October 16, 2019 — NGOs and retailers are seeking to distance themselves this week from a new report prepared by the Dutch-based Changing Markets Foundation, which claims to have found links between them and unsustainable fishing operations in Africa and Asian countries that supply feed ingredients for aquaculture.
Changing Markets undertook a comprehensive mapping exercise of fishmeal and fish oil supply chains from sea to plate, which is set out in the report “Fishing for Catastrophe.”
October 15, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
There is a growing interest in understanding where our food is coming from and in supporting local farmers. There has also been an increased focus on local fare on many menus at eateries coast to coast. In fact, the once-obscure term “locavore” is now in the dictionary and is a highlighted feature on menus. When thinking about farm-to-fork many envision rolling hills, red barns, and a farmer in overalls tending his or her flock. But what about a farmer in waders or swim trunks? Can we trade the rolling hills for blue waves and the barn for a boat? That is just what the tide-to-table farmers are hoping to do.
Aquaculture, also known as farming in water, is the fastest growing food production system in the world. In the United States, aquaculture farmers raised and harvested more than 80 million pounds of seafood in coastal waters and the open ocean. These farms can vary from seaweed production in Alaska, oyster gardens in New England, and even offshore farms in the clear waters of Hawaii.
Seafood is vital to the Hawaiian economy and culture. Fish, shellfish, and seaweeds are an important part of local diets. Seafood demand is further increased by millions of visitors who crave high-quality, fresh, and local seafood.
Blue Ocean Mariculture, the nation’s only offshore fish farm, is located just off the rocky Kona coast. It is helping provide a native Kanpachi species to meet this growing demand for seafood. “Among local species, Hawaiian Kanpachi was a clear choice for its high quality, versatility, and natural ability to hit sustainability benchmarks,” said Blue Ocean Mariculture farmer Tyler Korte.
The fish, marked by dark blue-green upper body and a lavender-tinted belly, are grown in floating pens that can be raised and lowered in the water column. The series of pens on the farm can grow around 900,000 pounds of fish a year.
October 15, 2019 — Combined commercial shellfish and seaweed aquaculture have significant potential to provide sustainable food and jobs while restoring marine ecosystems in Europe’s North Sea, the East China Sea, and Southern California.
A new study published in PLOS ONE finds that every inhabited continent has marine regions well-suited for the kind of shellfish and seaweed aquaculture that benefits both ecosystems and people by filtering polluted waters, providing habitat for commercially valuable species, and generating steady food and jobs. For shellfish, the potential was greatest in Europe, Oceania, and North America, while for seaweed, it was greatest in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South America.
October 15, 2019 — A scientist with an environmental group says she has found what she believes is the first recorded appearance of a potentially damaging species of crab in Maine waters.
Marissa McMahan of the Massachusetts-based group Manomet said she located the smooth mud crab this month on a research trip. The crabs are typically found south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They can pose problems for aquaculture businesses because they prey on young oysters — a species of high economic value that is grown in Maine.
McMahan collected the single specimen, and it’s still alive. She said it’s too early to know how the animal ended up in the New Meadows River in West Bath, but it’s important to monitor for more of them.
October 11, 2019 — Publix Super Markets, a Lakeland, Florida-based retailer with more than 1,200 locations in seven southern US states will begin, in 2020, to “reverse audit” some of its many seafood suppliers for their sustainability claims.
“We expect them to be in compliance and [to] find no errors,” Guy Pizzuti, the company’s seafood category manager, told Undercurrent News in a recent email exchange.
The reverse audit process will take an item code and lot number and work backwards through the system, he explained. In instances where aquaculture-related suppliers are found out of compliance, the company will meet with both the supplier and the Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) program, he said.
“Corrective actions would be submitted, audits would be increased, and [the] business would be reduced or eliminated [from the supplier list] pending any further issues. BAP will be asked to demonstrate findings to both Publix and the supplier.”
October 10, 2019 — Several scientists at the University of Rhode Island have been awarded grants to study oyster genetics, breeding and diseases as part of a region-wide effort to support the growing oyster aquaculture industry in the Northeast and assist efforts to restore wild oyster populations.
“Wild and farmed oysters are facing major threats from water quality and disease,” said Marta Gomez-Chiarri, a URI professor of animal science who has studied oyster diseases in Narragansett Bay for more than 20 years. “Even though local water quality has improved in Rhode Island, oysters across the United States face localized threats from pollution and eutrophication while at the same time dealing with multiple factors of global ocean change, like ocean acidification, as well as changes in salinity and dissolved oxygen. We are only beginning to understand the effects of these multiple stressors.”
Gomez-Chiarri — along with URI Assistant Professor Jonathan Puritz and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dina Proestou — have teamed with shellfish geneticists and breeders from 10 other East Coast universities to form the Eastern Oyster Genome Consortium to develop genetic tools to accelerate selective breeding efforts. The consortium, in a proposal led by Rutgers University, has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to accelerate the pace of identifying the genes responsible for desirable traits like disease resistance.
October 9, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Following the release of hidden camera video footage from a Cooke Hatchery in Bingham, Maine, Glenn Cooke issued a statement yesterday saying “I am very sorry that this has happened. We are thoroughly reviewing the footage and we are working closely with the Maine Department of Agriculture to review and ensure all our practices are within compliance. We are speaking with all our employees, and we will institute a rigorous re-training program at our Maine facility.”
His statement is an excellent response to an attack on aquaculture by a militant vegan organization called COK, Compassion over Killing. This group has 18 people on staff, and in 2017 reported income of around $1.3 million. 20% of their budget goes to undercover videos targeting farming, especially industrialized factory farming.
The organization was founded in 1995, and says its aim is to ‘End the abuse of farmed animals using a variety of strategies including vegetarian outreach, investigations, legal advocacy and publications.’
They are very much part of the movement that has led consumers to demand free-range eggs, minimum standards for space for chickens, and regulations against confinement for breeding sows.
They have won a number of concessions from major restaurant chains who have pledged to adopt higher animal welfare standards and offer vegan menu options.
You can see the video they secretly filmed at the Cooke facility on youtube. It is not getting a lot of hits, less than 5000 as of today.
It shows employees throwing discarded salmon, and in some cases whacking or stomping on fish. It also shows some deformities being culled from newly hatched embryos. The emotional tone of the video is that this is no way to treat fish, which Glenn Cooke has forthrightly acknowledged.
But for the salmon industry, and for seafood in general, this raises a larger question about consumer trends.
Farmed and wild seafood has been under continuous attack for both fishing and farming practices for nearly two generations. Some of the criticisms about overfishing were made largely by people like the MSC, who love and celebrate fish, with the avowed purpose of ending overfishing, or in the case of ASC, certifying farming, to responsibly increase seafood in the global diet.
But others were made by groups who want to halt all consumption of seafood. This is the category the Cooke critics fall into.
The problem the industry faces is that our customers, who have major retail and restaurant brands, are very sensitive to pressure groups and emotional appeals, regardless of whether they are based on facts or truth.
As a result, restaurant companies have made many changes in response to animal welfare demands and do not want to become targets of animal rights activists. Part of Compassion’s strategy is to pressure companies like Subway and others to adopt animal welfare standards and to offer vegan options. Even McDonald’s is subject to these pressures.
For us, complying with social responsibility has definitely increased costs. The entire infrastructure of certification and traceability has been added to the costs of fishery management in order to demonstrate our social compliance to our customers.
We have no choice but to continue to make our case for responsible harvesting and husbandry. This applies across the board, whether it is about lobsters being processed and cooked, wild salmon being crammed in RSW tanks, or farmed salmon raised in net pens. Anyone on a fishing boat knows that gutting and bleeding fish has a cost to the fish. But just as in nature, we accept that the pain we cause as a predator is no different to the fish than that caused by a seal or a tuna. We live in a world where there is a food chain.
We have to be responsible stewards of that food chain. Without the industry making this case, we are going to lose market share not just to vegetarians or people who will not eat fish under any circumstances but even among those who love fish.
As John Fiorello of Intrafish pointed out, there are two camps in the seafood industry regarding fake fish. One suggests that the idea of plant-based fish products will always be fringe, and that these products will not make headway with real fish consumers. I have tended to be in that camp. People eat fish because they like the taste. If they don’t eat fish, why would they buy fake fish?
The other camp is those sounding the alarm based on what happened to the dairy industry, where the milk aisle now has almond milk, soymilk, and other non-dairy products taking up space and market share. In the UK, around 15% of ‘dairy’ sales are non-dairy milk products. I now feel this is more of a true threat.
My kids are big fish eaters, brought up snacking on things like dried squid from a very young age. But their spouses are vegetarian, and they have certainly been attracted to the non-meat products like impossible beef.
What surprised me in our discussion of fake seafood was their willingness to consider it, because even though they love fish and shrimp, they also think there is an environmental cost, as they do with meat. So some of our best fish consumers may be tempted to try these fake products due to their overall view that fishing and aquaculture has an environmental cost that they can mitigate through their food choices.
This makes me think that the trend to hold not just fish but all foods to a higher standard is very real, and it means the entire seafood industry must continue to make the case for our responsibility and commitment to environmental and animal welfare.
Glenn Cooke’s statement is an excellent example of how to respond to this type of accusation. The company was blindsided by someone recording a secret video.
It does not matter if it was unfair, edited, or secretly taped—the response of the company was to own the mistakes shown on the video, and to promise to do better.
Glenn Cooke said he does not judge people’s dietary choices. If they don’t want to eat salmon they don’t have to, but regardless of their individual choice, Cooke is assuring all those who do eat farmed salmon that it is grown in a responsible, socially conscious way that respects animal welfare.
These are not issues that are going away.
This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It was reprinted with permission.
October 8, 2019 — Canada’s Conservatives have a few plans for their country’s fisheries and net-pen aquaculture industry that they would like to execute if successful in the Oct. 21 election, but none as dramatic as those promised by the incumbent Liberals.
The party led by Andrew Scheer, a challenger for prime minister, on Sunday unveiled the part of its platform that deals with fisheries and aquaculture issues, promising to, among other things, create advisory panels to consult with the federal government on stock-rebuilding efforts and “increase pathogen testing for open pen aquaculture sites”.
“Unfortunately, Justin Trudeau has failed to appreciate the knowledge of those closest to our fisheries,” the Conservatives said in a brief press release announcing their views and opposition to the positions staked out by the Liberal Party and its leader.
October 7, 2019 — As many as 15,000 adult Atlantic salmon will be put into the Penobscot River over the next three years, most of them after being raised in penstocks off the coast of Washington County. They are expected to create up to 56 million eggs as part of one of the most ambitious efforts yet at reversing the decades-long decimation of Maine’s wild salmon population.
The first 5,000 fish will be placed in the East Branch of the Penobscot River near the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument next fall as part of the Salmon for Maine’s Rivers program, which is funded by a $1.1 million federal grant and involves the state and federal governments, a Native American tribe and a New Brunswick-based company that raises salmon in pens off the Maine coast.
No one should expect the wild salmon population in the Penobscot and its tributaries to explode in the next three years, said Andrew Lively, a spokesman for Cooke Aquaculture USA, which raises salmon in farming pens off the Maine coast and is aiding in the restoration effort.
In addition to Cooke Aquaculture and Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, the other partners in the effort are the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Penobscot Indian Nation.
As the state’s sole commercial grower of sea-penned Atlantic salmon, Cooke’s involvement will vastly improve state revitalization efforts, said Dwayne Shaw, executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation.
October 7, 2019 — Soaring global demand for farmed Atlantic salmon has put many of the sector’s producers in a very strong financial position in recent years, but greater gains are there for the taking if they can overcome biological production barriers, according to an aquaculture analyst.
Christian Nordby, equity research analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux, informed the recent Aquaculture Innovation Europe conference in London that the salmon market continues to grow at a rapid rate with demand surpassing the supply, and said farmers will remain in good stead as long as they don’t take the “unlikely” approach of creating oversupply in the market.