Because it would'nt be a Nicoise Salad with Mackeral...
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3000lbs of Mackeral to get a Tuna to 300lb. Cost of Mackeral would be about £1.50 ? per lb so it would cost you 4.5k to feed it.
Add to that the cost to keep the Tuna in cages ...total guess...£500 per fish per year and if we say it takes a Tuna 5 years to get to maturity that means it costs you 2.5k to house it.
So total cost would be 7k ...sell on price 20k ...net profit 13k.
Sounds like good business to me....as long as people keep eating Tuna...
Phil the figure 20k was for wild fish, which in Japan is the equivalent of the best Aberdeen Angus carcass here. It didn't give the figure for farmed Bluefin, which is probably lower than 20K. It did and so did the prof stress the fact that Bluefin is now so rare in the wild, it commands such a price.
Nevertheless, I take the point you make about "good business" it has to be economic, else they'd have never scaled it up to farming them.
What wasn't said further to farming them, was whether they also released offspring back into the wider oceans to supplement the wild stock.
There's very little danger in Japan that people would stop eating fish as it culturally ingrained in them.
The programme the info came from is well worth a watch on iplayer - Fish! the Japanese obsession. It runs for about hour and half and covers everything to do with fish in Japan, Koi keeping and the cost of them, the dressing of the poisonous puffer fish, women divers for sea urchins who are in their 70s and still diving.