Delegates voted down the proposal to protect bluefin by 68 to 20, with 30 abstentions.
Thursday's vote was the second time Japan had defeated a proposal to protect bluefin.
We are disappointed that proposals to list bluefin tuna on appendix I of Cites were defeated".
She knows what she's up against: Medina was at the meeting in Qatar when Japan scuttled proposals to preserve bluefin tuna.
The proposal calls for total Pacific bluefin catches to be kept below the 2002 to 2004 annual average levels and for catches of fish weighing fewer than 30 kilograms—juveniles too young to spawn to be reduced to 50% of those levels.
The Japanese, for their part, are going out of their way to show that they care about the sustainability of the fishery, particularly after Japan led an effort earlier this year to defeat a proposal to ban the Atlantic bluefin trade by the UN-backed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).
Other Cites proposals include moves to control unregulated trade in corals and sharks, including the porbeagle, spiny dogfish and three species of hammerhead, as well as the proposed ban on bluefin tuna trade.
The Paris meeting had been closely watched by ocean conservationists because delegates to the March meeting of a United Nations conference, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, had voted against a proposal to ban international trade of bluefin tuna.
But earlier this year, Japan paid off a number of the countries voting at CITES, with the result that the proposal to ban the trade in bluefin was summarily dismissed.Fishing quotas are set each year by an organisation known as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).
See articleAfter much pious talk about the fate of the bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean, six Mediterranean countries blocked a European Union proposal to list the species as endangered, which would mean a ban on catching any more.
