At 407,000 square meters, the world’s largest wholesale seafood market is in Tokyo, Japan. This comes as no surprise given that Japan is the world’s largest consumer of high-value fish, such as bluefin tuna, and the third largest seafood importer after the European Union and the United States. This voracity makes Japan vulnerable to importing large amounts of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) seafood, and according to a recently published study, its lax traceability requirements all but guarantee that illegal seafood has a market in the island nation.
In 2015, the year examined by the study, Japan imported an estimated US $1.6- to 2.4-billion worth of seafood caught from illegal and unreported sources. By weight, this estimate accounted for 24 to 36 percent of the country’s wild-caught seafood imports, placing Japan on the high end of the global average of 15 to 30 percent.
To reach this finding, researchers consulted more than 100 scientists, crew members, port agents, ship captains, distributors, and seafood auditorsall of whom were intimately tied to fisheries and supply chains. These confidential sources provided estimates of how much IUU product makes its way into Japan, data the researchers bolstered by visiting select ports and analyzing available import records.
Anastasia Telesetsky, an environmental lawyer at the University of Idaho whose work focuses on marine policy and who was not involved in the study, says she was not surprised by these findings, considering the marine species arriving in Japan’s ports. For instance, crabs from Russia have been associated with illegal fisheries for decades, according to the study. Even after Japan and Russia reached an agreement in 2014 to curtail IUU crab, the study shows that poached crab from Russia still made its way into Japan, albeit at a reduced level.
Although Japan imported a large amount of IUU product from Russian fisheries in 2015, the highest volumes originally came from China and the United States. As much as 55 percent of Chinese squid and cuttlefish came from illegal and unreported sources, as did 15 to 22 percent of Alaska pollock, a species commonly used in products like fish sticks.
Tula Foundation and Hakai Institute family