"overfishing" news and stories

We were pretty excited to hear the news that "The Big Fish Fight," a U.K.-based show featuring superstar chefs Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay was taking on the dark side of the fishing industry. But the news got even juicier yesterday when bad-boy Gordon Ramsay told The Daily Mail that while in Costa Rica filming his episode on the illegal shark-fin trade, things got downright harrowing for the chef when he got close to a Taiwanese crew with a full load of fins and a stash of cocaine. The story continued to be a nail biter when he crossed paths with a shady character named Enrique, who is thought to be the third largest supplier of shark fins in the world.

The experience includes cars with ominously darkened windows, pointed steely rifles and chilling threats of bodily harm. In the backdrop? The sheer gruesomeness of sharks being shocked with electric prods, their fins sliced from their bodies, and then being thrown back into the sea to die.

"At one [point], I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me," Ramsay told The Daily Mail.

Shark fin soup, long considered a Chinese status symbol and delicacy, and served at weddings and important business banquets, will soon be illegal in Hawaii.

A bill prohibiting the possession, sale or distribution of the prized cartilage was signed into law by Gov. Linda Lingle last week, the Washington Post reported, and will take effect July 2011. That move has cheered environmentalists who say immense pressure placed on the world's shark population have decimated their numbers.

"They could be wiped out from the world's oceans in a blink of an evolutionary eye," said Dr. Julia Baum, a researcher at the University of Santa Barbara, during the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Foods Institute. "These declines matter because predators [like sharks] play important roles in the ecosystem."

According to Oceana, up to 73 million sharks per year are being killed for their fins. The practice is known to be especially brutal for the sharks who are dumped back into the ocean, often still alive.

Even Chinese superstar Yao Ming has been trying to raise awareness through a video, but scientists warn that many of these apex predators are on the verge of collapse. An attempt this spring to list six shark species, including scalloped hammerheads and oceanic whitetip sharks, as endangered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) failed.

Environmentalists who have lamented the serious decline of bluefin tuna stocks for decades are being bolstered by a significant move by France yesterday. According to today's New York Times article, France has agreed to support the listing of bluefin tuna as an endangered species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) -- a move that will give the EU enough votes to support the ban on bluefin tuna trade at next month's CITES meeting in Qatar.

Many environmentalists say that while the move by France is significant, it simply isn't bold enough.

"What's needed is a five-year total moratorium on fishing [for bluefin tuna]," says Carl Safina, co-founder of Blue Ocean Institute, who first proposed a ban on bluefin tuna to CITES in 1991. "A ban on international trade only goes part of the way. People could still catch bluefin and sell them domestically in any country, as long as it's not traded across borders."

While France now supports the proposed trade ban, they're qualifying that support with an 18-month delay to appease the country's fishermen and to give them time to adjust.

"If it's just a delay to assist fishermen with the transition, which is what we think, then that's OK. But the problem is, the fishermen may stockpile all the fish they can get during the 18-month delay, further threatening the species and its recovery, and that's bad," says Susan Lieberman, deputy director of international policy for the Pew Environment Group.

The U.S. government has not yet declared its position on the issue, and for the time being, bluefin tuna remains on menus at restaurants and sushi counters both here in the U.S. and abroad.