Gulf Oil Spill Ticking Time Bomb for Sushi Staple Bluefin Tuna
Smoke billows from controlled oil burns near the site of the BP Plc Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Photographer: Derick E. Hingle/Bloomberg
June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Torrenzano, chief executive officer of the Torrenzano Group, talks about BP Plc's management of its public image following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Torrenzano talks with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock." (Source: Bloomberg)
June 21 (Bloomberg) -- Ken Feinberg, the government-appointed administrator of BP Plc’s $20 billion compensation fund, said on ABC's "Good Morning America" today that claims related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill need to be processed faster. Bloomberg's Julie Hyman reports. (Source: Bloomberg)
BP Plc’s oil leak has polluted 140 miles (225 kilometers) of shoreline from Louisiana to Florida. Below the surface, the crude threatens a staple of sushi restaurants from New York to Tokyo: bluefin tuna.
Petroleum gushing from a seabed well in the Gulf of Mexico has caused slicks that overlap one of two spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin. The adult fish lay eggs in the Gulf in April and May before heading to the North Atlantic to feed.
Tuna, which need clean surface water to spawn, may have been covered in oil while chemicals used to break up the oil may damage their eggs, limiting reproduction, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in its June 28 issue. Atlantic bluefin are on the World Conservation Union’s endangered list after years of overfishing.
“This is a real blow,” said Bill Fox, managing director for fisheries at WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, which investigates overfishing and illegal catches in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, the bluefin’s other spawning ground. “The oil plus the dispersants are likely to have a huge effect.”
BP is using a drilling ship to try to collect oil from the damaged well, which is leaking as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20.
The London-based company said today it has spent about $2.35 billion responding to the oil spill. BP is drilling to intercept the leaking well permanently and conducting “ranging” tests to guide the drill to its target.
Fenced Off
This so-called relief well reached a depth of 16,275 feet on June 23 and BP expects to plug the damaged well at 18,000 feet, the company said today. About 27,090 barrels of oil were collected on June 22, the company said.
The U.S. has closed 36 percent of federal waters in the Gulf to fishing, equivalent to 86,985 square miles (225,290 square kilometers). Fishing for bluefin tuna in the Gulf was already banned to protect the spawning area, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Scientists from the NOAA and other institutions are investigating how much damage the oil will do to bluefin stocks. The fish, which have been shown to travel as far as 45,000 miles in 16 months, according to Tagging of Pacific Predators, take eight years to fully mature and can live for up to 40 years.
The extent of any damage won’t be known until bluefin tuna born this year become large enough to catch, according to a trader who declined to be named at Umino Co., a tuna wholesaler at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo.
Pricey Plate
Japan last year consumed about 80 percent of the world’s bluefin catch, or 52,000 tons, according to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Bluefin is a staple at Tokyo sushi restaurants and sells for about 1,200 yen ($13.43) for an 80-gram (2.8-ounce) sashimi portion.
They’re the most expensive tuna auctioned in Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market, where 1,700 tons of fish are sold daily. One caught off Japan’s northern coast by rod-and-line fetched $177,000 in January in the first sale of the year.
Sushi lovers prize the bluefin for its richer taste and softer, melt-in-the-mouth texture compared with lesser grades of tuna. The most expensive part is the belly, known as “toro,” or fatty tuna, where the meat is the most marbled with fat.
In addition to sushi, which uses rice, bluefin is also popular on its own as sashimi.
The fish is rarely canned because of its value. Instead, canneries typically use cheaper yellowfin tuna or the smaller skipjack tuna, which grows faster and reproduces in greater numbers.
Overfishing Damage
Any reduction in bluefin supplies would be bad for business, the Umino trader said. Still, traders at Tsukiji are more worried about the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean after fishing quotas were cut there this year, he said.
Bluefin stocks in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean have been the most damaged by overfishing. Bluefin populations may be about 18 percent of 1970s levels, according to The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, a body composed of nations including France, Spain, Italy and Japan that controls the Atlantic region.
For the western Atlantic stock, which spawns in the Gulf, populations are between 18 percent and 27 percent of 1975 levels, ICCAT says. A total of 2,015 tons of bluefin were caught in the western Atlantic in 2008, ICCAT says.
Reducing Quotas
For the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, ICCAT lowered the 2010 annual quota to 13,500 tons from 22,000 tons last year, following a decade in which fishermen caught up to 60,000 tons a year, according to ICCAT data.
Earlier this year, Japan successfully fought a fishing ban in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean proposed by the U.S. and the European Union.
Reduced supplies have contributed to a 26 percent increase in prices at Tsukiji since 2005, according to official data.
Officials in Australia see an opening for their bluefin, long considered an inferior cousin by Japanese consumers. The Australian bluefin industry, centered around Port Lincoln, South Australia, last year launched a rebranding campaign in Japan, changing the name from indo maguro, or Indian bluefin, to minami sodachi maguro, or southern “wave bred” bluefin.
“The basic aim was to get more Japanese to taste southern bluefin and recognize that there is no real difference,” says Brian Jeffriess, chief executive officer of the Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna Industry Association. The price per kilo of Australian-caught bluefin has gone up to $19, a 40 percent increase since March, Jeffriess said.
Hardy Creatures
The BP spill “will inevitably have a big effect at a time when there’s already uncertainty about the sustainability of the stock” in the Atlantic, he said.
Still, the bluefin are hardy creatures, and may still withstand the latest setbacks, the WWF’s Fox said.
“Once they get to full size, there’s nothing that can catch them other than humans,” he said. “But every year we move into more uncharted territory.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Bruce Einhorn in Hong Kong at beinhorn1@bloomberg.net Stuart Biggs in Tokyo at sbiggs3@bloomberg.net.
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