October 9, 2014 — In the face of myriad international crises ranging from airstrikes in Syria to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama recently moved oceans to the front burner—at least for a moment or two. On September 25, he exercised power established by the Antiquities Act to increase the size of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument sixfold, creating what is now the world’s largest marine protected area and permanently prohibiting industrial activities such as commercial fishing and subsea mining within its bounds.
This action represented a huge win for oceans, but realities of the modern seafood trade require that it not be the president’s last.
When President Obama first announced his intention to expand the Pacific Remote Islands monument in June, he also launched an initiative to tackle the worsening scourge of illegal fishing—also known as black market or pirate fishing—and seafood fraud. Despite the urgency of the events currently making headlines, the Obama administration must keep these ocean initiatives on the agenda and deliver reform on federal oversight of seafood safety and traceability.
Mislabeled seafood means public health risks and support for illegal fishing
While U.S. fisheries are arguably the best managed in the world, 91 percent of the seafood consumed by Americans today is caught, grown, or processed abroad. As an unintended consequence, Americans support fishing practices in other countries that are often far from sustainable, if not outright illegal. One recent study found that between 20 percent and 32 percent by weight of nonfarmed seafood imported into the United States is caught illegally, in violation of whatever rules may be in place to help sustain the productivity of marine ecosystems. Making matters worse, recent studies have shown that as much as one-third of seafood tested in the United States is mislabeled, bilking unsuspecting seafood consumers and whitewashing ill-gotten fish.
The deficiency of oversight and enforcement that perpetuates this fraud means consumers are unable to track or trace their seafood from source to table. This lack of so-called traceability is a huge problem for everyone involved—except the criminals who profit from laundering illegally caught or mislabeled fish. Illegal fishing destroys marine ecosystems, undermines fishery recovery efforts domestically and abroad, and undercuts the livelihoods of law-abiding U.S. fishermen.
A 2011 high-profile Boston Globe exposé detailed the rampant mislabeling of seafood. The article’s findings included vendors and restaurants substituting Pacific cod for higher-priced Atlantic cod while calling it “local.” Other establishments regularly sold escolar—described by industry insiders as the “ex-lax fish” for its gastrointestinal consequences—as “white tuna.” When the Globe returned a year later to the restaurants that had failed the first time, 58 of 76 samples still showed mislabeling. One restaurateur laughed off the investigation, saying her establishment was “too busy to deal with such silliness.” Combined with a recent report from Oceana—which found that certain species such as red snapper may be mislabeled as often as 94 percent of the time—stories such as these are beginning to raise the profile of seafood fraud among consumers and to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the current system.
Read the full story from The Center for American Progress