Saving Seafood

Seafood industry leaders reviewing new USMCA trade pact

October 2, 2018 — The day after U.S. and Canadian government officials announced a deal on a new trade agreement, seafood industry leaders from the neighboring countries expressed optimism about the accord, albeit with some uncertainty as they still pore over the details.

Canada’s participation, which was confirmed late in the evening of 30 September, means a new deal will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, the accord governing trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the past two decades. In late August, Mexican and American officials had reached a tentative agreement on a new deal.

“Today, Canada and the United States reached an agreement, alongside Mexico, on a new, modernized trade agreement for the 21st Century: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA),” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a joint statement with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland. “USMCA will give our workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses a high-standard trade agreement that will result in freer markets, fairer trade, and robust economic growth in our region.  It will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs, and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home.”

Officials from the Fisheries Council of Canada received a high-level briefing on the USMCA on 1 October.

“We look forward to this apparent deal to help heal our trading relationship with the US and lead to more trading opportunities in the future,” said Paul Lansbergen, council president, in an email to SeafoodSource.

The desire to revamp NAFTA has been one leg of a global trade strategy by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. That strategy has also included numerous proposals to raise tariffs on Chinese imports, including numerous seafood products, as the president seeks to reduce the trade deficit.

The National Fisheries Institute has lobbied heavily in recent months that tariffs on seafood products hurt U.S. jobs as the country imports more than 90 percent of the seafood Americans consume.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

We can help you fight fish fraud – for starters, buy local

October 1, 2018 — The path most of the seafood imported into the United States travels from its source to the consumer is long in terms of distance, complicated in terms of the number of middlemen and women and transformative because whole fish become fillets, shrimp become scampi and crab become cakes.

Seafood fraud happens when somewhere along the way, the fish, shellfish and their parts get intentionally mislabeled, swapped out or plumped up for the seller’s gain. In the massive international seafood market – some estimates value it at $130 billion – seafood fraud happens a lot.

In 2013, the seafood industry watchdog group Oceana found that one-third of the 1,200 seafood samples it tested were mislabeled.

In 2015, an INTERPOL–Europol investigation reported that fish traded internationally was the third highest risk category of foods (alcohol and red meat beat it out) with the potential for fraud. And Oceana’s most recent study in Canada last year revealed that 44 percent of 382 seafood samples tested from five Canadian cities did not meet the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s labeling requirements.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

NOAA Memorandum on Whales Lays Basis for Much Stricter Regulation of Trap Fisheries

September 28, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A recent technical memorandum from NOAA on right whale recovery in 2018 could push the agency to require new limits on trap fishing technology.

In short, the memorandum says that the measures adopted to reduce the number of rope lines in the water have backfired.

Although the number of lines to individual buoys have been reduced, the remaining trawl strings have more traps and stronger rope.

The result is that whales are suffering more for entanglements than they were before the new rules were introduced.

The memorandum says that “stronger rope contributed to an increase in the severity of entanglements.”

“Knowlton et al.(2012) showed that nearly 85% of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once, 59% at least twice, and 26% of the regularly seen animals are entangled annually. These findings represent a continued increase in the percentage of whales encountering and entangling in gear, which grew from to 61.5% in 1995 (Hamilton et al. 1998), to 75.6% in 2002.”

“Rough estimates are that approximately 622,000 vertical lines are deployed from fishing gear in U.S. waters from Georgia to the Gulf of Maine. Notably until spring of 2018, very few protections for right whales were in place in Canadian waters. In comparison to recent decades, more right whales now spend significantly more time in more northern waters and swim through extensive pot fishery zones around Nova Scotia and into the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence (Daoust et al. 2018).

Taken together, these fisheries exceed an estimated 1 million vertical lines (100,000 km) deployed throughout right whale migratory routes, calving, and foraging areas.”

“Each vertical line out there has some potential to cause an entanglement. With a 26% annual entanglement rate in a population of just over 400 animals, this translates to about 100 entanglements per year.”

The problem is that sub-lethal entanglements can impact the reproductive success of the population.

“While serious injuries represent 1.2% of all entanglements, there are often sublethal costs to less severe entanglements. Should an entanglement occur but the female somehow disentangles and recovers, it still has the potential to reset the clock for this “capital” breeder. She now has to spend several years acquiring sufficient resources to get pregnant and carry a calf to term, the probability of a subsequent entanglement is fairly high, and this will create a negative feedback loop over time, where the interval between calving becomes longer. This is certainly a contributing factor in the longer calving interval for females, which has now grown from 4 to 10 years.

The implication of this technical report is that substantial reductions in entanglements will be necessary if the long term decline in the population is to be reversed, and under the endangered species act, NOAA will be required to evaluate any actions that increase harm or fail to mitigate harm to the right whale population.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

 

US companies accused of dumping lobster in Asia

September 28, 2018 — An executive with a Chinese seafood conglomerate has accused U.S. lobster companies of dumping their products on other Asian markets at steep discounts.

Jack Liu, the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based, North American president of Chinese seafood company Zoneco, which owns the lobster-focused Capital Seafood, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company the dumping was a response to newly-imposed tariffs closing off the Chinese market to U.S. exporters.

“They are going to dump those amounts of lobster into other parts of the world,” Liu said. “We have seen that.”

Liu said U.S. lobster – often labeled as Boston lobster – is selling for at least a USD 1.00 (EUR 0.85) per pound less in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan, putting pressure on Canadian lobster exporters.

“I believe Canadian lobster, as we speak, is somewhat losing market share in those Asian markets due to the lower price from the U.S.,” he said.

While Canadian exports to China have risen in the short-term, Liu said he is not comfortable with the situation.

“Tariffs have never been a good thing. Any sort of tariffs are going to distort and disrupt the markets and we’ve already seen that,” Liu said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Unprecedented experiment with Canadian military provides new insights on right whales

September 27, 2018 — North Atlantic right whales began making headlines the summer of 2017 when a record number of the whales died after getting tangled in fishing gear or hit by ships.

Before the die-off and since, Dalhousie researchers have collaborated with a number of partners in Canada and the United States to gain as much insight as possible on the endangered species. After a significant number of the whales began deserting other habitats off the coast of Nova Scotia in favour of a location in the southern region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, experts recognized the lack of scientific evidence required to best inform marine management measures in this newly identified habitat.

That’s why members of the Whale Habitat and Listening Experiment (WHaLE) team in Dalhousie’s Department of Oceanography have been working tirelessly to fill the knowledge gap. In one experiment this past summer, they helped bring together a number of federal agencies in an effort to collect the most multi-faceted dataset on the North Atlantic right whales yet.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Fishing regulators approve measures to conserve Atlantic herring

September 26, 2018 — New England fishing regulators on Tuesday approved two measures aimed at conserving the dwindling Atlantic herring stock.

The New England Fishery Management Council approved a rule that “establishes a long-term policy that will guide the council in setting catch limits into the future” at a meeting in Plymouth.

Such an option will result in more herring being left in the water “to serve as forage and be part of the overall ecosystem,” according to the council. Under that proposal, catch limits can be adjusted based on new information.

Additionally, the council approved a measure aimed at preventing midwater trawlers from fishing too close to shore for herring. The boats are banned from fishing within 12 miles of shore, an area stretching from the Canadian border through Rhode Island, that includes areas east and southeast of Cape Cod, according to the council.

Recent surveys have found that the Atlantic herring population in the Gulf of Maine is at risk of collapse. The fish provide a crucial source of food to species that include cod, striped bass, and humpback whales.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

Tentative deal reached on renewal of Pacific Salmon Treaty

September 21, 2018 — American and Canadian negotiators have successfully brokered a deal to renew the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The compromise agreement has now been sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C., to be approved and ratified by their respective national governments.

The Pacific Salmon Treaty is renegotiated every decade between the two countries to govern salmon catch, research, and enhancement in Alaska, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The treaty expires on its own terms on Dec. 31, 2018. The current negotiations have taken place over the course of two years by two teams seeking to renew the treaty for the next decade, from Jan. 1, 2019, through Dec. 31, 2028.

Aspects of the expiring plan will carry over. Among them, the use of an abundance-based management regime for king salmon, as opposed to hard caps. This should result in harvest rate indices and quotas that will rise and fall depending on abundance of the fish.

Pacific Salmon Commission Executive Secretary John Field praised the negotiators for working out amendments to the treaty, including harvest rate reductions of king salmon when it comes to mixed-stock ocean fisheries.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Salmon preservation plan to impact Alaska and Canada over 10-year span

September 19, 2018 — PORTLAND, Ore. — Alaska and Canada would reduce their catch of endangered Chinook salmon in years with poor fishery returns under an agreement that spells out the next decade of cooperation between the U.S. and Canada to keep various salmon species afloat in Pacific waters.

Members of the Pacific Salmon Commission recommended a new 10-year conservation plan to the U.S. and Canadian governments Monday that would run through 2028 and involve Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and a number of tribal nations in both countries.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at KTUU

 

Alaska salmon negotiators accept fewer ‘treaty fish’

September 18, 2018 — Alaska will see a reduced salmon allocation under a proposed salmon treaty deal with Canada. That’s according to a proposed 10-year extension of the Pacific Salmon Treaty.

For more than 30 years, the Pacific Salmon Commission has allocated salmon stocks shared between the U.S. and Canada. It’s re-negotiated every 10 years, and the latest version expires at the end of 2018.

Formal talks finished in mid-August. Now, the numbers are out: Alaska will accept a 7.5 percent reduction, compared to 12.5 percent for Canada. In Washington and Oregon, the cuts range from 5 to 15 percent.

“There’s some that would consider it to be winners and losers and I think in this case, I think everybody was equally disappointed,” said Alaska Fish and Game Deputy Commissioner Charlie Swanton, who headed Alaska’s delegation.

It’s unclear just what the reduction will mean for Alaska’s fisheries; a lot will be up to the Board of Fisheries when it meets in March. But it will certainly mean less fishing time and other conservation measures.

Read the full story at KTOO

Want to Protect the Oceans? Empower Women

September 18, 2018 — Picture someone fishing, and a woman probably doesn’t come to mind. Men are the face of fisheries work, even though women are its backbone in much of the world.

Half of seafood workers are female. Women net fish, spear octopus, dig clams, dive for abalone and pack and process seafood, yet are consistently denied a voice in fisheries management.

That’s more than unfair. Excluding women overlooks half the workforce, and all the fish and shellfish they pull out of the water. Ignoring such a sizable chunk of fishing sets communities up to overexploit their resources, according to a 2006 study from the University of British Columbia. It’s a recipe for overfishing and ocean depletion.

In the Tuvalu Islands, for example, a government initiative to restore edible sea snails failed because it only consulted men. Women also harvest the snails, and continued collecting them as usual, unknowingly trouncing the restoration effort.

Female fishers have deep knowledge of the seafoods they catch and the rhythms of the beaches where they work, often passed down matriarchal lines. They have strong incentives to manage natural resources sustainably, experts say, but first they need a seat at the table.

Read the full story at EcoWatch