June 28, 2012 – With fishermen under increasing pressure from factory fishing boats and government catch limits, two new ideas on how to keep the local fishing industry alive have recently broken the surface.
Both are intended to provide local fishing boats with a fixed-price market for their catch free from the day-to-day market fluctuations that currently determine the price for the fish they bring to shore. While both the new Duxbury-based business Open Ocean Trading and the South Shore Seafood Exchange, based in Scituate, create new markets for fishermen, they come at the job from different angles.
Open Ocean is thinking big, linking producers with big buyers. The South Shore Seafood Exchange is bringing back the age-old exchange of freshly caught fish from local boats to the waiting hands of customers on the pier in Scituate.
Using the Internet and commodity-based analysis to serve “customers on both ends,” Open Ocean arranges for fishermen to make direct contracts with “end buyers” such as grocery stores and fish restaurants for an agreed-on amount of fish at a previously determined price, owner Keith Flett said recently. Under the traditional auction system, that is impossible. Currently fishermen bring their catch to the few ports where dealers operate (such as Boston and New Bedford, but nowhere on the South Shore) and where their fish is inspected and sold by auction.
Since the auction determines the price for each species of the catch and prices can vary widely from day to day, fishermen never know how much money they have made — or possibly lost — until it’s sold.
Through the open market approach offered by Flett’s company, boat owners and captains can negotiate a price with a buyer such as a supermarket or restaurant chain and go fishing with a clear idea of their profit margin, said Flett, 31, who previously ran a wholesale business in New York.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe.