Boycott Mitsubishi

[pscot]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x197986

[kristopher]

1. You'd have better luck pushing stronger regulations of third party fishing nations

at the UN. How would a boycott of a company with holdings like Mitsubishi have an effect on Mexico catching tuna outside the limits and selling it to the US or Japan?

There is some possible good news in the technology front - stem cell research.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/27/japan-steps-up-efforts-to_n_191854.html

Now Yoshizaki is in a race against time to save the imperiled bluefin.

He believes he is only a few years away from adapting the technology to enable him to transplant sperm and ovary stem cells from bluefin tuna to mackerel, and for the recipient mackerel, when mature, to produce a precious bounty of bluefin sperm and eggs.

The biggest obstacle is obtaining enough stem cells from bluefin testes to produce both eggs and sperm. Preliminary experiments have proved unsuccessful, but the professor is certain he is close to a breakthrough.

Success, he says, depends on his ability to exploit the sexual bipotency of enriched stem cells from bluefin to produce both sperm and ovaries in mackerel.

"The hypothesis is that the bluefin tuna has some stem cells in its testes, but that the concentration is very low," he tells GlobalPost. "If that's the case, and we can find a way to enrich them, then we should be able to repeat the success we had with the salmon and trout."

Replicated on a big enough scale, the process could produce masses of tuna fry with enough genetic variation to survive and multiply in open sea after being raised in marine ranches, thereby helping replenish stocks of wild fish.

The approach has several advantages over the bluefin farming pioneered by Kinki University in western Japan, in which the sperm and eggs from farm-raised tuna are used to create test-tube fish, which in turn are reared for about four years in offshore pens until they are big enough to be sold.

The process is time-consuming and costly, and, aficionados insist, produces sashimi of an inferior quality.

The Japanese government, aware of mounting international criticism of its failure to rein in fishermen, have given Yoshizaki's team a 300 million yen ($3 million) grant for the five-year project.

They have three years left to produce results. "In that time I want to produce at least one tuna bred using surrogate mackerel," Yoshizaki says.

"And if I'm being optimistic, we should have all of the techniques we need to mass produce tuna through surrogate mackerel in less than 10 years. If we can make it work ..."