One Fish. One Point Seven Million Dollars. Adios, Blue Fin.

It's a record.  A 222kg blue fin tuna was sold for $1.7-million (155m yen) at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

 High bids traditionally mark the year's first auction at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

Even the buyer, sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura, who also paid out the record price last year, said the cost was "a bit high".

The sale came amid continued warnings from environmentalists that tuna stocks are dwindling and overfished.
'Encourage Japan'
This year's record-breaking fish was caught off north-eastern Japan and weighed in at 222kg (489lbs), some 47kg lighter than last year's prize-winner, which fetched 56m yen.

Averaged out, that's $3,500 a pound.  Imagine what the last blue fin will fetch.  It's only a matter of time.

How Do You Save a Fish Worth $750,000?

A prized bluefin tuna, all 269-kgs of it, fetched $746,000 Cdn. at the opening tuna auction in Tokyo.   The price is said to be symbolic, the buyer paying a huge premium to snag the first prized specimen of the year.

Japan now dominates the tuna market, consuming about 80% of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefin catch.

The fish pictured here is another bluefin caught last March off North Carolina and weighing a record 805 pounds.

Exposing the High Seas Black Marketeers

When you're a fish that can bring as much as $100,000 delivered to the market, your days are numbered.   That, of course, would be the eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna.  It's a monstrous beast that can live for 40-years and weigh as much as 500 kilograms.  It fetches top dollar in Japan where consumers account for 80 per cent of all bluefin consumed.   When they're willing to part with a hundred grand for a single fish, you can be sure they'll keep arriving.

The Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Journalists has just released a report, The Black Market in Bluefin.   The report is the result of a 7-month project looking into the black marketeers who are pillaging the endangered species and the government officials who look the other way.

 "Led by the French, Spanish, and Italians, joined by Turks and others, Mediterranean fishermen violated official quotas at will and engaged in an array of illegal practices: misreporting catch size, hiring banned spotter planes, catching undersized fish, and plundering tuna from North African waters where EU inspectors are refused entry. An illicit market even arose in trading quotas — when regulators finally started enforcing the rules — in which one vessel sells its nation’s quota to a foreign vessel that had overfished."

The report that exposes the corruption that surrounds the pirate fishermen and the officials who collude with them to empty the seas of the bluefin.

Canada Thwarts Bluefin Protection

The Atlantic bluefin tuna is on the ropes. Overfishing has caused stocks to drop by 75% and many countries, including the United States, warn the prized species is seriously endangered. That's why the Harper regime joined forces with the Japanese to sabotage a proposal to ban the export of the bluefin.

In keeping with its enthusiastic support for seabed trawling, Canada joined other nations in rejecting a bluefin ban proposal that came before a United Nations conference on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Qatar.


But wait, there's more!


Canada also blocked an American proposal to ban the international trade in polar bear skin and parts.


Oh well, did you hear about all the gold medals we won at the Olympics?