Japan Agrees to Cut Bluefin Tuna Catch After Admitting Overfishing

Japan has agreed to nearly halve its annual catch of southern bluefin tuna after admitting that years of overfishing had left stocks at dangerously low levels.

The deal was reached after heated debate last week at the annual meeting of a bluefin tuna conservation commission in Miyazaki, south-west Japan, where Australia accused Japan of deliberately under-reporting its catches and of fishing some bluefin to the brink of extinction.

The Australian delegation leader, Glenn Hurry, reportedly said Japanese fishermen had illegally caught 178,000 tonnes of the species, worth as much as $6bn (£3.22bn) over the past 20 years.

The overfishing was uncovered when Australian investigators found the amount of tuna sashimi being sold in Japanese markets was more than double its agreed quota. Japan admitted it had exceeded its 6,065-tonne quota by 1,500 tonnes in 2005 and agreed to cut its catch to 3,000 tonnes a year for five years from 2007.

"There is also a possibility that Japan may have overfished a bit in other years besides 2005 as well," Reuters quoted a Japanese fisheries official as saying.

Australia praised Japan for agreeing to change its ways. "The new Japanese government has done the right thing and has agreed to take this cut," the fisheries minister, Eric Abetz, told ABC Radio.

The commission, whose members include the EU, agreed last week to cut the overall southern bluefin tuna quota for next year from 14,030 tonnes to 11,530 tonnes amid fears that the Japanese appetite for the fish, prized as a delicacy for its fatty texture, had seriously cut world stocks. Japan and Australia, whose annual quota stayed at just over 5,200 tonnes, account for about 80% of the global southern bluefin tuna catch, most of which ends up as sashimi or sushi.

Last year Japanese households consumed about 150,000 tonnes of tuna, most of it the cheaper bigeye variety, which costs about 800 yen (£3.60) a kilogram, compared with 2,000 yen a kilo for bluefin tuna.