Saving Seafood

Cooke Aquaculture One of Canada’s Best Managed Companies

March 8, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Cooke Aquaculture has reason to celebrate. For the 14th year in a row the family-owned and operated company has been named one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies.

“Serving our customers while focusing on environmental stewardship remains at the forefront of our sustainable growth strategy,” said Glenn Cooke, CEO of Cooke Aquaculture Inc. “Regardless of what country we operate in or sell to, we understand that our relationship with the environment is vital to our business and to producing top quality seafood. We view this as a significant component of our corporate social responsibility. There is always room for improvement – and we continue to try new techniques, implement new practices and test new equipment. We know the company depends on a healthy marine environment for growing and harvesting seafood.”

Applicants are evaluated by an independent judging panel that consists of representatives from program sponsors, as well as special guest judges. Winners of the Best Managed program award are “amongst the best-in-class of Canadian owned and managed companies with revenues over $15 million demonstrating strategy, capability and commitment to achieve sustainable growth.”

“Best Managed companies are elevating Canada’s place on the world-stage,” said Lorrie King, Partner, Deloitte Private and Co-Leader, Canada’s Best Managed Companies program. “By broadening their network, and thinking globally, the Best Managed program is honoring these winners for their achievements in Canadian business, and growing influence worldwide.”

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

MSC delivers a pinch to Canada’s snow crab fishery

March 6, 2019 — Canada’s snow crab fishery is looking ahead at another year without its Marine Stewardship Council certification, but the real risk may be at the hands of the ecolabel.

Last March, the MSC scrambled to suspend its certification of Eastern Canada’s snow crab fishery after a high rate of right whale entanglements and deaths traced back to the fishery in 2017.

What happened next was a little surprising — the lack of a label didn’t have much effect on prices. Despite a buoyant market, Canada’s fixed-gear fleets as well as federal and provincial managers set about on an international mission to work with their neighbors to the south who have long been fighting the good fight to reduce right whale interactions.

Maine’s lobster fishery has been at the forefront of gear innovations to coexist with right whale migratory and feeding patterns. Ten years ago, the fleet made an expensive conversion to sinking groundline instead of using floating rope between pots on a trawl. But the population of an estimated 411 right whales has been expanding its territory into Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, where regulations haven’t been as robust.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Clearwater changes lobster fishing practices, asks for early MSC audit

February 25, 2019 –Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based Clearwater Seafoods has changed its controversial lobster fishing practices, which resulted in a fine from the Canadian government and a downgrade in the Ocean Wise recommendation for its lobster fishery.

Clearwater, via CS ManPar, was convicted of repeatedly storing 3,800 lobster traps on the ocean floor more than the limit of 72 hours. The offenses took place in Lobster Fishing Area 41, which is a unique territory exclusively licensed to Clearwater. Area 41 runs 80 kilometers from the shore out to the 200-mile limit from Georges Bank to the Laurentian Channel.  Clearwater paid a CAD 30,000 (USD 22,770, EUR 20,075) fine in relation to its guilty plea.

On 15 February, the CBC reported the fishery was downgraded in the recommendations made by Ocean Wise for sustainable fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Top Canadian official considers moving salmon aquaculture sites for sake of wild fish

February 22, 2019 — Salmon aquaculture should be moved out of sensitive native salmon migratory habitats out of concern for the impact it may have on wild fish, according to Canadian Minister for Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard Jonathan Wilkinson.

In recent public comments, Wilkinson expressed alarm related to wild salmon stock declines.

“We need to move to area-based management, which means we are actually thinking about sitting these facilities in areas where you don’t run into issues around migration pathways, areas where communities are actually interested in the economic development that comes through [fish farming] rather than in areas where those communities are very much opposed,” Wilkinson told The Globe and Mail.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Multinational salmon research trip underway in Gulf of Alaska

February 20, 2019 — The International Gulf of Alaska Expedition 2019 is underway, according to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, with the chartered 62-meter Russian research vessel Professor Kaganovskiy having departed Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on Saturday, 16 February.

The expedition is setting out to study salmon while they are at sea, rather than when they journey back to rivers and streams to spawn at the end of their lives. The study is the first comprehensive winter study of Pacific salmon in the Gulf of Alaska. According to a press released provided by the NPAFC, the study will visit 72 stations in the Gulf and will return to Vancouver next month on 18 March.

Researchers hope the study will provide information and understanding of the abundance, condition, country of origin, and location of stocks from Pacific salmon-producing countries.

The NPAFC is comprised of the five Pacific salmon producing countries: Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America. The expedition is comprised of 21 researchers from those five countries.

The project, expected to cost USD 1.3 million (EUR 1.2 million), has received funding from multiple sources including government, industry, NGO, and private contributions.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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

Seafood mislabeling common across North American supply chains, study finds

February 7, 2019 — New research completed at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has found mislabeing is prevalent throughout the supply chain.

Researchers found that 32 percent of fish overall were mislabeled. The highest rate of mislabeling was at retailers (38.1 percent), followed by processing plants (27.3 percent) and importers (17.6 percent).

Conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the study was published in the journal Food Research International.

“We’ve been doing seafood fraud studies for a decade,” Robert Hanner, the lead author of the study and associate professor at the University of Guelph, said in a press release. “We know there are problems. But this is the first study to move beyond that and look at where the problems are happening throughout the food supply chain.”

“If you can see the name is changing across the supply system, that’s a red flag,” Hanner told SeafoodSource.

Hanner said he could not definitively prove whether some of the mislabeling is intentional, but found a “pretty significant price differential” in certain substitutions, such as farmed salmon labeled as wild salmon, tilapia labeled as red snapper, and basa labeled as haddock and cod.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New drive to reduce lobster fishing gear to help rare whale

February 7, 2019 — Interstate fishing managers are starting the process of trying to reduce the amount of lobster fishing gear off the East Coast in an attempt to help save a declining species of rare whale.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission announced on Wednesday that it would consider options designed to reduce vertical lobster fishing lines in the water by as much as 40 percent. The lines pose a threat to the North Atlantic right whale, which is one of the rarest marine mammals in the world.

The commission said it would try to reduce the amount of gear with a combination of trap limits, seasonal closures, changes to gear configuration and other methods. The rules are under development and it will take months before they come up for public hearings.

The commission said in a statement that the drive to reduce lines in the water is “in response to concerns about the North Atlantic right whale population and the potential impacts of whale conservation measures on the conduct of the lobster fishery.” But some lobster fishermen said they need more details about the effort before they will get on board.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

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

 

Canadian judge says young salmon must be tested before placed in net pens

February 6, 2019 — A Canadian federal judge, in Vancouver, British Columbia, has ruled that fish farms must test their young salmon for contagious viruses before transferring them into open-net pens, StarMetro, a Vancouver newspaper, reports.

In her 199-page decision issued Monday, justice Cecily Strickland gave the Canadian Department of Fisheries an Oceans (DFO) four months to develop a new policy that considers the threat piscine reovirus (PRV) poses to wild salmon and to comply with the country’s preferred precautionary approach.

The ruling addresses two cases brought separately against DFO, the minister of fisheries and oceans and also Marine Harvest. One lawsuit was filed by biologist Alexandra Morton and the other by the ‘Namgis First Nation.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News