According to the FAO, up to one third of all food is spoiled or wasted before being consumed by people in a time when almost a billion people go hungry and represents a waste of labor, water, energy, land and other inputs that went into the production of that food.

In certain countries, many of them in the EU, a fisheries management process has been initiated to achieve a substantial reduction of discards in capture fisheries. The discards in the fishing can have, among others, an economic base (species without or with low commercial value), a normative base (species prohibited or sizes below the legal ones), for having exceeded the quota of the vessel or the fleet or be produced by an excess of capture of some species that would lower the price at landing. In short, there is a loss of possible food of marine origin that would help to supply the deficit of food that is extracted from the sea for the world population.

An extreme case of discards is occurring in the Mediterranean Sea with the bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus). It is a species submitted to TAC by ICCAT and with annual quotas distributed among the different ICCAT members. Spain, as an EU country, has access to a part of the exploitation quotas of this species in the Mediterranean, a quota that in 2018 some vessels have completed in just two days. This situation means that purse-seine vessels that catch bluefin tuna for fattening cages discard all fish that are either dead or damaged. The specimens are returned to the sea dead or dying.

On the other hand, surface longliners that fish bluefin tuna and swordfish (Xyphias gladius) have low bluefin tuna quota in general, so they complete it in a few days. But the surface longline targeting swordfish also catch bluefin tuna as bycatch, so skypers discard those specimens at sea (we are talking of tuna about 50-100 kg) to avoid sanctions at landing ports.

In short, to the traditional discards of trawling, which involve losses of thousands of tons of high-quality food products that do not have a good sale and commercialization, have adds in recent years, in which there has been a substantial improvement of the stock of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean, the discards of this hundreds, if not thousands, of bluefin tunas.

The scientists recommend that the fishing mortality of the stock does not exceed the levels of the MSY, but the data for stock assessment are usually accessible at least with one year delay to the current year situation. So in cases such as the bluefin tuna, the improvement of the stock status translates into an increase in discards and not in an increase in production and revenues associated with this fishing, in which are involving large numbers of artisanal fishermen from the Mediterranean and the Macaronesian islands.

I suggest opening the debate and that there are regulatory alternatives to the current international and national legislation that prohibits landing of unwanted tuna when the quota has been exceeded if that vessel with a small quota of tuna is engaged in fishing for another target species (swordfish for example). Those tunas above the quota could have a controlled legal sale with social purposes, not commercial, that would benefit the fishing villages and for exclusively social purposes. The above quota could also be used in the feeding of orphanages, senior centers, public hospitals, etc. A portion of the funds from that sale could be used to improve the research on the stock and the fisheries that exploit it, or to other social and scientific uses.

In short, avoid wasting food, energy consumed, labor and time lost to catch tuna that have no economic or social benefits when thrown into the sea and dead.

And now a series of questions: Are there some similar cases regulated in other global fisheries managed by an RFMO? What are the alternatives to discarding dead tunas in other regions? How can scientists know this data on opaque fishing mortality (from the discards of bluefin tuna) and not considered to estimate the actual mortality of the stock? Is ecosystem-based management being established by establishing quotas and allowing (or not acknowledging) that there are discards of tones of tuna for exceeding the individual quota when fishing is not directed to tuna? How to control that the tuna purse seiners for fattening do not discard the dead specimens (with less value and that decrease the quota of the ship) but that they have to take them to port?

The debate is public.