Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Market Watch! Tuna Prices to Fall!

Like most Americans, my sister likes to keep her eye on the markets, and today’s news is really amazing: Tuna Prices are going to come down!

She sent me this article about efforts to farm tunas in Hawai’i. 

Says the article:

The popularity of tuna is growing as more people from Boston to Beijing learn the pleasures of succulent raw fish. But the heavy fishing of wild tuna to meet this demand is rapidly shrinking the global supply.

Now a Hawaii company wants to build the world’s first commercial bigeye tuna farm so the masses may savor sashimi without further reducing tuna populations.

“All indications are we’re on a rapid race to deplete the ocean of our food resources,” said Bill Spencer, chief executive of Hawaii Oceanic Technology Inc. “It’s sort of obvious - well, jeez we’ve got to do something about this.”

Well, jeez! Could my expertly written column on the tuna industry have inspired this?  Certainly this Spencer citizen reads my blog and got to thinking about how delicious and rare tunas were, and thought he’d cash in.

Unfortunately, his plan is doomed to failure.  In my article, I tried to spell out in simple language why tunas are a superior food, but I also explain why no farm can hold them:

Tunas are awesome because they are large and fierce.  The maximum tuna ever recorded was over 4.5 meters long, and that is huge.  Shaquille O’Neil himself is only 2.16 meters long, and he is a good standard measurement for “big” things.  A tuna, measuring in at just over 2 Shaqs, is pretty darn “big.”

Tunas are also fierce.  When they arrive in the can they are not much, but in their prime they are really courageous and agile.  A tuna can swim at over 70 miles per hour, which….you know…wow.  The dorsal fin on a yellowfin tuna is so sharp it can cut your hand if you touch a tuna moving at full speed. Also they have fearsome teeth and jaws, and use teamwork to utterly annihilate bait balls made of lesser fish.

Now how exactly does citizen Spencer plan to farm these maniacs?  Maybe next he’ll start up a Komodo dragon farm.  Good luck, is all I have to say.

So if you want my advice, the investment strategy for tuna is still hold until citizen Spencer explains how he will corral 4.5 meter long dealers of raw death (aka tunas).