Taiwanese fishing boats are flooding Japanese markets with huge catches of bigeye tuna, taken from the pirate-infested waters off the coast of Somalia, which are sending retail prices plunging.
The Taiwanese boats can navigate the coastal waters, where pirates have disrupted shipping lanes, in relative peace of mind after hiring armed guards with automatic weapons.
Japanese fishing boats are at a competitive disadvantage because domestic legal provisions prohibit them from employing the same kind of protection. As a result, the falling prices for tuna are just another blow to these Japanese skippers who are suffering from small catches in other waters.
“I heard the cost for armed guards for one boat was $18,000 (about 1.4 million yen) a month,” said a boat owner in Muroto, Kochi Prefecture, who switched fishing grounds from the western side of the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. “The number of tuna has increased during the period fishing boats avoid those waters so they are now catching several times the amount of fish we catch. They can probably still manage to turn a profit.”
The huge catches brought to Japan indicate the boats are indeed making a profit even with the additional cost of a security detail.
The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward auctions off frozen bigeye tuna caught in waters around the world. For the tuna caught in the Indian Ocean, most of the fish is marked with the T initial that represents the fact the fish was caught by a Taiwanese boat.
The average wholesale price of frozen bigeye tuna for the period between August and October was between 850 and 900 yen ($10.80 and $11.40) per kilogram. That was about 15 percent lower than the prices for the same period of the previous year.
According to officials of Chuo Gyorui Co., a wholesale company at Tsukiji, bigeye tuna prices began falling from around May and had dropped by about 30 percent in early June.
“The effect of the huge volume of large tuna caught off the coast of Somalia by Taiwanese boats was large,” said an official in charge of bigeye tuna.
According to catch certificates for imported tuna submitted to the Fisheries Agency, of the approximately 24,000 tons of bigeye tuna imported from Taiwan in the first six months of this year, 13,400 tons came from the Indian Ocean. Imports from Taiwan increased by about 8,000 tons over the previous year and accounted for about half of all imports. In May, before the waters of the Indian Ocean become more turbulent due to seasonal winds, a total of 7,640 tons was imported.
The main fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean are to the western side and larger catches are made the farther north boats go.
While Taiwanese and Chinese boats operated mainly in the waters off Somalia, acts of piracy against commercial ships became more prevalent from about seven years ago. Since 2009, a huge ransom was taken from a Taiwanese fishing boat, and that led to a decrease in the number of Taiwanese vessels operating near the waters off Somalia.
The Fisheries Agency also issued two notices to Japanese fishing boats after 2009 urging caution about fishing in those waters.
According to Foreign Ministry officials, there were 237 acts of piracy last year, the highest ever. While there has been a decrease this year, there have still been 70 cases of piracy so far.
The Taiwanese fishing boats are believed to have returned to the waters off Somalia from the end of last year.
According to what officials with Japan’s tuna fishing cooperative have heard from those connected with Taiwanese fishing boats, security details have been hired in Sri Lanka to deal with the pirates. That protection has resulted in huge catches. While some Taiwanese fishing boats were attacked, the armed guards were successful in scaring the pirates off. That has, in turn, led to an increase in the number of Taiwanese fishing vessels operating in those waters.
According to a Japanese fishing cooperative official, a Taiwanese broker asked about the possibility of Japanese fishing vessels hiring armed guards. Three guards are employed for each boat and they come armed with automatic weapons. The basic fee covers the amount of ammunition the security detail can use. Extra fees have to be paid if it is forced to fire more rounds than the limit.
However, because domestic legal provisions apply on fishing boats even if they operate in foreign waters, the fishing cooperative official said the inquiry from the Taiwan broker was refused because Japanese boats could never take such measures.
The Asahi Shimbun Company