Reasonably priced and tasty, saury is a fixture in autumn meals for Japanese, but that may change in the foreseeable future.

Japans saury catches have fallen sharply in the past few years, primarily due to a surge of fishing operations by large vessels from Taiwan and China on the high seas.

Government officials are worried about the depletion of saury resources but have not worked out an effective way to maintain stocks, raising the prospect of saury prices remaining high in Japan.

At an annual meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries Commission in Sapporo last month, a representative of China opposed a Japanese proposal to set saury catch quotas for the commissions member economies.

We have not recognized a substantial fall in resources, the representative said. We dont want to be restrained (by the proposed quotas) and see no need for one.

With South Korea and Russia also in opposition, the Japanese proposal for curbing catches to preserve marine resources went nowhere at the meeting.

Participants at the NPFC meeting agreed to a one-year rule banning China, Taiwan and South Korea from increasing the number of their saury fishing vessels. They also decided to discuss the advisability of setting catch quotas for members at next years meeting, but there is little prospect of the disagreements on the quota issue being resolved.

At a news conference on July 25, then-Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Yuji Yamamoto deplored the absence of effective measures to curb fishing operations by China, which caught about 60,000 tons of saury in 2016, 30 times the level of 2012.

We are helpless against the overfishing of saury on the high seas, Yamamoto said.

Prizing freshness, Japan mostly uses small and medium-sized ships to catch saury in its exclusive economic zone.

By contrast, much bigger Chinese ships catch saury on the high seas, mainly off Hokkaido, and a large amount of frozen saury is transported to China by specialized cargo vessels.

Before the NPFC meeting, Fisheries Agency officials said it would be difficult to sell the catch quota proposal to China, which is responsible for food for its 1.3 billion people.

If Japan does not make the proposal, overfishing will only continue. It (the proposal) had the effect of warning China, said a senior agency official who attended the meeting.

Japan has no solution, however, if China and Taiwan continue fishing on a scale similar to that of recent years.

Japans saury catches shrank to some 110,000 tons in 2015 and 2016, roughly half of the levels of preceding years. The figure slipped below 140,000 tons for Taiwan in 2016.

The reduced supplies pushed saury prices sharply higher.

According to the Tokyo-based Japan Fisheries Information Service Center, wholesale prices in Tokyo, Sapporo, Nagoya and Osaka averaged 551 per kilogram in 2016, up 54 percent from 357 in 2006. Retail prices in 2016 are believed to have soared to an average of 165 per fish of standard size.

Satoshi Midorikawa, leader of the centers distribution information group, attributed the poor hauls of recent years to the surge in fishing activities by China and other economies, rising water temperatures and changes in oceanic currents.

The number of saury has fallen in coastal waters off Japan and it is quite unlikely that saury catches will recover rapidly, Midorikawa said.

Atsushi Kawabata, assistant chief of the Fisheries Agencys Resources and Environment Reserve Division, said, As distribution costs have increased, saury prices are unlikely to fall to levels seen some years ago.

Stabilizing saury prices at reasonable levels would require the curbing of fishing by foreign vessels and a recovery of Japanese catches to previous levels of some 200,000 tons a year, Kawabata said.

In view of hauls in the initial phase of the current (fishing) season, saury prices will probably remain high this year, Midorikawa predicted.

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Saury prices look to stay high amid overfishing as neighbors snub Japan-proposed catch quotas - The Japan Times