Bad day for tuna lovers

The New York Times has an editorial about tuna:

Thursday was a terrible day for bluefin tuna. By a depressingly lopsided margin, countries meeting in Doha at the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species rejected a proposal by Monaco and the United States to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is spiraling toward extinction. The convention had earlier rejected, also by a wide margin, a softer motion by the Europeans that would have placed the tuna high on the international list of endangered species, but delayed a trading ban for one year.
The vote split partly along developed/developing nation lines. But make no mistake: It was largely the result of relentless lobbying by Japan, whose citizens consume four-fifths of the world’s bluefin tuna, thus providing a steady market for poorer countries with big fishing industries like Tunisia.
Under the proposed ban, Japan would have been allowed to consume only the fish caught in its own waters, which would have put a huge crimp in exports from Tunisia and other African nations that ply the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic.
The best case for conservation, of course, is that if things keep going the way they are, those nations are going to wake up one day to discover that tuna, as a viable commercial species, have disappeared.
They are in bad shape already. Stocks of Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin dropped by more than 70 percent between 1957 and 2007, and by more than 60 percent in the last decade alone. But numbers like these are never really persuasive when commercial interests stand to lose, whether talking about tuna or sharks or salmon.
The convention’s member nations will not meet again for another 30 months, and, in the meantime, the onus for restoring the bluefin to sustainable levels will fall on the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the regulatory body with primary responsibility for the species.
At its most recent meeting in Brazil, the commission, which for years did little to stop the slaughter, agreed to reduce the allowable catch significantly, but nowhere near the moratorium recommended by the commission’s scientists. The commission meets next in November. Japan says it will honor the new quota and possibly press for other measures to halt the species decline. We are not holding our breath.

Rico says the Japanese are, as ever, selfish and short-sighted. (But, then again, aren't we all?) In the 'but surely it can't happen here', let's all remember the passenger pigeon; there were lots of them...