Saving Seafood

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

IPHC agrees on halibut catch limit after 2018 impasse

February 4, 2019 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) has set 2019 catch limits slightly higher than last year’s levels, it announced.

The body, which sets halibut catch limits in the US and Canada, set the 2019 limit at 38.61 million pounds (17,513 metric tons) for the 2019 season, which should March 15 and must cease on Nov. 14.

In 2018, the IPHC was not able to agree on a catch limit. In a move called both “inevitable” and “disastrous”, the IPHC could not come to an agreement on the catch limits for the seasons in the US, off the coast of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, and British Columbia, Canada. So, the US and Canada set limits independently, which totaled 37.2m lbs, a 9% decrease overall.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

ALASKA: NOAA closes Bering Sea cod fishery as trawl catchers approach TAC

February 4, 2019 — US fishing regulators have closed the directed fishery for trawl-caught Pacific cod in Alaska’s Bering Sea for trawl catcher vessels after harvesters met their A season allocation quicker than they did last year.

The closure order from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, which takes effect at noon today, Feb. 1, brings the season to a close after only 13 days of fishing effort.

During the season, which began Jan. 20, trawl catchers caught 13,507 metric tons of cod in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands as of Feb 1, the latest date for which data is available. Trawl catchers were allocated a total allowable catch (TAC) of 26,388t for the season, including a 5,000t set-aside for delivery to shore-plants in the Aleutian Islands and 388t for halibut protected species catch.

“This action is necessary to prevent exceeding the Pacific cod allocation of the total allowable catch for the Bering Sea Trawl Catcher Vessel A-Season Sector Limitation in the Bering Sea subarea,” NOAA said in a press release.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

California has a weird new desert. It’s in the Pacific Ocean.

February 4, 2019 — Six years after it was stricken by a wasting disease off the northern California coast, the sunflower sea star — one of the most colorful starfish in the ocean — has all but vanished, and the domino effect threatens to unravel an entire marine ecosystem.

The cause of the sea star’s demise is a mystery, but it coincided with a warming event in the Pacific Ocean, possibly tied to the climate, that lasted for two years ending in 2015. It heated vast stretches of water in patches, and likely exacerbated the disease, according to a new study released Wednesday.

“I’ve never seen a decline of this magnitude of a species so important,” Drew Harvell, the lead author of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, that documented the sunflower sea star’s retreat into possible extinction off California and Oregon.

If the study had a purpose, she said, it was to call attention to the sea star’s demise so that federal officials would take action to list it as endangered and work to save it, possibly with a breeding program using sunflower stars that are surviving in parts of Washington, Alaska and Canada.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Senators file bill to mandate labeling requirements on genetically enhanced salmon

February 4, 2019 — A bipartisan group of U.S. senators from the Pacific northwest filed a bill last week that would require any salmon produced through genetic engineering to be labeled clearly as such on its packaging.

The bill, filed last week, comes a month after the Department of Agriculture published its final rule requiring producers, importers and other entities to reveal information about bioengineered products and ingredients. However, critics panned the measure saying companies could use digital QR codes, which would require a smartphone to scan, or list a toll-free number to meet the obligation.

Among those critics is U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who along with cosponsors U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) filed the Genetically Engineered Salmon Labeling Act on Wednesday, 30 January.

The two-page bill says the legislation would ensure buyers can make “informed decisions” when buying salmon.

“We have the right to know what we’re eating,” Murkowski said in a statement. “When you splice DNA from another animal and combine it with farmed salmon, you are essentially creating a new species and I have serious concerns with that. If we are going to allow this fabricated fish to be sold in stores, we must ensure there is at least clear labeling. Americans should not become test subjects for this new product without their full knowledge and consent.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Brighter 2019 seen for Alaska’s Copper River sockeye, but ‘blob’ effect unknown

January 28, 2019 — On the heels of the second-worst salmon season in the history of Alaska’s Copper River district, 2019 is estimated to see healthier returns.

The commercial sockeye salmon fishery in the central region of the US’ northernmost state is closely watched by US retailers and consumers as it is the first Alaska season annually to open and is accompanied by significant media coverage. Last year though, it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t much to see.

Despite an initial Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) that 942,000 sockeye would be caught in 2018– the range estimated between 536,000 to 1.4 million  — only 44,318 sockeye were.

In 2019, ADF&G predicts a total Copper River sockeye harvest of 955,000, an estimate made within the range of 351,000 to 1.16m. The 10-year average harvest for the district is 1.25m sockeye, will includes 1.04m wild-caught fish.

“It’s a pretty decent forecast,” Stormy Haught, an ADF&G biologist based in Cordova, Alaska, told Undercurrent News. “But it definitely deserves some caution. For the Copper River last year we used this same method and over-forecast by over a million fish.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News