Saving Seafood

Opinion

JIM LOVGREN: Congress must act to save U.S. fishing industry

March 25, 2020 — With the coronavirus being spread around the world and nations reacting to this threat in many different ways — from doing nothing, to closing the borders and full quarantines — the unintended effects of such government actions have yet to be fully felt.

Granted the stock market has lost 30 percent in value in just three weeks’ time, the average American really doesn’t feel that unless he is living on his investment returns.

With the closing of schools, and restaurants and any places of public gatherings, an enormous crisis is being created. Many people are being put out of work, and some of them may not have a business to come back to when the crisis is over. The coronavirus may topple an empire if we let it.

How? By exposing our self-inflicted dependence on foreign imports by every major industry in our country.

Years ago, the problem was our dependence on imported oil from the Middle East. That problem was based on cost of production — it was cheaper to import oil than to produce our own oil. As oil prices rose, and fracking technology advanced, we have reached a point where we have energy independence — although it is based on fossil fuel, and not fissionable fuel.

In regard to almost every other industrial production, be it agricultural, pharmaceutical, manufacturing or whatever, our own companies have sold their soul to short-term profits. We are at the mercy of foreign companies and governments for many of our essential items, and it was our politicians of both parties that sold us out.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman

Keep fishermen fishing: Food producers are essential to our health and survival

March 23, 2020 — Food production and delivery are crucial systems for society. The covid-19 virus is causing severe economic and social disruptions worldwide. The president has made it clear to the U.S. population that grocery stores and pharmacies will remain open. However fishermen, farmers and processors need to be able to continue their work to provide consumer with food.
Seemingly without a plan, parts of the world are demobilizing the food supply chain when they should be trying to secure and protect it.

Every day we learn more that fishermen in the United States and in some European countries are increasingly unable to sell their products. These harvesters have come to the docks with fresh food and there are either no buyers, or price offers are so low that fishermen won’t return to sea do a second trip.

With the information we have thus far, the best way to combat covid-19 is to keep immune systems healthy. Everyone needs nutritious food to maintain their underlying health. Seafood is a vital part of a healthy diet. Consumers expect to go to the store to find milk for their coffee and spinach for a salad. Not surprisingly, if dairy and market farmers stop farming, or a seafood processor stops processing, or a shipping company stops driving, there will be nothing left in stores.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

JESSICA HATHAWAY: Why local fisheries matter — with or without a global pandemic

March 18, 2020 — The topic of food security has been on the mind of forward thinkers for years now, who primarily have focused on access to food as affected by natural disasters. As Covid-19 closes ports, markets and distributors, and social distancing practices threaten the supply chain for goods and services, many of us are discovering how valuable local products are.

Some of my Maine-based social media groups have been filled with posts from the staff of locally owned stores, detailing the products they have for sale, and from local farmers hoping to find new distribution points for their goods and to remind local buyers that not everything is sold out, despite the popularity of Empty Shelf Shots.

I’m feeling lucky to live in a state with small-scale farmers and fishermen. The products being delivered locally are made, grown and caught right here. On Friday, as my office was closing for the foreseeable future, I hauled home 20 pounds of Maine blueberries and 10 pounds of Gulf of Maine scallops for the freezer.

This pandemic is a reminder that a global marketplace can satisfy our worldly desires, but it cannot sustain us through deeply troubled times when our access is limited. Diversification of markets would ideally include expanding local distribution points, as well as global ones. And if we as consumers want access to our local products in times of trouble, then we have to keep buying them even when the world opens up to us again.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

JOHN SACKTON: How coronavirus could impact North American seafood

February 20, 2020 — A lot of people in the seafood industry are thinking about coronavirus (COVID-19). The major impact has been on shipping, tourism, and travel, all of which are vital to the North American seafood industry.

The question is whether this is a short-term event like a hurricane or political strike that impacts one area of our supply chain, or if this is a year-long global pandemic, leading to big changes in behavior in our markets.

Clearly we don’t know yet, despite people like the CEO of Mowi saying it is a short term event. However, we can already see some supply and demand disruptions, and we can prepare for others. After thinking about this for the last couple of weeks, here are some preliminary ideas.

Some products disrupted more than others initially

Most seafood products have not suddenly changed in price over the past few weeks. If you look at Urner Barry’s dashboard, the majority of items remain green, showing rising or steady prices.

Read the full opinion piece at Undercurrent News

HOMER NEWS: Cook Inlet commercial fisheries feed Alaskans

February 13, 2020 — Alaska is salmon country, where fish feed our communities in every way — sustenance, work, recreation, art, faith, family, tradition and culture. For us, second- and third-generation commercial fishermen raised on Cook Inlet, salmon is a complex livelihood and identity built on all of those things.

We are proud to wield the skills our fathers taught us, and proud that we are able to venture onto an unruly ocean and return with food for our communities. That is the core purpose of commercial fishing: the movement of healthy protein from the ocean to the people.

An incredible industry has grown around it, reaching from riverbed to global marketplace. But our first duty is as local harvester, as small business owners bolstering the food security and economic stability of coastal Alaska.

In Cook Inlet, commercial fishing provides essential coastal livelihoods through hundreds of small locally-owned businesses, and thousands of jobs in the harvesting, processing and marine trades sectors. Additionally, 79% of Cook Inlet fishermen are Alaska residents.

Read the full opinion piece at the Homer News

ALLEN SUSSER: Strong fisheries management will keep seafood on Florida’s dinner tables

February 11, 2020 — The options for eating seafood are plentiful in Miami, from beach shacks to fine-dining establishments and everything in between. Equally plentiful is the seafood caught by U.S. fishermen that I and other Florida chefs are proud to serve and promote.

The United States boasts some of the best managed fisheries in the world, making American seafood a preferred choice for sustainability advocates like myself and, increasingly, for consumers.

But this wasn’t always the case. Until the mid-1990s, many U.S. fish stocks were being caught at an unsustainable rate — depleting the ocean of many of the species we love to eat.

Fortunately, a wide range of stakeholders committed to sustaining U.S. fisheries and fishermen worked with Congress to make key changes to a federal law known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA). As a result of those changes, more than 45 of our country’s fish populations have recovered from perilously low levels, and the law ensures that they are now fished sustainably. For chefs in Florida, with more than 8,000 miles of coastline along the Atlantic and the Gulf, that means we have access to sustainable seafood on a regular basis.

Read the full story at the Miami Herald

JIM LOVGREN: Whats The Big Rush To Offshore Wind?

February 11, 2020 — The U.S. is currently in a mad rush to build offshore wind farms on every square inch of the ocean on the east coast, despite the fact that there is presently little known about the environmental effects of so many structures on the marine ecosystem. The surveying, construction, operation and maintenance of these huge, up to 900 foot tall structures, will create a cacophony of sound never before heard in these ocean waters. While the surveying and construction phase is supposed to be of short duration, consisting of sonic and seismic testing to explore the ocean bottom, and piledriving the windmill bases into the sea floor, because more and more projects are being proposed almost everyday, it’s not unreasonable to assume that this noise will be present for the next 25 years at least. What will the cumulative effect of all this noise, [some of it loud enough to kill creatures] be over the course of decades? It’s seems no one cares. So, to save the planet we must kill the planet.

We are told the world will end in twelve years if we don’t immediately stop burning fossil fuels, and change over to a green economy. This is absolute nonsense. I won’t dispute that we need to seriously slow down mankind’s carbon emissions, but anybody that thinks that the USA can solve this problem by itself is delusional. The USA has reduced carbon emissions by over ten % in the last decade while China and India have increased over one hundred % each in that time. The Asian continent is now responsible for half of the worlds green house gas emissions, and that figure is continuing to climb as China keeps building more coal burning power plants, not only for themselves but other countries as well. In a few years China will emit twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as the USA, which is presently the second larger contributor. As the older industrialized nations work towards a cleaner energy future, the developing world, particularly in Asia and the Pacific basin are neutralizing any efforts to clean the atmosphere by utilizing the cheapest energy they can use, which is fossil fuels.

So, why must we ignore all semblances of concern to the possible effects of thousands of huge off shore wind turbines on the marine environment? Right now leases have been granted that cover fully one third of the ocean bottom from Nantucket to Delaware in water out to forty fathoms, leaving only the coastline out to seventeen miles, and the shipping lanes, clear of them. These wind turbines must be sighted at least three quarters of a mile apart, meaning that vast tracks of the ocean will be covered by them. Hundreds of square miles. Most of them sited in the middle of long time historical fishing grounds. What about the fishermen that fish there? Tough luck, they will not be able to. In Europe, of the five country’s that have offshore wind farms, only the U.K. allows fishing in them, it is just too dangerous for commercial operations to operate amongst them. As for those lucky U.K. fishermen they can fish there, but unfortunately the Cod they used to catch there all left. Of course because the farms were rushed into construction and operation, no one thought to do a baseline study of the marine ecosystem so they could scientifically document any changes to marine life that might have occurred due to construction and operation of the windfarms. The windmill companies can continue to claim no harm, because they obstruct any attempt to document effects to the marine ecosystem.

Read the full story at Fishery Nation

Stimson Center’s Sally Yozell: RFMOs, China must do more to fight IUU

February 6, 2020 — Some of the key global instruments to fight illegal fishing are under-resourced and underperforming, according to Sally Yozell, director of the environmental security program at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C., U.S.A.-based think-tank. Previously a senior adviser to former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Yozell was instrumental in starting the Our Ocean Conference. In her role at the Stimson Center, Yozell focuses on ocean security, climate security, and wildlife protection. Her recommendations on reducing global illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing included in the drafting of the Maritime Security and Enforcement Act, which entered into U.S. law in December.

Through her recent work in co-authoring the Stimson Center report, “Shining a Light,” Yozell took a close look at illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in the Chinese fleet. In an interview, she answered questions from SeafoodSource on how the fight against IUU can be better resourced and how Chinese authorities and the insurance industry can play a bigger role in that fight.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ERIC BURNLEY: Commercial fishermen do not affect recreational fishing

February 3, 2020 — There is a misconception among some recreational fishermen that commercial fishermen are to blame for all the ills we suffer with a lack of flounder, bluefish, trout, striped bass, or (you name it) . Sorry, Charlie, it just ain’t so.

There was a time when both commercial and recreational fishermen could take as many fish of any size as they wanted, and we did. I have seen coolers full of flounder come off the Point at Cape Hatteras with many of those fish well below 12 inches. Blues stacked up like cordwood at Indian River when the run was on, and trout deck loaded in Delaware Bay. At the same time, commercial fishermen were filling their nets with the same fish until the market value dropped to the point where it became a losing proposition to go after them.

I was a small part of the movement to put limits on both recreational and commercial fishermen here in Delaware and in Virginia. In Delaware, I was on the Delaware Wildlife Federation’s Advisory Council, and we met regularly with state officials to try to bring some order to the fishery. The late Buddy Hurlock and his wife Rose were the driving force behind this movement.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

MAX MOSSLER: The truth behind seafood sustainability?

January 31, 2020 — People care about the impact of their diet. According to Nielson1, consumers are more likely than ever to acknowledge the environmental impact of global food production and make choices to reduce their individual footprint – usually willing to pay more for lower-impact foods. So why is seafood not flying off the shelves? It is, by far, the lowest impact animal protein2 and, according to a recent global analysis3, fish populations around the world are healthy in places that manage their fisheries well.

The problem is that people’s perception of ocean conservation and subsequent seafood sustainability is often misinformed. For example, when people are asked4 to rank ocean threats, pollution (like plastic) and overfishing are consistently listed as the top two despite expert consensus that climate change is the most pressing threat. The seafood industry has a largely negative5 reputation among everyday consumers and are increasingly blamed6 for plastic pollution.

Why does the negative perception of seafood persist?

Overfishing throughout the 1980s and 1990s earned the seafood industry its infamous label. High-profile media stories about overfishing coupled with the formation of several international ocean advocacy groups vilified the industry – a reputation the industry cannot seem to shake, despite important policy reforms and strong data that many global fisheries are firmly on a path to sustainability.

Read the full story at New Food