By Kyoko Hasegawa
Tokyo - Japan, the world's biggest tuna consumer, expects an import crunch driving up prices of favorite sushi and sashimi dishes after a decision to slash the catch of Mediterranean tuna, officials said on Monday.
A 42-nation meeting in Croatia agreed on Sunday to cut the catch of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea. Environmentalists had warned that the lucrative Japanese market and a global fad for Japanese food were driving the fish toward extinction.
The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas reduced the gross catch of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean from 32 000 tons this year to 29 500 tons for 2007, and 25 500 tons in 2010.
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Japan, which eats one-quarter of the world's tuna, has already accepted a major cut in its unrelated quota for southern bluefin tuna in the Pacific Ocean as punishment for overfishing.
Environmentalists estimate that Japan imports about 25 000 tons a year of Mediterranean bluefin tuna, much of it from "fish farms" that can skirt international quotas.
"The decision could cause about 2 000 to 3 000 tons of reduction in imports from the region," an official at Japan's Fisheries Agency said.
"A reduction of 2 000 to 3 000 tons, out of 25 000 tons, is sure to affect the price of tunafish, even if not drastically," he said.
Japan has often clashed with environmentalists, who strongly oppose its annual killing of whales and dolphins for meat.
But the Japanese government said it supported the conservation effort for Mediterranean tuna.
"Slashing the global catch is inevitable," Katsuma Hanafusa, one of Japanese negotiators, told reporters in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
"This is an important start for conservation," he said.
The Japanese branch of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, a non-governmental group that promotes conservation, said that Japanese consumers also had to do their part.
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