Saving Seafood

FCC issues warning on fishing gear beacons

February 14, 2019 — Small electronic beacons that are being widely used by increasing numbers of fishermen could net them big fines.

Automatic Identification Systems, or AIS, are easily attached to nets, longlines and pots and signal the locations of the gear via a vessel’s navigation system, laptops, or even cell phones.

The inexpensive buoys, which range from $47 to $199 from most online retailers, are regarded as a Godsend by fishermen in the way they help locate gear as well as being a potential money saver.

“If you’re not sitting on your gear with your vessel either on radar or on AIS, somebody can come along that doesn’t think there’s any gear in the water in the absence of an AIS marker and set over the top of you. Or a trawler could potentially come and nail your gear and it could result in substantial financial loses,” explained Buck Laukitis, a Homer-based fisherman and a member of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

AIS is required for boats longer than 65 feet and in certain shipping lanes, said Jerry Dzugan, director of the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association. But warning bulletins are advising that other users and sellers are subject to fines of more than $19,000 to $147,000 per day for those who continue to use them.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

How The Trade War With China Is Threatening America’s Largest Fishery

February 13, 2019 — Alaskan pollock is an incredibly versatile fish when it comes to cooking. The species is often referred to as a “cousin of cod” because the two species are classified in the same family, Gadidae. This means they have many shared characteristics, including how they taste. Their meat is a flaky blank slate, ready for nearly any preparation you could throw at it. Pollock’s affordability also makes it an attractive species for a variety of markets, from fast-casual to university and corporate dining.

These factors, along with the stability and health of the species’ population, helped to make Alaskan pollock the top species landed by volume in the United States in 2017. It hasn’t always been a top seller though. Back in the 1980s, there was very little demand for the species, but seafood distributors such as Trident Seafoods, based in Seattle, saw pollock’s potential as a cheaper cod alternative. Trident started a pollock revolution and became the largest vertically integrated seafood company in North America. Its founder, Chuck Bundrant, even became a billionaire, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $2.4 billion. Today, Alaskan pollock remains one of the top five most commonly eaten species in the U.S., but the fishery is at risk of being diminished by the ongoing trade war with China.

The species’ dominance could change if markets become unavailable because of shifts in global seafood processing and distribution due to an escalating international trade war. Last summer, China put in place a retaliatory tariff of 25% for seafood products. Then the U.S. proposed a 10% increase for tariffs on seafood imported from China. The issue here is that a portion of seafood caught by American fishermen is shipped to China for filleting and processing before being re-exported back in the U.S. for Americans to buy. While this seems like a wildly inefficient move, it has been, in fact, a commonly used method to cut costs. That meant when Alaskan pollock was processed in China and re-exported to America, it was included on the tariff lists.

After reports came out that the tariffs were harming the American fishing industry, particularly in Alaska, the U.S. announced that certain species of fish caught in the state would be excluded from the tariff list. Alaskan pollock is included in this group and will not be taxed when re-entering America. But the exemption doesn’t solve all problems for Alaskan fishermen and processors.

According to an FAO market report from January, Trump’s trade war “could end up favoring Russian Federation (and Chinese) exporters at the expense of Alaska processors.” This is because foreign fishing competitors can still ship pollock caught in their waters to China for lower-cost processing and then re-export to the U.S. tariff free. It seems like a bad turn of events for Alaskan fishermen and processors.

Read the full story at Forbes

 

ALASKA: Investors are backing Southeast’s largest oyster farms

February 12, 2019 — The largest ever oyster farms in Southeast Alaska could be coming soon. That’s in line with the state’s Mariculture Task Force that sees the potential for a $100 million industry in Alaska.

Silver Bay Seafoods has been buying and processing salmon and herring at its plant in Sitka for the past decade.

The company says it wants to do something new.

“Alaska waters produce the highest quality seafood products in the country, if not the world,” said Tommy Sheridan, a former state fisheries biologist who now works as a company representative. “There is significant demand for Alaska oysters.”

Silver Bay recently chartered a boat to take a group of local business people, academics and seafood industry boosters to see the site of its oyster venture about 13 miles from Sitka’s harbor.

It’s in a cove near rocky shoreline. Not much to see – yet.

“If this were to go through, what you’d see here would be a series of rafts that we’d use to suspend oysters from,” Sheridan tells the group.

Read the full story at KTOO

Alaska deckhand apprentice program open for applicants

February 11, 2019 — It’s the second year for the Crewmember Apprenticeship program hosted by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association in Sitka. Over 100 applied last year from all over the country, over half were women, and 13 were placed on local boats.

“It’s very exciting to see so many young people interested in entering the industry,” said Tara Racine, ALFA communications and program development coordinator. “You always hear about the graying of the fleet but it shows that the interest is out there. Young people just need these resources to explore and get involved.”

ALFA received a $70,000 matching grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to launch the program last year and to help support expansion of similar apprenticeships in Alaska.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Commercial catches of Pacific halibut increase for most Alaska regions

February 11, 2019 — Contrary to all expectations, commercial catches of Pacific halibut were increased for 2019 in all but one Alaska region.

The numbers were revealed Friday at the International Pacific Halibut Commission annual meeting in Victoria, British Columbia.

The reason was due to increased estimates of the overall halibut biomass based on expanded surveys last summer from Northern California to the Bering Sea, said Doug Bowen who operates Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.

“There’s a couple of strong year classes from 2011 and 2012 that are just starting to show up in the commercial catches and I think the scientists are cautiously optimistic that we could see some better harvests as a result of those halibut entering the fishery,” he said in a phone call as he was leaving the meetings.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

How Trump’s trade war kept Russian fish sticks in US school lunchrooms

February 11, 2019 — A trade decision by the Trump administration has inadvertently protected a price advantage enjoyed by Russian-caught fish sold in the US, much of which ends up in fish sticks served to American school children.

For years, Alaskan fishermen have been frustrated by foreign competition from Russia, particularly in the lucrative pollock market. Caught in Russian waters, this cold-water cousin of the cod is processed in China before being sold in the US for use in frozen and breaded fish products, as well as imitation crab meat.

Russian pollock costs less than its US-caught equivalent. That’s helped it gain share of the roughly $200 million US market for frozen pollock, to the point that by 2017, about half the fish sticks served in US school cafeterias were made from fish caught in Russia and pumped with additives in China, according to the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers, a trade group that represents 14 different seafood companies.

Domestic fish producers thought President Donald Trump would fix all that. The administration’s move to slap a 10% tariff last year on thousands of imports from China was supposed to erase the price advantage enjoyed by Russian fish. But instead of fixing the problem, the Trump administration has made things worse for Alaskan fishermen.

As the Bering Sea warms, this skipper is chasing pollock to new places

February 7, 2019 — The pollock fishing in the Bering Sea was “about as good as it gets,” skipper Dan Martin said as he steered his 133-foot trawler, the Commodore, over a dense school of the fish last month.

From the bridge, Martin watched as his sonar showed the fish streaming into his net – so thick that his instruments couldn’t distinguish the pollock from the ocean floor.

After just a few hours of fishing, Martin had filled the Commodore with more than 200 tons of pollock. As the wind and waves picked up, he started the nine-hour run back to Dutch Harbor, the Aleutian Island port.

The trip was what Martin called “classic” winter fishing: The pollock could be easily found at their traditional spawning grounds. But that’s not the case year-round, Martin said.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

US shutdown delays NOAA surveys that influence groundfish TACs

February 7, 2019 — Some of the important summer research surveys that the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducts each year off the shores of Alaska to estimate the health of key commercially caught groundfish stocks like pollock and Pacific cod could face delays due to the recent partial government shutdown, officials said.

In a report to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said that the shutdown that sent most of its staffers home from Dec. 22, 2018, until Jan. 25 has already affected one research cruise, a winter pre-spawning acoustic survey of pollock stocks in the Gulf of Alaska.

“Unfortunately, due to the delay in starting the survey, the first two legs (in the Shumagin Islands and outer Kenai regions) will not be conducted,” science center staffers wrote in a report to the NPFMC.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

International Pacific Halibut Commission sets US, Canadian catch limits for 2019

February 6, 2019 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission last week agreed on catch limits for the Pacific halibut fishery which runs from California to Alaska, according to KBBI.

In 2018, the IPHC, the public organization responsible for managing the  U.S. and Canadian West Coast halibut fisheries, was unable to agree on quotas for the season, and as a result the quota remained the same as the 2017 season. Before last year, the last time the United States and Canada could not come to a quota agreement was nearly a century ago.

The main sticking point for the negotiations was the amount of halibut that Canada was allowed. Recently, Canada has taken about 20 percent of the catch. A U.S. proposal during the negotiations suggested that the number be closer to 12 percent this year, and a compromise was reached at 17.7 percent.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Alaska pollock’s new top promoter: Upping price may be only way to grow; trashing Russia could backfire

February 5, 2019 — Given that the harvesters of Alaska pollock are limited in how much they can catch and there is no shortage of sales, the only sensible tack to grow business seems to be increasing the fish’s value on the market, believes Craig Morris, the new CEO of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP).

Also, he’s not sure it makes sense to keep attacking Russian pollock as an inferior product.

“Russia is making a major investment in their fleet,” he said. “Potentially the quality differences between US and Russian pollock in five to 10 years are less than they are today. I think that’s one of the things we need to talk through … I would hate for us to invest millions of dollars to differentiate ourselves from Russian pollock and then, at the end of that campaign, [find out] the way that we chose to differentiate ourselves doesn’t make any sense.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News