Oceana, founded in 2001, is the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation. Our offices in North America, South America and Europe work together on a limited number of strategic, directed campaigns to achieve measurable outcomes that will help return our oceans to former levels of abundance. We believe in the importance of science in identifying problems and solutions. Our scientists work closely with our teams of economists, lawyers and advocates to achieve tangible results for the oceans.
They are pushing increased government regulation, knowing that we can't afford it, in the hopes it will greatly drive up fish prices.
BTW, this is something the market could correct, if it was as rampant as they claim. I would think that any person who bought a can of tuna and had the symptoms mentioned could sue.
That would force the companies selling tuna to crack down on their suppliers, and then the suppliers on the distributers, and to the original sources.
Lawsuits, people making private claims against others who break contracts (like the contract for selling tuna as tuna), are an efficient way of regulating this type of activity.
The study is very interesting. The biggest "flaw" is that they mixed sushi bars with grocery stores and restaurants. Three vastly different distribution chains, with highly different regulation.
And they note that in most cases, it is the sushi bar samples that drove the high numbers, for example in Washington DC only 2% of the grocery stores had anything mislabeled.
Also, they hit dozens of outlets, and only collected a total of 1200 or so samples, of dozens of fish. So in some cases, they might have only collected 1 or 2 samples.
My guess is they found some disreputable sushi bars and got most of their samples from them, to drive up the numbers.
The study just came out, but they circulated a petition about it last year.
And I can bet that they would LOVE Bloomberg to join them in regulating the fishing industry.
The thing is, most sushi aficionados know white tuna is escolar. Escolar is darn tasty, the mouth-feel is just rich. People seek it out. Most seafood restaurants also know not to serve you more than four ounces of the stuff.
Of course, some days I am not sure it is real food.