Saving Seafood

Fresh local seafood available at more food banks in the South

August 11, 2021 — The past year was hard for Cy Tandy. He is the director of IONA House, a 34-year-old food pantry in Jackson, Mississippi. The economic downturn caused by the pandemic doubled the number of people who came to the pantry in need of food. But in the tough year, there were bright spots. For the first time, the IONA House was able to give its clients fresh, locally caught shrimp.

“Our clients, they loved it,” Tandy said. “Seafood, that’s part of our culture in South Mississippi and Louisiana.”

The Hattiesburg-based charity Extra Table distributed 13,000 pounds of peeled shrimp to food banks and food pantries across the state. All the shrimp was purchased by Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United with money from Massachusetts organization Catch Together.

Read the full story at The Clarion Ledger

Covid helped connect small fishermen to the emergency food network. Can the link last

June 25, 2021 — By now, last year’s food supply chain chaos has been widely reported. We’ve also learned about all the chain’s desperate fixes and ingenious workarounds: Fruit, veg, meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy produced for Covid-shuttered restaurants, cafeterias, and other institutions were diverted to grocery co-ops, local CSA programs, the frozen/canned/preserved market, and even reef restoration projects.

Some fresh food also made its way into the emergency food system. It was a welcome counterpoint to shelf-stable goods like peanut butter and beans, at food banks and pantries that struggled to feed up to 70 percent more hungry Americans than in 2019. “We had a lot of people in the industry reaching out to us, saying, ‘We’ve got pork! How can we move this food that’s just sitting on farms?’” said Joe Weeden, who sources protein for the food bank network Feeding America.

Weeden was also approached last November by a Massachusetts-based fishermen’s association, looking to forge a partnership between Feeding America food pantries and small-boat fishermen who needed a new market for their catch. The resulting program—one of 21 funded by a nonprofit called Catch Together—was so well-received that Weeden and other organizers want to continue and maybe expand it, even as the pandemic winds down and the usual purchasers of high-quality fish re-open for business. There’s also hope among some fishermen that this may provide a way to reconnect with local communities that their business models have left behind, and to provide themselves with a layer of stability in an unpredictable sector.

In the charitable food sector, seafood is considered a nutritious “food to encourage.” But the good stuff can be hard to come by, because it’s expensive—$7 per pound or more, compared to less than $1 per pound for bulk chicken. Small-boat fishermen contend with quotas and fluctuating prices; they garner the most stable profit by sending most of their catch abroad or into food service. When Covid-19 upended these supply chains, Catch Together saw an opportunity to feed ever-more hungry local people while keeping fishermen and processors financially afloat.

Catch Together normally exists to offer low-interest loans to buy fishing quotas that are then leased affordably to community-based fishermen. But in early 2020, “We saw a total collapse that caused fishermen to tie up because the pricing wouldn’t support a harvest. It was a really scary time,” said Paul Parker, Catch Together’s president. Some state and local governments had begun loosening regulations to help, like allowing fishermen to sell “over the wharf” (straight off the boat to customers). Nevertheless, many fisheries still faced abysmal market prices that didn’t justify their opening.

Read the full story at The Counter

Innovative nonprofit brings together fishermen, food banks in need

June 24, 2021 — On an early, sunny morning, a fresh catch comes ashore.

“We deal with crabs, oysters, shrimp, fish,” said Jeremy Forte of Forte Seafood.

A new shrimp season just opened along Mississippi’s coast and Forte couldn’t be busier.

“It’s always keeping you guessing, that’s for sure,” he said.

However, this wasn’t necessarily the case during the pandemic. When restaurants shut down, it created a chain reaction affecting fishermen around the country.

“We’re highly dependent on the restaurant sales,” said Ryan Bradley with Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United. “And, you know, certainly when you saw these massive shutdowns of the restaurant, it caused a lot of uncertainty, a lot of disruption to the supply chain.”

At the same time, down the coastal road from the harbor, soup kitchens and food pantries reeled from the economic strain of COVID-19.

“We’re having a 30 to 50 percent request increase in requests for food,” said Martha Allen of the food bank Extra Table. “Many people were first-time patrons of food pantries and soup kitchens.”

That’s when the harbor met the soup kitchen, brought together by the nonprofit Catch Together.

“What we realized is not just the food insecurity crisis was deepening in terms of the number of people they needed to serve, but also many of the sources of their traditional proteins was drying up because restaurants and restaurants were closed, which is one source, and then also a lot of supermarkets were just sold out,” said founder Paul Parker.

Read the full story at KATC

FLORIDA: Local fishermen give catch to hungry families

January 22, 2021 — A half-dozen people spent a few hours this week unloading the “Miss Rebecca” on the dock behind Wild Seafood Company. The flurry of activity continued for hours. Erin Grebenev only put her calculator down for a few moments to answer questions about how special the process made her feel.

“This has been an amazing opportunity,” she said. “It’s so cool to watch a boat offload.”

This has been the scene at John’s Pass since October. Jason Delacruz, the owner of Wild Seafood, sends out one of his fishing vessels and it will return with thousands of pounds of fish. They are tagged, separated by client, and then a portion is placed in a box to the side to feed hungry families in Tampa Bay.

“We are at a need level that we have never seen,” said Delacruz, who has been operating Wild Seafood since 2012.

Hundreds of pounds of freshly caught red snapper were loaded into a box marked ‘Catch Together’ this week. The label represents the name of the program designed to support local fishermen and feed families in need.

Delacruz, who had to stop running boats for a brief period last spring when the pandemic began to ramp up, got a grant from Catch Together this year in the $200,000 range to offset the price of the fish caught by his crews. That money paid for the donated food, which was sent up the road to the St. Pete Free Clinic.

Read the full story at WTSP

LAURA DEATON: One key to moving the Biden agenda: Bring all three sectors to the table

January 20, 2021 — The incoming Biden administration unquestionably will bring new focus to sustainable development goals at home and abroad. Joe Biden has produced plans in an array of key areas — environmental protection, clean energy and racial equity among them — and has promised action in his first 100 days as president. His administration will be playing catch-up in all these key areas, and the best way to make rapid progress is one that doesn’t get talked about enough: building three-sector collaboration into every major initiative.

Government partnerships are nothing new, but they’re usually binary: Government agencies work with nonprofits or with businesses or gather feedback separately from each. Collaborations across all three sectors are less typical, but they generate more deeply informed, comprehensive solutions and yield wider support.

The clearest way to illustrate the value of cross-sector collaboration is to contrast what happens when one sector isn’t at the table with what’s possible when all sectors are present. The following examples of initiatives related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals show the consequences of leaving out or engaging key stakeholders — and point to how the Biden administration can do better.

Environmental NGOs have been lobbying for the 30×30 initiative to conserve 30 percent of the world’s ocean habitat by 2030, and the Biden administration is embracing that goal.

Sounds great, right? The problem is, the legislation on deck was created without meaningful input from the small-scale fishermen who have helped make U.S. fisheries the most sustainable in the world. This proposal would ban commercial fishing in at least 30 percent of U.S. marine areas, overturning the successful fisheries management system, harming coastal communities and cutting off consumer access to sustainable local seafood. The end result could be to increase long-distance imports from far less sustainable sources.

Contrast that with an example of what can happen when all three sectors work together: The nonprofit program Catch Together partners with fishing communities to create and launch community-owned permit banks, which purchase fishing quota (rights to a certain percentage of the catch in a fishery) and then lease that quota to local fishing businesses at affordable rates.

Read the full opinion piece at GreenBiz