New York Times – Tunas End, by Paul Greenberg: “Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China. This latest surge has taken us past the Age of Cod and landed us squarely in the Age of Tuna. Fishing has expanded over the continental shelves into the international no-mans territory known as the high seas the ocean territory that begins outside of national exclusive economic zones, or E.E.Z.s, usually 200 nautical miles out from a countrys coast, and continues until it hits the E.E.Z. of another country. The high seas are owned by no one and governed by largely feeble multinational agreements. According to the Sea Around Us project of the University of British Columbias Fisheries Center, catches from the high seas have risen by 700 percent in the last half-century, and much of that increase is tuna. Moreover, because tuna cross so many boundaries, even when tuna do leave the high seas and tarry in any one nations territorial waters (as Atlantic bluefin usually do), they remain under the foggy international jurisdiction of poorly enforced tuna treaties…The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 7 of the 23 commercially fished tuna stocks are overfished or depleted. An additional nine stocks are also threatened.”
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