Bluefin tuna ban tops concerns at CITES endangered species meeting

Many of these proposals reflect growing international concern about the accelerating destruction of the world's marine and forest ecosystems through overfishing and excessive logging, and the potential impacts of climate change on the biological resources of the planet. The UN General Assembly has declared 2010 the international year of biodiversity and the CITES Conference will be one of the key occasions governments will have this year to take action to protect biodiversity.

Activists said ahead of the CITES meeting that the vote was too close to call, according to New Zealand's TVNZ.

Japan, already in the hot seat for its whaling practices, is catching flak from environmentalists as the key country opposing the ban.

Japan consumes three-quarters of the global bluefin catch. Raw bluefin tuna is prized at Japanese seafood restaurants. Bluefin routinely fetch $10,000 for a single fish and sometimes far more at Tokyo markets.

Environmentalists say Atlantic bluefin are being fished at an unsustainable rate, and only a ban can save the species, argues Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in the Huffington Post.

Whaling battle lines

The battle lines aren't quite the same as those over whaling, though. Australia -- one of Japan's fiercest critics on whaling -- has said it prefers more regulation to manage Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks, rather than an outright ban. Australia has its own lucrative industry fishing "southern" bluefin tuna.

The US supports a ban out of concern of the "longterm viability" of the bluefin tuna, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

While Western Atlantic bluefin spawning stocks have dropped by 82 percent from 1970 to 2007, those stocks have stabilized at “a very low” population level, the Interior Department reported.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks have continued to plummet 72 percent, with most of that drop occurring in the past decade. In 2007, just 78,724 metric tons of spawning biomass remained in the Eastern Atlantic from a peak of more than 305,000 tons in the mid-1950s, the department said.

Japan has said it would not comply with a bluefin ban, if passed.

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