Cheap tuna is costing us dearly, as Bill Carvalho, founder and president of Wild Planet Foods, explains in a blog article on their website.
In summary, due to the competitive nature of the quest to provide cheap tuna to consumers, the commercial fishing industry employs devices known as Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs). FADs do exactly what they say on the tin (pardon the pun): they cause fish to aggregate, or gather, around the devices where they can be scooped up at will. This practice is environmentally unfriendly because a massive amount of unwanted fish species are caught up along with tuna and are discarded, usually dead, back into the sea. FADs are also indiscriminate when it comes to the size of fish they catch, further exacerbating their negative effect upon our environment.
Simply put, when you buy cheap tuna you're contributing unwittingly to the needless destruction of a wealth of marine life. Really, hard as it may be, we should discipline ourselves to pay that bit more for tuna marked as pole-and-line caught.
Wild Planet, a TradeScope client, has become the leading sustainably-sourced tuna brand in the world, helped largely by accepting only pole-and-line caught tuna; in fact, Greenpeace has endorsed its efforts by awarding it #1 in sustainable sourcing policy.
TradeScope has helped Wild Planet bring its tuna to the UK market where you can now choose fish that is not only sustainably caught but also tastes better and contains more nutrients than the cheap white meat tuna that proliferates on supermarket shelves throughout the world. Drop us a line here if you'd like to find out about stockists near you.