I'm in Brussels, at the annual European Seafood Exposition. In the shadow of the improbably-shaped Atomium, thousands of people gather to buy and sell seafood. Five vast halls in an impossibly imposing building, crammed for three days with every sort of seafood you can imagine, as well as quite a few you hadn't yet dreamt up. The scale of it takes your breath away. This is the world's largest seafood fair, and quite literally it's the place the big-money deals are done to trade away our ocean life.

For many people it seems that 'tuna' is synonymous with 'sushi'. And there's certainly no doubt that the demand for high quality tuna to feed the fashionable sushi restaurant demand has had a devastating impact on some tuna populations. None more so than bluefin tuna.

Both the Atlantic and Southern bluefin species are in dire trouble, trouble caused by overfishing, to satisfy a demand for the fatty red belly meat in expensive sushi, sold as 'toro'. It's a demand that has led to a fishing frenzy, in places like the Mediterranean , over the past few decades. It's a frenzy that has trampled over artisanal fishing methods and harvested bluefin tuna with little or no regard to the scientific advice, or the law. They are fisheries that have been so spectacularly mismanaged, it's not even laughable.

Today, in my inbox, was a letter from Whiskas parent group, Mars, gleefully telling us Greenpeace folk how committed they were to sustainability, saving the oceans, and other such buzzwords. Read more »

I've tried several times to write a 'wrap-up' blog for this year's CITES meeting. But usually I end up just banging my head against the keyboard in despair.

This CITES meeting was a turning point – the governments in the room decided that they weren't there to restrict trade to protect species, but rather there to protect trade as best they could. Nowhere was that more evident than the marine proposals.

Sharks were shafted, corals crushed, and bluefin obliterated, as the assembled governments played politics, and wrung their hands earnestly over the adverse economic effects of actually protecting any of these endangered species. Conveniently ignoring the fact that it's their inability to restrain trade which endangered them in the first place...