Although the world’s largest tuna stocks are in growing danger of collapse, the countries battling over how to divvy up the diminishing bigeye and yellowfin tuna in the Pacific Ocean are giving no ground. They met recently in Busan, Korea to argue over the fate of the Pacific’s stocks, which account for 55 percent of the tuna eaten worldwide, but refused the advice of their own scientific committee to make drastic cuts in the amount of tuna taken, settling for a far smaller cut in the catch and probably guaranteeing a thinning fishery.

The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which governs the annual catch, met as environmentalist activists circled them with a plan, for instance, to publicize the inaction by stuffing a large fake bigeye tuna into a coffin and marching it around outside the posh Lotte Hotel in downtown Busan where the commission was holding its annual conference behind closed doors and away from the prying eyes of the press and the environmentalists.

The environmental activists – Greenpeace members from across the world and the Korea Federation for Environmental movement, the country’s largest environmental group, intended to dress in traditional Korean hemp funeral garb in a publicity stunt designed to bring attention to scientific evidence that the Pacific stocks are in deadly decline.

The Busan police had different thoughts on the idea.

Read the rest at Asia Sentinel.

Copyright © James Card.