ...)

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@Setanta,

The Japanese have been fishing since forever;

Quote:

In addition to rising sea levels, this period of global warming produced more abundant sea life and a thriving forest. With these resources ancient Japan flourished during the Jomon Period"some of the oldest pottery in the world has been dated to this period. The Jomon Period lasted from about 10,000 BC to roughly 300 BC. During this time ancient Japan was mostly a fishing and hunter/gatherer society.

http://www.destination360.com/asia/japan/history

Are you aware that a melon can cost $150 to $200 or that Kobe beef is thru the roof, fugu [pufferfish/blowfish] is extremely expensive but oh so tasty; matsutake mushrooms for $200.

There are a number of things that are expensive but there are lots of fish that are reasonably priced. That's why they are eaten for lunch and dinner.

You can find a good kaiten-zushi where you can eat your fill for about ten bucks, all the green tea, great green tea, not that crap that is found in North America, for free.

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At what point short of Soylent Green will humanity act to lessen dramatically its impact on natural resources? Because I don't really know. I don't know where to start in a discussion on food habits because I think that living in a society that provides cheap food as I do distorts the one's perspective on the topic.

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@Thomas,

Thomas, you're just jumping into the thread, and making statements which demonstrate that you've not read the thread before the point at which you jumped in, but rather have selected a particular post to argue about. I provided a link to data on the Atlantic bluefin tuna from NOAA. I provided other quotes from articles about the importation of seafood by the Japanese. In particular, i provided a quote from an article to the effect that the Japanese have reduced their importation of seafood, because people have finally decided that they are unwilling to pay such prices. Bluefin tuna may be being overfished--but a 60,000 tons a year at present, it cannot be denied that the market for $100/pound bluefin tuna (at the supplier end) is still huge. I've already provided evidence that the Japanese situation is extraordinary (the NOAA link has data on the price paid in Japan to suppliers). The NOAA link shows the United States, although one of the nations exploiting the bluefin tuna, is a net importer of bluefin tuna--and they aren't paying $100/pound to the supplier.

My point about the bluefin was not to the extent that it was a representative species to show the general problem of overfishing--it was to show that the Japanese commercial fishing industry is motivated by capitalist greed. You can have vigorous capitalism without greed, surely--but society is not obliged to stand aside while capitalists pursue their cupidity. My discussion started with a claim that the Japanese choose culturally to rely so heavily on seafood (based on a quote from another thread suggesting that they consume on the order of one half pound of fish--we're not even talking whale meat here--per person, per day. I submit that they don't need to do that to meet their food needs. Robert suggested that they do it because it makes good sense logistically. I challenged that idea by pointing out the comparative cost to the Japanese of sending fishing fleets to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean in search of the bluefin, while at the same time buying the bulk of the world's catch of Atlantic bluefin. It ought to be obvious given that a Japanese fishing fleet that trawls the Gulf of Mexico in search of the bluefin--crossing the Pacific and entering the Gulf through the Panama Canal, the recrossing the Pacific to take the catch home--is motivated by the high return on investment, since simply meeting the food needs of the nation can be accomplished much, much cheaper by importing the products of domestic livestock.

It gets tedious when you just show trying to find an argument, as opposed to following and contributing to the discussions which have been spawned by the thread topic.

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@Setanta,

Also, in MAine, the markets for Sea urchin roe and "Nori", yellowfin tuna, "fatty bluefin" and "sea potatoes" are diven entirely by Japanese taqstes and their market demand. Urchins, normally couldnt be fed to cats are now being sold for several dollars an ounce if full of roe.

The disappearance of Pollock on the "Donut hole" and in the extra continental area of the Gulf of MAine is all the demand driven by JApan. Our own Pollock needs are driven by this "fake crabmeat" stuff thats made of pressed pollock (its like sheets of OSB or MDF).

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@JTT,

Quote:

Quote:
the seafood, for which they've developed a taste only since the end of the Second World War,

You're deluded if you believe that

Much of the seafood theyve gotten on their menus wasnt even available in markeatable amounts till then. Whaling required a "blue water" fleet that took away any earlier "aboriginal" whaling that was done by neeting from land. If you put in a query for Japanese Whaling Boats. You will see that a craft, similar to large rowboats (or like a small Umiak) were the original whale boats that were used to satisfy the tastses of their elite and the emperors tables.

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I suppose i need to organize the material better, and present a single, substantiated post. But i didn't want to clutter the thread with "serial posting," so there were quite a few bits of information which i came across in searching the web to substantiate that prior to the 1950s, the Japanese were not engaged in large-scale, commercial, blue-water fishing. There was a citation i found from the New Zealand ministry of fishing stating that Japanese fishing fleets did not appear off their coasts until the 1950s. There was reference to a "cod war" with China in the 1920s and -30s--but Japan occupied Formosa in 1895, and occupied Korea in 1911, so the waters of the North China Sea and the gulf of the estuary of the Yellow River were claimed by them as territorial waters--we are still seeing coastal fishing, and not blue-water commercial enterprise, and Japan simply did not heavily rely on commercial fishing to provide its food needs. Taking Formosa (Taiwan) and Korean was as much about securing food supplies as it anything else, it certainly wasn't about imperialist expansion to settle its population.

In looking for the information on Tokugawa Japan, i found a discussion of fishing in Japan at that time, which described it as little more than a subsistence industry for the villages involved, who traded with farmers inland for rice, and sold some of their catch to a very small wealthy elite. Anyone familiar with Japanese history will know that they were poor nation until well after the Second World War--the "sushi industry" which is worth literally billions of dollars today in Japan simply did not exist until after the war.

(As an interesting side note, the beginning of Memoirs of a Geisha has the central character as a girl in a fishing village, who is sold to the geisha house by the manager of the local commercial fish warehouse.)

I was having trouble finding a good source on the history of the commercial fishing industry in Japan. I'm off to the ICCAT site to get more information about the Atlantic tuna fisheries.

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Click here to visit the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas web site. This is a wonderland of resources. Click on the Links button at the top of the page, and it will take you to a page with excellent data on all kinds of pelagic fishing issues, and not just Atlantic tunas.

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(from commentary on page 1)

The whales eat too much fish argument for controlling their numbers is short-sighted. As fman was discussing, people are looking at this in too narrow a way. Think ecology. When we took out the wolves in the American West because they were eating our livestock, gopher populations went nuts and more and more of our live stock broke their legs in their den holes. When we take out the coyotes, rabbits over breed. As we take out the whales, the balance of ecology will get thrown off. It ecological systems nothing is as simple as whales eat fish, we eat fish, let's kill whales so we have more fish.

A big point missing from the question about where Japanese might get their meat source is that Japan, like most modern nations, eat way more animal protein than they need to be eating. We simply can't all continue to eat as much beef, fish, whale, etc. and sustain a functioning food supply to the entire world. People in America and Japan (and elsewhere, likely) could very healthfully live on a small fraction of the meat that they currently eat.

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@littlek,

Quote:

.... the real basis of the Japanese diet is not rice but fish, consumed at more than 154 pounds per person per year1-almost one-half pound per day

http://www.westonaprice.org/Inside-Japan-Surprising-Facts-About-Japanese-Foodways.html

And the poor eat far less of it. That is necessary consumption.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

It gets tedious when you just show trying to find an argument, as opposed to following and contributing to the discussions which have been spawned by the thread topic.

Well, I suppose we all have our own ways of writing things that are tedious for others to read. I'm sorry you feel this way when I mostly read along and answer only to particular points that come up. But I'm afraid that won't stop me from doing so.

One particular point came up when you said the market for fish in Japan reflects an recently-acquired taste for fish among Japanese consumers, which a capitalistic market now satisfies. I countered that the market might not be so capitalistic. Instead, the outcome might reflect heavy subsidies for the Japanese fishing industry. (A quick Google search confirms that the Japanese government is indeed subsidizing its fishers to the tune of $15 billion a year.)

Another way I could have countered your statement is by pointing you to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica's article on "Japan". It clearly shows that the Japanese cannot have acquired their taste for fish after 1945. They consumed "enormous amounts" of it even then. (Whatever that means in tons.)

In the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, some author wrote wrote:

The seas surrounding the Japanese islands may be called a resort of fishes, for, in addition to numerous species which abide there permanently, there are migatory kinds, coming and going with the monsoons and with the great ocean streams that set to and from the shores. In winter, for example, when the northern monsoon begins to blow, numbers of denizens of the Sea of Okhotsk swim southward to the more genial waters of north Japan; and in summer the Indian Ocean and the Malayan archipelago send to her southern coasts a crowd of emigrants which turn homeward again at the approach of winter. It thus falls out that in spite of the enormous quantity of fish consumed as food or used as fertilizers year after year by the Japanese, the seas remain as richly stocked as ever.

I'm not arguing about other points you're making in this thread. But your economic model of the Japanese market for fish doesn't check out. That's all I'm saying for now; it's all I need to say. I am under no obligation to respond to every point ever made in this thread, or to stay out altogether if I don't.

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@littlek,

Er, I meant .... "that is NOT necessary consumption."

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@Thomas,

No, you're under no obligation to be honest about what is being discussed in this thread. I haven't said that the Japanese have a newly acquired taste for fish--all of my comments were specific to Japan fitting out and operating deep sea commercial fishing and whaling fleets. Your encyclopedia article refers to fishing in the waters near the Japanese archipelago--and both FM and i have already taken notice of this. In other whaling threads, FM has noted, as i have in this thread, that the large-scale exploitation of pelagic fish stocks by the Japanese, in waters outside the home islands, oft times as far away as the Atlantic or the Med, is a new phenomenon, since the end of the Second World War.

Referring to Japanese subsidization of commercial fishing does not address the issue of highly popular and expensive fish, such as the bluefin tuna, of which 60,000 tons are taken each year. I earlier, and only for the sake of argument, did some math on the basis of the Japanese buying 10% of that catch. In fact, every source i've seen in my searches on the subject which mentioned the proportion of that catch bought by the Japanese has said that 80% of that catch which was not kept for domestic consumption by the nation whose trawlers made the catch is sold to the Japanese.

By all means, Thomas, be as dishonest as you like about what people here are saying.

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By the way, Thomas, your point about subsidies is meaningless. If there is a profit to be made when fishing is subsidized, why would the subsidy make it any less true that the motive is capitalist greed? Then, of course, there is the issue of where the subsidy gets spent. Can you tell me now much goes to the support of Japanese commercial operations trawling for tuna in the Gulf of Mexico, for example?

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I stopped eating fish on a regular basis years ago.

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@Setanta,

First, addressing Robert, Setanta wrote:

You really don't understand the extent to which the Japanese import their food, and how much cheaper meat from domestic livestock would be to the seafood, for which they've developed a taste only since the end of the Second World War, do you?

http://able2know.org/topic/142272-2

Then, Setanta wrote:

I haven't said that the Japanese have a newly acquired taste for fish-- [...]

By all means, Thomas, be as dishonest as you like about what people here are saying.

http://able2know.org/topic/142272-3#post-3919896

Oh well ....

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

By the way, Thomas, your point about subsidies is meaningless. If there is a profit to be made when fishing is subsidized, why would the subsidy make it any less true that the motive is capitalist greed?

It isn't any less true. My problem is that it's not specific to the problem at hand, either. Sure, capitalistic greed drives Japanese imports of subsidized fish, which is part of the problem. But capitalistic greed also drives the supply of domestic soybeans to Japanese consumers, which I assume you'd consider part of the solution. In addition, capitalistic greed drives Japanese imports of North American beef, which you yourself have suggested as part of a potential solution. Capitalistic greed, then, is part of both the problem and the solution. So how does it make any difference?

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@Thomas,

Once again, Thomas, be as dishonest as you like. I remain convinced, however, that you just came looking for an argument, and didn't bother to read the thread before you jumped in to pick a fight. Before the post which you have quoted, in my post #3919200:

I wrote:

Their choice to eat fish and whale meat is a cultural choice, and of pretty recent date. The Japanese did not become blue water sailors until after the end of the Meiji era, in the mid-19th century. Even then, it was not until the 20th century that they began to become large scale pelagic fishers--and they only started hunting the whale after the Second World War.(emphasis added)

and . . .

I wrote:

By the way, in Miss Olga's whaling thread, DP posted information which shows that the Japanese eat a half pound of fish per capita each day, and that does not include whale meat (of course, whales are not fish)

So my later remark, which you disingenuously or ignorantly quote, was in that context of the Japanese being large scale pelagic fishers, for which the evidence is that they only began supplying a sigificant portion of their food needs with pelagic fishing since the end of the Second World War. Note also that in this thread i have discussed the difference between large scale pelagic fishing and the traditional inshore fishing of villages which subsisted on their catch, trading some for rice with farmers inland, and selling a small proportion for the market for fish among the wealthy.

Knock yourself out, Thomas, jump in and make accusations without having read the thread well enough to know what the terms of the discussion have been.

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@Setanta,

Fair enough. I'll be as dishonest as I like, and you remain convinced of whatever you like. You've got yourself a deal. Laughing

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DECLINES IN FISH STOCKS WORLDWIDE_the ecology of exinction

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