Saving Seafood

US Alaska pollock suppliers navigating complications from expanded ban on Russian product

January 10, 2023 — U.S. suppliers are scrambling to figure out how the nuances of an expanded U.S. ban on Russian seafood might impact their trading in Alaska pollock.

On 22 December 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding the U.S. ban on Russian seafood to include imports of Russia-originated seafood processed in third countries, including China. The expanded ban entered into immediate effect, with import contracts signed before that permitted to be carried out through 21 February 2024, according to the department.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Supreme Court denies Alaska’s bid to revive the copper and gold Pebble Mine proposal blocked by EPA

January 9, 2024 — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Alaska’s bid to revive a proposed copper and gold mine that was blocked by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The justices did not comment in turning away the state’s attempt to sue the Biden administration directly in the high court over its desire to revive the proposed Pebble Mine in the state’s Bristol Bay region.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

ALASKA: Tribal groups applaud Alaska Native appointments to federal fisheries advisory panel

January 9, 2024 — Amid alarmingly low salmon returns in Western Alaska, calls have grown for tribes to have a greater say in the way fisheries are managed. Many say that the recent appointment of three Alaska Native members to the panel tasked with advising the top regional federal fisheries council could be a step in the right direction.

A recent press release from the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Tribal Consortium, representing 98 tribes directly impacted by salmon crashes in Western Alaska rivers, said that it was encouraging to see more Alaska Native faces than ever before on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Advisory Panel. But it also called out the council for having a “voting majority with an economic interest in the trawl fleet,” as well as a total lack of Alaska Native representation.

“It’s something that we’ve been fighting for and asking for for many years. The fight for Alaska Native subsistence rights is getting a lot of attention right now because things are crashing,” said Eva Dawn Burk, who was recently appointed to a three-year term on the advisory panel, holding its first-ever designated Alaska Native seat.

“I sit on at least four Alaska Native advisory councils, and it’s like, yeah, I’m an advisor, but I don’t have decision-making power,” Burk said.

Read the full article at KYUK

Alaska pollock may gain with expanded ban on Russian product

January 9, 2024 — The recent U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control ban on the importation of Chinese seafood that originates from Russia promises to crimp the cash funding Russia’s war against Ukraine. In less than 60 days, the hope is that the United States and other countries will adapt labeling and procedures that establish clarity on country of origin, presumably shutting down the seafood pipeline coming out of Russia.

That’s the ethical-geopolitical side of it.

The so-called Seafood Determination issued Dec. 22, 2023 expands the March 2022 federal ban on importation into the U.S. of seafood and other products of Russian origin to include salmon, cod, pollock and crab harvested in Russian waters or by Russian vessels, and processed in another country.

Though language in the federal sanction has been generalized to include any third-party countries reprocessing Russian seafood products for distribution into the United States, the main country of concern is China and the predominant fish species is Bering Sea pollock, a mainstay commodity among whitefish consumers worldwide.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Alaska’s snow crab season canceled for second year in a row as population fails to rebound

January 7, 2024 — Gabriel Prout is grateful for a modest haul of king crab, but it’s the vanishing of another crustacean variety that has the fishing port in Kodiak, Alaska, bracing for financial fallout; for the second year in a row, the lucrative snow crab season has been canceled.

“We’re still definitely in survival mode trying to find a way to stay in business,” he told CBS News.

When the season was canceled last year, there was a sense of confusion among the Alaska crab fisher community. Now, a sense of panic is taking hold in the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.

“It’s just still extremely difficult to fathom how we could go from a healthy population in the Bering Sea to two closures in a row,” Prout said.

And while he is barely holding on, others — like Joshua Songstad — have lost almost everything.

Read the full article at CBS News

ALASKA: “Crisis … years in the making” – Alaska’s seafood sector reeling after Trident’s announced withdrawal

January 4, 2024 — Alaska’s seafood industry is reeling after Trident Seafoods announced its plan to sell off several processing plants.

The Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing company, which has a huge footprint across Alaska’s seafood sector, announced on 12 December that it plans to divest itself of its Alaskan assets in Kodiak, Ketchikan, Petersburg, and False Pass, as well as the South Naknek Diamond NN cannery facility and its support facilities in Chignik.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Salmon and other migratory fish play crucial role in delivering nutrients

January 4, 2024 — Yukon River chinook salmon boast the longest freshwater migration in North America, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from their spawning grounds in Canada to the mouth of the Bering Sea in Alaska. A smolt preparing to enter the ocean is small enough to lay across the palm of your hand. But by the time it returns four or five years later to swim back upriver, it will be about a meter long (more than 3 feet), and weigh 14 kilograms (more than 30 pounds).

Not all Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) travel as far, or grow as big, as the Yukon River chinook (O. tshawytscha), but they all make the journey from freshwater spawning grounds to the ocean, then return to their natal streams to spawn and then die en masse. Those remarkable journeys connect and nurture distant ecosystems.

That’s because salmon gain most of their body mass in the ocean, and when spawning adults travel back inland to die, they ferry energy and nutrients from marine to terrestrial ecosystems. Those migrating salmon are eaten by bears, eagles and a slew of other predators. Scavengers devour carcasses left rotting in streambeds, or discarded in the forest along streams by other carnivores. Ultimately the nutrients diffuse throughout the ecosystem. The young return to the sea to reinvigorate the cycle, in a dance that has lasted unknown centuries — until modern humans began interfering.

Today, researchers can trace the pathway of these nutrients using the “salmon signature,” an isotope of marine nitrogen associated with the migrating fish. John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, has been searching for that salmon signature in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia’s central coast for more than 15 years.

His lab has published numerous studies showing that nutrient additions from salmon influence wildflower development; the productivity of salmon berry bushes; the territory size of Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus); the density of salmon and other freshwater fish; and more. The salmon signature can even be seen from space: on satellite imagery, the greenness of riparian forests is higher following years of high salmon abundance.

Read the full article at Mongabay

US makes 1-million-square-kilometer marine seabed claim

January 2, 2o23 — The U.S. State Department has extended its territorial claims by over 1 million square kilometers, including large swaths of the Arctic and Atlantic seabeds.

Under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries have the right to claim any marine resources within their exclusive economic zone, which stretches 200 miles out from their coastline or halfway between two countries’ coastlines. Countries may also claim areas where the continental shelf originating within their existing boundaries extends into unclaimed areas. These claims include rights to resources on or below the seabed but not within the seas above, such as fisheries.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Processors lament expansion of US ban on Russian-origin seafood

January 2, 2024 — U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent expansion of the country’s ban on certain types of Russian-origin seafood has garnered mixed reactions, with domestic seafood producers and Alaskan politicians celebrating the move but importers claiming it will have a negative impact on the U.S. processing industry.

Biden expanded the ban of Russian seafood under U.S. Executive Order 14068 to include seafood harvested in Russian waters, “even if these products are then transformed in a third country.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource