Today Greenpeace is asking supporters to “pre-order” sustainable skipjack tuna as a way of pressuring retailers and tuna companies in to sourcing only from pole and line caught operations– but it fails to properly highlight that skipjack, be it from the Pacific or the Atlantic, is already the most sustainably managed of all the tuna stocks worldwide.

Skipjack is plentiful and well managed, period.

Greenpeace has added a caveat to its latest campaign insisting that the method it is promoting is the most “socially sound.” It’s ironic to see Greenpeace pulling out the “social” card when it feels it needs a hook and ignoring it when it’s convenient.

If you know anything about sustainability you know there are three aspects that need to be considered at all times (in alphabetical order); economic, environmental and social. Greenpeace rarely takes even two of the three tenets into account when launching its misguided campaigns.

Let’s remember, when Greenpeace took aim at Alaska Pollock, one of the world’s best run fisheries with an impressive sustainability track record, it argued for unnecessarily inflated catch reductions that would have crippled the industry and cost hard working men and women their jobs. Where was its concern about the socially sound aspect of its own campaign back then?

Not to mention Greenpeace ignores the fact that the major tuna companies have just partnered with WWF to create the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF)– designed to do what? Oh that’d be over see and promote tuna sustainability. In fact when ISSF launched Greenpeace said publicly it was “great to see processors finally taking a stand.”

Greenpeace has a history of being late to these types of parties and then taking credit for things it had little or no role in.