SEAFOODNEWS.COM — June 23, 2014 — In a move that will infuriate many Scandinavians, the WWF has redlisted fresh prawns from the North Sea and Skagerrak fisheries. This was the major change in the new issue of WWF's Seafood Traffic Light publication, in which they changed local shrimp to red, and mackerel from green to yellow. The buying guide was last updated in 2012.
WWF urges Norwegians to keep eating frozen prawns, from the Barents Sea and Greenland and Canada, but draws the line at the summer treat of local fresh shrimp.
They say that catches have been declining, but more specifically they redlisted the fishery because of a high bycatch of small shrimp, which are discarded, and the failure to use sorting grids to reduce other bycatch.
“There’s a lot of mistakes and deficiencies regarding management of shrimp in the North Sea and Skagerrak,” Lars Andresen of WWF-Norge told newspaper Dagsavisen on Monday. “Dumping of small shrimps seems to be on the increase in all three Scandinavian countries that fish these stocks, that is Norway, Sweden and Denmark.”
He added that the shrimp boats can also catch too many other threatened species, while the actual shrimp stocks themselves may be lower than estimated. Andresen said international experts thus recommend that the shrimp catch be cut in half from the amount caught last year. “And we think shrimp managment overall must improve,” he told Dagsavisen.
Many Norwegians prefer freshly cooked shrimp, often sold right off the boat in harbours all along the coast.
Erik Johannesen, skipper on board the fishing boat Pelican at Oslo Harbour, scoffed at the WWF warning and told Dagsvisen that “if folks follow it, I’ll go bankrupt.” He conceded that shrimp stocks have declined in the Oslo Fjord over the past several years, but he attributes that to “natural swings” and not to any overfishing.
Johannesen claimed he and his colleagues only fish in a small area of the fjord, “and we’re not taking anything close to all the shrimp found here. Our catch is just a drop in the bucket.”
The following story appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.