Fishermen sail into storm over shrinking tuna stock

MARSEILLE - It has been a long few weeks for captain Jean-Louis Donnarel and the crew of the Provence-Cote d'Azur II. Long, rough and not very profitable.

After sailing a total of 6600 nautical miles - first to Cyprus, then the length of the Egyptian coast, to Malta, around the Balearics and then home - the Provence-Cote d'Azur II returned with 84 tonnes of bluefin tuna, a catch that will barely cover the costs of the voyage.

"We found fish on the last day," Donnarel said. "Without that, we would have been finished. Someone has to take a decision. Do they want us to fish or not? If not, they should put us out of our misery."

Donnarel and his crew are at the sharp end of an increasingly bitter row: one that links globally known restaurants, top celebrities, huge international conglomerates, sushi shops and supermarkets across half the world to the livelihoods of a few thousand fishermen.

At stake is the survival of the bluefin tuna, a single specimen of which can be sold for tens of thousands of dollars - a price that has seen stocks decline in some areas by up to 90 per cent.

Last month Sienna Miller, Elle Macpherson, Jemima Khan, Sting and others signed a letter to Nobu, a famous upmarket restaurant chain part-owned by Robert De Niro, threatening a boycott of their favourite haunt.

The British entertainer Stephen Fry, one of the celebrity campaigners, wrote: "It's astounding lunacy to serve up endangered species for sushi. There's no justification for peddling extinction, yet that is exactly what Nobu is doing in restaurants around the world."

The restaurant has so far refused to take it off the menu, citing its cultural importance in Japan and "enormous demand", but the battle goes on.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Atlantic bluefin will be wiped out in three years unless radical action is taken.

Fishermen such as Donnarel are unimpressed by the celebrity-inspired pressure on their livelihoods. "We have become hooligans, bandits," he said. "Tuna fishing has become politically incorrect and we are pariahs. Once it was fine to fish; now it isn't."

With their 40-metre, £3 million ($7.65 million) boats, the vast nets used to encircle and sweep up entire schools of tuna making their way into the Mediterranean, and their apparent disregard for the limits the European Union have previously tried to impose, the French fishermen have been cast as the villains of the piece.

The fishermen themselves are very defensive - angry with consumers, governments, conservationists and the EU. Few speak to the press.

And they are now being closely watched. When this year's season ends this week, France's fleet of tuna boats will have fished less than its quota of just over 3000 tonnes.

After seriously exceeding limits in previous years, a huge operation involving French navy ships, observers and constant monitoring of a boat's position and catch has meant "total control and total transparency", according to Bertand Wendeling, spokesmen for the 11 tuna boats working out of the French port of Sete.

Even the campaign groups agree that there have been "steps in the right direction", but they also say it may be too little, too late.

Tuna fishing is managed by the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. Conservationists claim the body is primarily interested in protecting the fishing industries of its 45 member countries and they also allege that it ignores its own scientists' recommendations, setting quotas twice as high as those believed necessary to allow the bluefin to survive.

The fishermen, while doubting the scientists' figures, know the boom times are over. For decades, prices for bluefin and other species such as the more common skipjack have risen and EU funds flowed into the industry. That was then.

The one bright spot for the likes of Donnarel is the skipjack. Unlike the slow-breeding bluefin tuna, skipjack is smaller and spectacularly fecund: the "chicken of the seas" is most likely to be the tuna in your tin or sandwich. But it is a world away from the bluefin.

"As long as people want to eat bluefin, someone will fish it," said Donnarel. "It just probably won't be me."

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