A sleepy village comes back to life thanks to bluefin, but some experts worry the good times will not last.
It is 7 am on a Saturday, and as usual a bustling crowd has gathered for the auction at the Donggang fish market. "NT$990 (US$30) per kilo," shouts a young auctioneer, and then when no counter offer comes in: "NT$990 per kilo," repeated twice, before closing the deal.
The bid winner is Hsu Shui-chiang, who promptly bounces home on an antique motorcycle, a broad grin on his face. It has been another good day of bargain hunting on behalf of his daughter, Hsu Hsin-chun, who sells fresh bluefin tuna in vacuum packaging online and in a shop.
The 70-year-old Hsu certainly has a good eye for picking fish. But then he should, after 55 years as a fisherman. Hsu, however, retired last year, just in time to help his daughter drum up business.
"The bigger a tuna is, the better," he says. "It has a higher fat content, which makes it more valuable."
In the case of Hsu's purchase, the total is around US$6,000--a lot of money for a single fish, but nothing compared to the first fish of the season caught in April, which came in at around US$65,000 at an auction presided over by President Chen Shui-bian himself. And, although prices have settled since then, environmental activists and academics see such high prices as a sign that the fish are under threat and could even be close to extinction.
According to Lee Yung-jaan, chairman of the Green Citizens' Action Alliance, the numbers of bluefin caught and the size of the fish themselves have both been shrinking in recent years due to over-exploitation. Donggang's tuna catch peaked just a few years ago in 2000 at 10,456, according to the Donggang Fisherman's Association, a number that has decreased by nearly half at 5,886 by last year, say critics.
Most locals, who depend on the fish for their livelihoods, and whose fortunes have seen an upturn in recent years due to the heavily promoted bluefin season--an event that attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists--dismiss such claims as doom-mongering. They argue that bluefin numbers tend to fluctuate due to a host of mysterious reasons, including El Nina and shifting deep sea ocean currents. But critics are backed by international research, and by global environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, which have been warning for some years that the rocketing popularity of sashimi worldwide is leading to a serious depletion of tuna stocks in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
The bluefin is a remarkable creature. The northern variety, which is larger and more valuable than the southern bluefin caught at Donggang, grow up to 4.5 meters long and weight up to 680 kilograms, and can swim at speeds of up to 80 kph--schools of tagged adults have been recorded as crossing the Atlantic in 60 days--and they live to be 25 years or older. The southern bluefin pass Taiwan every year from April until early July, on a long migratory route from Australian waters in the south to Japanese waters in the north. Fishing for them, however, is not a local tradition. As recently as the 1960s, Donggang fishing boats were small, wooden affairs that could not stray far from the coastline. The local fishermen carried out their work with small nets, which equalled small fish and small profits. A bluefin haul was a rare event.
The Japanese, who in the mid-1970s started buying up any fresh bluefin caught off Pingtung County's shoreline, changed all that. Their insatiable demand for bluefin and the high prices they were willing to pay allowed Pingtung fishermen to make enough profit to outfit themselves with better equipped boats, and they increasingly began to trawl for the lucrative bluefin.
"Donggang has three treasures," says Hsu. "Banded coral shrimp and oilfish roe are two of them, but bluefin tuna is considered [by Japanese] to be the king, especially when it comes to sashimi."
The Japanese may have established the bluefin's reputation as the king of fish, but its reputation began to spread to Taiwanese sashimi-eaters when in 2001 the Pingtung County Government established the Bluefin Tuna Cultural Festival as a means of generating local tourism. Today, it is an annual event, with annual average sales of around NT$350 million (US$11 million) for bluefin alone.
Hsu's daughter, Hsu Hsin-chun, is one of the beneficiaries of the county government's promotion of the tuna festival. She came up with an idea to sell bluefin tuna in vacuum packaging after seeing how popular the fish were becoming.
"Most people assume that, after the tuna season ends in June, that's the end of the tuna," she says. "But the truth is it can be kept fresh throughout the year by a low-temperature vacuum technique."
Hsu's business is a partnership with a friend, Cheng Lu-yi. The two women completed courses provided by the Cabinet-level National Youth Commission as part of the Flying Geese Program, which assists women opening businesses by holding workshops and offering low-interest loans.
"When we started the business, it happened to be tuna season, and the county government was launching its promotions for the tuna festival, which saved us marketing costs," Hsu recalls. She says her revenue in the first month was around NT$500,000 (US$15,150), a figure that bounced up to NT$800,000 (US$24,240) just a month later. That year, she bought a total of 10 bluefin, weighing 2,000 kilos altogether, and sold everything.
The success of Hsu's business, like other local businesses, can in a large part be ascribed to the efforts of the local county government, which has turned the bluefin festival into a major tourism event. Chen Chun-chi, tourism department chief under the Pingtung County Government's Bureau of Construction, estimates that the annual event has lured an average of more than 100,000 visitors and created NT$1.5 billion (US$45 million) in revenue so far annually. Before 2001, the Taiwanese catch of bluefin tuna was mostly exported to Japan; now 90 percent is consumed here in Taiwan, according to Chen Kun-yu, general director of Donggang Fishermen's Association.
This year's festival, which officially ran from May 8 to June 27, expanded its scope beyond the bluefin, according to local tourism officials. Combining entertainment, sightseeing, and shopping, as well as aboriginal dancing and musical performances, body painting, and lucky draws, Pingtung County Acting Magistrate Wu Ying-wen says that the festival can serve as a springboard for the sights of Pingtung County.
"We mapped out a core promotion of 'dining at Donggang, sightseeing at the fish market, water sports at Dapeng Bay National Scenic Area, shopping at the Green Port, and accommodation at Kenting (National Park),'" he says.
Ultimately, this may well be the strategy that makes the festival sustainable, despite the fact that at present there is little local awareness that the festival might be under threat either from over-fishing or from environmental activists.
Director of Cultural Affairs Bureau of Pingtung County Government Tu Yen-liang says the fourth year of the festival has been celebrated with the erection of installation art and new street lamps along the main streets, while renowned Japanese designer Shigeo Fukuda was invited to create bluefin tuna sculptures.
As Lee Yung-jaan cautions, however, the statues may be the only tuna left in years to come, if the fish remain the festival's overwhelming drawcard.
"Behind the lively bluefin tuna festival, we should be alert to the problem of over-consumption that could lead to the collapse of fishery resources," he says.
Locals are optimistic that this will not happen.
"Donggang is not just about fish and agriculture, but also natural beauty, and it has tremendous potential as a tourist destination," says Hsu. "We hope that visitors will linger and explore the beauty of the old town and make their trips more rewarding, rather than just dining out on seafood and leaving as soon as they have eaten."
Hsu and her partner Cheng have been reinvesting all their earnings into a small museum in the hope that the tourists are here to stay. Meanwhile, some 100 local artists have been busy capturing the scenes at the harbor and in the fish market on canvas at the request of the county government, and the results have been reproduced in a book that is on sale locally.
Lee Yung-jaan argues that the next step is for Taiwan's government to take the lead of the European Union, which has established fishing quotas for migratory fish so as to ensure they are not driven to extinction.
Chen Yuh-chen, an official with the Council of Agriculture's Fisheries Administration, agrees that government legislation aimed at protecting the bluefin and other migratory fish is a worldwide trend, and that Taiwan needs to seek international cooperation to ensure sustainable development of its fisheries industry. She notes that the Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean took effect on June 19 this year, and as a signatory Taiwan will be joining its inaugural meeting in December.
"As a member, Taiwan will have to comply with rules aimed at sustaining the stocks of migratory fish, including the bluefin tuna," she says.
"If it's possible to come up with measures aimed at achieving sustainability, we might be able to celebrate festivals like this for years to come," says Lee. "If we don't, the festivals are likely to be replaced by memorials to the bluefin tuna."