Saving Seafood

JAPAN SET TO REACH ITS PACIFIC BLUEFIN TUNA FISHING QUOTA TWO MONTHS EARLY

April 26, 2017 — Japan is on track to meet its annual Pacific bluefin tuna quota two months early, frustrating activists trying to protect the species from overfishing.

Japan, where bluefin tuna is considered a delicacy, consumes significantly more of the fish than any other country. But its quota for the year ending in June 2017 is likely to be reached as early as this month.

Despite the country’s aggressive approach to fishing, bluefin tuna isn’t cheap. At Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish auction, a 467-pound bluefin tuna sold for 74.7m yen ($700,000) in January.

The seemingly insatiable appetite for the tuna is causing concern among conservationists. Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts, said Japan is irresponsible in its approach to bluefin tuna fishing, The Guardian reported.

“Just a few years of overfishing will leave Pacific bluefin tuna vulnerable to devastating population reductions. That will threaten not just the fish but also the fishermen who depend on them,” Nickson told The Guardian on Monday.

Overfishing has already caused the Pacific bluefin population to fall by 97 percent.

In 2015, Japan and other members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission agreed to reduce their catch of immature bluefin.

Read the full story at Newsweek

Fish fight: Scientists battle over the true harm of mercury in tuna

March 6, 2017 — Molly Lutcavage thought she had a deal. For more than a decade, she had collected hundreds of tissue samples from bluefin tuna in hopes of settling a question that has long vexed pregnant women and the parents of young children: Should they eat the big fish, a beneficial source of protein and fatty acids? Or did mercury contamination make them too dangerous?

Lutcavage hoped to test the theory that selenium, a key chemical found in tuna, prevents mercury from being transferred to the people who eat them and that, therefore, the fish are safe to eat. So she gave her hard-won samples to a colleague, Nick Fisher, to analyze in his lab.

But Fisher, it seems, didn’t have as much interest in Lutcavage’s selenium theory. Two years later, he produced a study focused almost exclusively on his own hypothesis: that lowering pollution emissions from power plants reduced the levels of mercury in bluefin tuna.

Lutcavage was furious, and the two scientists went to war.

“We kept fighting on this,” said Lutcavage, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “I feel that the paper didn’t advance the issue whatsoever on this divide between scientists over methylmercury. I can’t tell you how much [my colleagues and I] agonized over taking our names off the paper.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Eel farming coming closer to reality in Japan

March 6, 2017 — At the 14th annual Seafood Show Osaka, held 22 to 23 February at ATC Hall, the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency operated a booth highlighting its work in closed-cycle breeding of Japanese eel.

Osamu Tamaru, a researcher at the research Center for Fisheries System Engineering, of the National Research Institute of Fisheries Engineering, said that his group has achieved survival rates of 10 percent, but estimates that this figure needs to be doubled to be commercially viable. Asked what the difficult point was, he said, “The feed, the tank, everything…”

That is to say, it often hard to discover the cause of mortality. However, as commercialization of closed-cycle breeding of bluefin tuna is advancing in Japan, there is hope that pressure on threatened eel populations can be relieved through the research.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Violations of soft bluefin tuna cap may lead to TAC limit

February 6, 2017 — Japan’s Fishery Agency is likely to set a total allowable catch (TAC) for bluefin tuna, after a survey found problems with the current voluntary cap.

In January 2015, to show it was not ignoring bluefin tuna overfishing, the Japan Fisheries Agency (JFA), introduced voluntary limits on bluefin harvests in domestic waters. A system of alerts was included an “advisory” when catches hit 70 percent of the limit, an “alert” at 80 percent, a “special alert” at 90 percent, and a request for voluntary suspension of fishing at 95 percent.

In July 2016, JFA further changed its system. Previously, there were six bluefin management blocs – northern and western Sea of Japan, northern and southern Pacific Ocean, the Seto Inland Sea and the sea west of Kyushu – each with its own voluntary catch limit. In the new system, quotas were set by prefecture, with the warnings issued on a prefectural basis.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

National Fisheries Institute Sues NOAA Over New Seafood Fraud Import Rules Claiming Regulatory Overreach

January 10, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The National Fisheries Institute, six major seafood companies, and two West Coast Associations sued the Obama Administration over the final US Rule regarding seafood import regulations in federal district court on Friday, Jan 6th.

The six company plaintiffs are Alfa International, Fortune Fish & Gourmet, Handy Seafood, Pacific Seafood Group, Trident Seafoods, and Libby Hill Seafood Restaurants.  Also the Pacific Seafood Processors Association and the West Coast Seafood Processors Association joined the lawsuit.

The Final rule was announced on December 9, 2016, and was the culmination of the regulations that were developed at the urging of the Presidential Task Force on Seafood Fraud.

The suit is unusual in that NFI was the leading advocate for action against seafood fraud over the past decade. However, NFI claims that the new rule is not based on a risk assessment with data about seafood fraud, but without evidence will impose enormous and unjustified costs on the American public and the seafood industry.

In a statement, John Connelly, President of NFI, said “The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and our members have led industry efforts to combat both Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing and seafood fraud for the last decade.  NFI has supported most U.S. government efforts to eliminate illegal fishing and urged the government to do more to ensure accurate labeling.”

NFI began publicizing and working against seafood fraud more than a decade ago, focusing on the lack of any enforcement over seafood labeling regarding net weights and product integrity.  At the time, US buyers were being flooded with offers for seafood with glaze (protective ice coatings) of 20% to 40% of the total weight of the product, leading to a hugely misleading price per lb.

Also NFI worked with the FDA and NOAA on better enforcement of seafood labeling, including attacking mislabeling of species in commerce.  As a result of this pressure a number of states increased their enforcement of state labeling requirements on seafood.

Finally, NFI aggressively supported NOAA action against IUU fishing, including traceability requirements on species like toothfish, the signing of the UN Port State Measures Agreement, and the authority of NOAA to blacklist products from IUU vessels from entering the United States.

So why, after a decade of work, would NFI feel compelled to sue over the implementation of the Presidential Task Force rule, through NOAA, to combat seafood fraud.

The simple answer is that the Task Force refused to recognize the major ways in which fraud was already reduced, and would not accept a data driven approach to defining risk.

Instead, the Task force defined 13 species ‘at risk’ that were the target of enforcement under the act, without any verifiable documentation that seafood fraud was a significant problem with these species.

Connelly says in the rush to publish the rule, NOAA and the Obama administration refused to disclose the data used to craft it, and grossly miscalculated compliance costs.  The Office of Management and Budget made a back of the envelope calculation under the Paperwork Reduction Act that the cost to the industry would be $6.475 million, based on about 30 minutes additional work on each container.

The industry thinks costs could exceed $100 million per year, with a total economic impact on the seafood sector of as much as $1 billion.

The reason is that there is a total mismatch between the requirements in the rule and the way in which seafood is actually harvested, collected, processed and imported.

Connelly says NOAA “grossly underestimates the cost and impact of the regulation on those companies doing the right thing, and will not solve the problem. NOAA’s fundamental shift from targeted investigation of the suspected guilty to arbitrary and massive data collection from the innocent creates an enormous economic burden on American companies.”

One of the most glaring examples of the overreach is that in the Task Force, there was wide praise for the EU rule on traceability that requires exporters to the EU to certify the vessels from which the products originated.  But at the same time, the EU provides a wide exemption to countries that have sufficient internal fisheries management controls.  So for example, neither Norway, Iceland, the US, or New Zealand, for example, are subject to this requirement.

But NOAA’s rule makes no exemptions for the lower risk of fraud from countries where enforcement and management is at the highest standard.

The rule would apply to ten species of fish and the five species of tuna, or 15 commodities altogether.  The agency has deferred rule-making on shrimp and abalone.

The ten species are:  Atlantic Cod, Pacific Cod, Blue Crab, Red King Crab, Mahi Mahi, Grouper, Red Snapper, Sea Cucumber, Shark, and Swordfish.

In addition, Albacore, Bigeye, Skipjack, Yellowfin and Bluefin tuna are included.

The complaint filed by NFI says:

“According to the Government’s own studies, most mislabeling occurs after seafood has entered the United States and even though many U.S. importers subject imported seafood to DNA testing to preclude fraud at the border. The Rule would accomplish its goals by requiring that fish imported into the United States be traceable to the boat or to a single collection point, time, and place that the fish was caught, and that this information be entered into a master computer program operated by the Government.

“The Rule, were it to go into effect, would remake the way in which seafood is caught, processed and imported around the World. These changes to food processing practices in every nation would reduce exports into the United States and would dramatically increase the cost of catching, processing and importing seafood. Fishermen, many of whom are subsistence workers operating in Third World Nations, would have to keep track of each fish harvested, as would the brokers who purchase the seafood from the fisherman, and processors who handle catches from hundreds of fishermen would have to be able to trace each piece of fish to a specific vessel and specific fishing events or to a single collection point. This would require significant changes in the way fish are processed overseas. It would also affect the way in which fish are processed in the United States, because these requirements would also apply to all domestically caught or farmed seafood covered by the Rule that are shipped outside the U.S. for processing and re-imported back into the United States.”

If implemented the rule will drive up seafood prices and reduce consumption, the exact opposite of the advice to consumers from government health agencies.

Alfa Seafood says “The Rule would require processors in Ecuador and Peru, where most of Alfa’s seafood originates, to change the way in which fishermen or brokers document their catches and the way in which processors actually process these catches, so that fish imported into the United States can be traced to a particular fishing event or to a single collection point. This will add hundreds of thousands of dollars to Alfa Seafood’s cost of importing fish, assuming that the processors abroad are willing to modify the way in which they process fish.

Handy says they already use DNA testing for all their imports to ensure accuracy.  “If Handy’s processors modified their processing methods to segregate product by Aggregate Harvest Report and gathered the information required by the Rule, both the price of Blue Crab to Handy, as well as at retail, would increase by approximately 28%. The price of Grouper would increase by about 8% with a similar impact at retail.

Libby Hill restaurants says  “The Department’s Rule would force Libby Hill to charge more for many popular seafood menu items, thus hurting its business and driving customers to less healthy fast-food options. Further, because of the very real possibility that certain species under the Rule may become less available in the U.S. market, Libby Hill may have to contend with supply interruption that will make it more difficult to attract return customers expecting to be able to rely on the same menu from visit to visit. Because return customers are essential in the fast-casual category of the restaurant industry, such uncertainty could have a debilitating impact on Libby Hill’s business.”

The rule would require the following to be entered for each seafood entry subject to the regulations:

a. Name of harvesting vessel(s).
b. Flag state of harvesting vessel(s).
c. Evidence of authorization of harvesting vessel(s).
d. Unique vessel identification(s) of harvesting vessel(s) (if available).
e. Type(s) of fishing gear used in harvesting product.
f. Names(s) of farm or aquaculture facility.
g. Species of fish (scientific name, acceptable name, AND an AFSIS number.
h. Product description(s).
i. Name of product(s).
j. Quantity and/or weight of the product(s).
k. Area(s) of wild-capture or aquaculture location.
l. Date(s) of harvest or trip(s).
m. Location of aquaculture facility [Not relevant to wild caught seafood].
n. Point(s) of first landing.
o. Date(s) of first landing.
p. Name of entity(ies) (processor, dealer, vessel) of first landing.
q. NMFS-issued IFTP number.
It would be a violation of Magnuson-Stevens to import any at-risk seafood without a valid IFTP number.

The rule would also reach into the US domestic industry, where currently no such reporting requirements exist, because any seafood exported from the US overseas for processing and re-imported into the US would be subject to the rule.  So for example, this would change the entire reporting system for cod and salmon in Alaska.

The suit is being filed now, although the actual date of implementation is January, 2018.

The arguments are there are multiple ways in which this rule has violated the administrative procedures act:

  1. There was no public sharing of the data on which the agency identified species at risk.
  2. There is not a sufficient agency record to support the rule.
  3. The final rule was rushed into being by a junior official, the Assistant Administrator For Fisheries, who is an employee of the Dept. of Commerce, not an ‘officer.’  There was no formal designation of authority to make the rule, and such designations are required to only go to “officers of the united states ” of the executive branch.
  4. The agency does not have the legislative authority to ‘regulate seafood fraud’.  That authority was given to the FDA, not NOAA.
  5. The agency failed to do a regulatory flexibility analysis to see if the desired results could be achieved in a less costly and burdensome manner.
  6. The agency failed to do an adequate cost benefits analysis.

The plaintiffs ask for a ruling that enjoins the effective date of the rule until the agency remedies the deficiencies that have been cited.

The plaintiffs ask the rule be declared invalid.

The plaintiffs ask the court to declare the Agency failed to do the required analysis under the regulatory flexibility act, and to enjoin the rule until such time as that is done.

The suit was filed on Friday in the federal district court in Washington, DC.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Bluefin Tuna Sells for $632,000 at Tsukiji’s New Year Auction

January 5, 2016 — TOKYO — A sushi chain boss paid $632,000 for a 466-pound bluefin tuna at auction on Thursday.

The 74.2 million yen winning bid for the prized but imperiled species was the second highest ever after a record 155.4 million yen bid in 2013 at the annual New Year auction at the famed Tsukiji market.

Kiyomura Corp. owner Kiyoshi Kimura posed, beaming, with the gleaming, man-sized fish, which was caught off the coast of northern Japan’s Aomori prefecture.

His company, which runs the Sushi Zanmai chain, often wins the auction. This year’s purchase works out to $1,356 per pound.

Japanese are the biggest consumers of the torpedo-shaped bluefin tuna, and surging consumption of sushi has boosted demand, as experts warn the species could go extinct.

A report by the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean last year put the population of bluefin tuna at 2.6 percent of its “unfished” size, down from an earlier assessment of 4.2 percent.

Read the full story at NBC News

BP oil disaster might have hurt Bluefin tuna rebuilding, study says

October 3, 2016 — The release of 4 million barrels of oil in the 87 days following the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred just as Atlantic bluefin tuna had returned to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, and a small but significant percentage of the adult fish and their eggs and larvae were likely exposed to the toxic oil, according to a new study announced Friday (Sept. 30).

The study led by scientists with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Stanford University concludes that the oil cumulatively covered 3.1 million square miles where fish, eggs and larvae were present in the weeks immediately after the accident.

When combined with other stressors affecting this species of tuna — including overfishing and warming seas caused by climate change — the addition of the oil’s impact “may result in significant effects for a population that shows little evidence of rebuilding,” the study published in Nature: Scientific Reports concluded.

The study, funded by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the BP spill required under the federal Oil Pollution Act, made use of computer modeling based on information gathered from 16 years of electronic tagging of 66 tuna that kept track of individual fish locations, temperatures and oscillating diving patterns. The information was compared with satellite observations of the breadth of oil from the spill on the surface of the Gulf to estimate the potential impacts.

Barbara Block, a Stanford professor of marine scientists and expert on Atlantic bluefin tuna, said in a Friday interview that the tagging program took advantage of earlier tagging information that indicated many of the Gulf-spawning tuna migrate back and forth from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers captured adult tuna in Canada and installed the tags. When the fish returned to Canada a year later, the tags dropped off and were collected, and their data was added to a long-term database on fish movements.

The information collected from the tags helped the scientists confirm their theories about the spawning habits of the huge fish, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds at maturity, and begin reproducing about 10 years after birth.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune

The Majority of the Tuna Catch Comes from Abundant Stocks, But Overfishing of Some Stocks Continues

September 22, 2016 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation:

The global commercial catch of tuna — a valuable, natural protein food source — reached 5 million tons in 2014, an increase from 4.6 million in 2013, according to the ISSF Tuna Stock Status Update – 2016 (Status of the World Fisheries for Tuna) report just published by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF). The report can be downloaded from the ISSF Status of the Stocks page. Tuna accounts for approximately 6% of the world’s 81.5-million-ton marine catch.

The skipjack tuna species accounted for 57% of the tuna catch, followed by yellowfin (27%), bigeye (9%), albacore (6%) and bluefin (1%). Purse seine vessels harvested 64% of the tuna, followed by longline methods (12%), pole-and-line (9%), gillnets (4%) and miscellaneous fishing gear types (11%).

The ISSF report indicates that 77% of the total volume of tuna catch worldwide in 2014 was from stocks at a “healthy level of abundance.” Previous Tuna Stock Status Update reports showed 78% of tuna catch from healthy stocks in 2014 (from a preliminary report in February 2016), 87% in 2013, 86% in 2012, and 94% in 2011.

From a perspective of tuna stocks, 44% of tuna stocks globally are at a healthy level of abundance, and 39% are overfished. Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) bigeye tuna, for example, continues to be slightly overfished and was downgraded from a Green (healthy abundance) rating to a Yellow (intermediate) rating since the previous February 2016 report. Other overfished stocks were Western Pacific Ocean (WPO) bigeye, Atlantic Ocean (AO) bigeye, and Indian Ocean (IO) yellowfin.

Tuna Stock Status Update also reports on tuna management measures recently enacted by tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). Significant newly adopted measures covered in the report include the adoption by the IOTC (Indian Ocean Tuna Commission) of harvest control rules (HCRs) for skipjack tuna, as well as a plan for rebuilding the overfished IO yellowfin stock. The IATTC (Inter-American-Tropical-Tuna-Commission, in the EPO) also adopted an HCR for tropical tuna species.

“While 77% of the world’s tuna catch comes from healthy stocks, it is important to remember that there are four stocks — representing 13% of the catch — that are being overfished,” explains Dr. Victor Restrepo, ISSF Vice President, Science. “Even though there are management measures in place for them, these measures are proving to be insufficient to end overfishing — and a greater effort is required.”

ABTA: Atlantic Marine Monument Says U.S. Doesn’t Support Its Own Sustainable Fisheries

September 15, 2016 — The following was released today by the American Bluefin Tuna Association, in response to President Obama’s decision to designate a new Marine National Monument off the coast of Cape Cod:

The American Bluefin Tuna Association (ABTA) represents 27,000 commercial, charter/headboat and recreational fishermen who fish for Bigeye, Yellowfin, Bluefin and Albacore tuna. ABTA is deeply saddened to hear of President Obama’s decision today to designate a marine monument in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts. All of the aforementioned fish species are found and fished by our fishermen within the newly designated monument.

ABTA’s fishermen have the distinction of employing the most sustainable fishing methods of any oceanic fishery in the U.S.  ABTA’s commercial fishery is the U.S.’s only artisanal fishery, as defined by the United Nations Fish and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) and by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). ABTA fishermen catch one fish at a time, using handgear, with negligible bycatch and its commercial fishermen have the highest record of compliance with fishery regulations of any such fishery in the world.

ABTA’s takeaway from the Administration’s decision to designate an Atlantic marine monument:

  1. This decision sends a message to the world that the U.S. does not support its own sustainable fisheries; that the U.S. is more interested in promoting the concept of marine protected areas internationally than it is in protecting its own fishing economy and food supply. Implicit in this action is the message that the U.S. does not trust the body of law that we have created and the democratic institutions we have empowered to enact that law in the stewardship of our oceans.
  1. This decision will most definitely result in the U.S. having greater difficulty in utilizing its fishing quota, as set by ICCAT, for certain species fished in this region; in particular, swordfish. There is a very real threat that the U.S. will have to surrender some or all of its unutilized swordfish quota to another ICCAT-member country who may not maintain sustainable fishing practices. This decision will also result in an unnecessary increase in fish imports.
  1. The proposed prohibition on all forms of fishing in the monument is simply punitive and completely unnecessary. The Canyons and Seamounts region is in very deep water, from 1,500 to 15,000 ft in depth. Much of the fishing in this region uses surface and sub-surface fishing gear, sustainable fishing methods in which the fishing gear never comes into contact with deep sea coral found on the sea floor. Prohibiting these forms of fishing is tantamount to prohibiting commercial airline flights over Yellowstone National Park for fear that trees will be knocked down.
  1. The notion that creating a marine monument will contribute to the sustainability of the marine species found there is a myth. All of the marine species harvested in this region are from healthy fish stocks and are sustainably managed by NOAA. Most of the marine species that are harvested in this region are highly migratory, highly fecund pelagic species whose habitat is the entirety of the tropical, sub-tropical and temperate regions of the Atlantic Ocean and its adjacent seas. These species do not preferentially inhabit this region for long periods of time. They swim in and out of the region constantly during certain months and migrate to the east Atlantic, West Africa or the east coast of South America regularly.

A negative message

Abandoning the open, democratic and thoroughly science-based process by which we undertake to establish protections for important marine attributes in favor of a monument established by executive fiat sends a negative message to those U.S. fishermen and shoreside industries who would needlessly pay for this monument by loss of income. It also sends a negative message to the majority of our fishermen who are committed to adhering to the processes and respect for regulation promulgated in accordance with the Magnuson Stevens Act. The decision is a clear denouncement of the democratic institutions that are charged with safeguarding the public interest as it pertains to oceanic marine matters. U.S. fisheries, in particular those fisheries that are found in the proposed area, are already the most highly regulated such fisheries in the world.

Absent strong, verifiable scientific support for such an action, creating a marine monument based upon vague and unsupported concerns “for the future”, can be likened to such expressions as “better safe than sorry” or “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. These are fairly vacuous guidelines for safeguarding the environment and for public policy in general.

David Schalit, Vice President

American Bluefin Tuna Association

MASSACHUSETTS: Bluefin tuna seized for size violation donated to homeless shelter

September 14, 2016 — A bluefin tuna was donated to a local homeless shelter after it was seized for a size violation during a routine inspection on Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, the Massachusetts Environmental Police said in a Facebook post.

Police were inspecting a fleet of more than 100 tuna ships on the sanctuary Tuesday when officers located a vessel with a 55-inch bluefin tuna onboard, according to police.

The fish was about 18 inches under the required size limit for the ship’s fishing permit category, police said. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked that officers seize the tuna because of the violation.

Police transported the fish to Boston, where a NOAA officer took possession of it, according to police. The tuna was then donated to a homeless shelter in the area.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe