With the launch of Greenpeace’s latest campaign against canned tuna, the eco-extremists have launched headlong into overt distortions. It’s a practice they’ve admitted to in the past. Instead of calling it lying, they call it “emotionalizing the issue.”

The truth is tuna stocks used in canned tuna are not in peril. There is no canned tuna crisis. There is, however, a mountain of rhetoric and distortion that Greenpeace hopes will help raise a lot of money… for Greenpeace.

One of Greenpeace’s main talking points that you may have read is, “FADs [Fish Aggregating Devices] increase bycatch in the skipjack tuna industry by between 500 percent and 1000 percent when compared to nets set on free-swimming schools.”

Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Five hundred to 1,000 percent is a big number, isn’t it?

Bycatch from FAD fishing averages around 5% of the entire catch (which is about the average or a little less than most fisheries). Bycatch from FAD-free fishing is around 1% of the entire catch. So, we’re actually talking about a change of about 3 or 4 percentage points.

Regardless of the picture Greenpeace paints, the reality is its campaign against canned tuna is simply part of a scare story. A scare story it’s shopping to consumers that it hopes won’t have all the facts. This effort will do nothing for tuna sustainability, but will needlessly drive the price of can tuna up for hardworking American families.