Greenpeace says “globally tuna populations are in trouble,” and insists that tuna is being pushed “to the brink of extinction.” That’s not true. When you go to the grocery store, canned tuna is always easy to find, and there’s plenty of it available at an affordable price. That’s because virtually all of the nation’s canned tuna supply comes from species that are plentiful.

That conclusion is the consensus of global marine fisheries scientists. One of those scientists, Professor Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, says that there are almost as many tuna in the world’s oceans as there were 60 years ago. Light tuna, known as skipjack tuna, makes up 70% of the canned tuna eaten in the U.S. All skipjack stocks around the world are healthy and abundant.

The USDA’s new nutrition guidelines state unequivocally that Americans need to eat more fish. But if Greenpeace has its way, there won’t be enough canned tuna to go around.They want tuna companies to fish with poles and lines, a method that only produced 4 million cases last year. Meanwhile, Americans ate 50 million cases of canned tuna.

Recently, we traveled to the Georgetown waterfront to ask real people what they thought about canned tuna and Greenpeace’s campaign to get it removed from store shelves. We got some very interesting answers.

With the launch of Greenpeace’s latest campaign against canned tuna, the eco-extremists have launched headlong into overt distortions. It’s a practice they’ve admitted to in the past. Instead of calling it lying, they call it “emotionalizing the issue.”

The truth is tuna stocks used in canned tuna are not in peril. There is no canned tuna crisis. There is, however, a mountain of rhetoric and distortion that Greenpeace hopes will help raise a lot of money… for Greenpeace.

One of Greenpeace’s main talking points that you may have read is, “FADs [Fish Aggregating Devices] increase bycatch in the skipjack tuna industry by between 500 percent and 1000 percent when compared to nets set on free-swimming schools.”

Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Five hundred to 1,000 percent is a big number, isn’t it?

Bycatch from FAD fishing averages around 5% of the entire catch (which is about the average or a little less than most fisheries). Bycatch from FAD-free fishing is around 1% of the entire catch. So, we’re actually talking about a change of about 3 or 4 percentage points.

Regardless of the picture Greenpeace paints, the reality is its campaign against canned tuna is simply part of a scare story. A scare story it’s shopping to consumers that it hopes won’t have all the facts. This effort will do nothing for tuna sustainability, but will needlessly drive the price of can tuna up for hardworking American families.

Greenpeace is a $300 million-a-year international fundraising giant. It needs to raise over $700,000 per day just to keep the lights on, but somehow still found $32 million to spend on a new boat complete with a helipad.

Although Greenpeace spreads misleading information about the world’s tuna stocks, Americans just aren’t listening. They’re still enjoying canned tuna. Read Full Post »