December 15, 2020 — The Marine Stewardship Council is targeting the private-label sector as a focus for its growth in China.
MSC co-organized a conference recently with the China Chain Store and Franchise Association (CCFA) to discuss the introduction of more MSC-certified products into its members’ plans for increased private-label offerings.
December 15, 2020 — China’s recent move to tighten inspections and controls of imported seafood is forcing Russian seafood exporters to begin to look at other markets.
Claiming it has found live coronavirus strains being carried by seafood imports, Chinese Customs has increased its scrutiny of all imported food, resulting in delays in the time it takes for products to get to market.
December 8, 2020 — Seafood markets in one of China’s largest cities are barring vendors from selling or stocking imported seafood after a string of incidents in which the novel coronavirus was detected on foodstuffs of foreign origin.
Vendors at the Xin Zhu Que wholesale market, located in the northwesterly city of Xi’an, have signed a pledge not to bring imported product into the market or to sell it, with fines set at CNY 10,000 (USD 1,500, EUR 1,300) per 500 grams of product if found in possession of imported seafood. Copies of the declarations shared on Weibo suggest the declarations – signed and stamped by each vendor – have been drawn up by the managers of the market rather than any government authority.
December 1, 2020 — On Aug. 5, 2017, China complied with a United Nations decision and formally imposed sanctions on North Korea, including a ban on seafood exports. Seafood, particularly squid, is one of North Korea’s few significant foreign-exchange earners, and the sanctions were expected to increase the pressure on the regime.
But just a few weeks after the ban came into effect, hundreds of squid-fishing vessels left Chinese waters and rounded the southern tip of South Korea. They entered North Korea’s 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), nearly doubling the number of Chinese fishing vessels operating there from 557 to 907, according a recent Global Fishing Watch report that tracked data from four different satellite systems. Even as China publicly claimed that is was complying with sanctions, many of the Chinese vessels continued to make trips to North Korea and back, including several round trips each year during both 2018 and 2019, said Jaeyoon Park, one of the report’s lead authors.
The Chinese fleet, made up of squid jiggers and pair trawlers, scooped up a staggering amount of squid—equal to almost as much as the entire squid catch in Japanese and South Korean waters combined over the same period, the report estimated. The Chinese decimated the squid population off North Korea to such a degree that Japanese and South Korean fishers saw their own take of the usually plentiful, migratory species plummet.
November 27, 2020 — Battered by trade wars and COVID-19, the U.S. Northwest maritime industry is applying lessons learned from both crises, according to leaders who spoke at Pacific Marine Expo’s virtual Maritime Economic Forecast.
With China as its number-one trading partner, the Northwest Seaport Alliance of Seattle and Tacoma saw immense change as a result of U.S.-China trade disputes, followed by a steep falloff in vessel traffic as COVID-19 reverberated in the world economy.
November 27, 2020 — Donald Trump positioned himself as a friend of New England’s lobster industry, campaigning hard in Maine, and even had lobsterman Jason Joyce speak at the Republican national convention.
But the president’s prolonged trade war with China resulted in a rocky few years for the industry.
Following Biden’s win in the presidential election, which saw him take three out of four electoral votes in Maine, which, along with Nebraska, has a split system, members of the industry now say they are looking forward to some much-needed stability.
Stephanie Nadeau, owner of the Lobster Company, a dealer in Arundel, Maine, said the industry needs assurance that it will be able to sell lobsters to other countries without punitive tariffs and is hopeful that such comfort will come in January following the inauguration of the Democratic president-elect.
She said of life under the Trump administration: “You can’t plan. You can’t live in chaos. The trade war, was it going to last a week, was it going to last a month, was it going to last four years? How do you operate around that?”
November 24, 2020 — The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has added new labor and social standards to its requirements for member companies, which include tuna processors, traders, importers, transporters, marketers, and more.
The new standard – Conservation Measure 9.1 Public Policy on Social and Labor Standards – will require any business associated with ISSF to develop, and publish, social and labor standards and/or a sourcing policy that applies to the entire supply chain, which addresses forced labor; child labor; freedom of association; wages, benefits, and employment contracts; working hours; health and safety; discrimination, harassment, and abuse; and grievance mechanisms. The policy must be public – meaning it must be at a minimum available to the general public.
November 19, 2020 — Fishery products from China and Taiwan have been added to a list of commodities associated with forced labor in the latest edition of a US government report on child and forced labour globally.
The 2020 edition of the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor – a report required by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 – claims that the majority of workers on Chinese distant-water fishing vessels are migrants from Indonesia and the Philippines.
November 19, 2020 — A new trade deal could open up Southeast Asia to Chinese e-commerce, while also boosting Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] as an alternative to Chinese processors.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was signed on 15 November, reduces barriers to trade between China and 15 Asian-Pacific countries. The partnership includes 10 Southeast Asian economies as well as Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia. It covers 2.1 billion people, with RCEP’s members accounting for around 30 percent of global GDP. Possibly the world’s biggest free-trading bloc, RCEP members account for almost a third of global economic activity.
November 17, 2020 — China’s testing of seafood for traces of COVID-19 will remain strict for the rest of the year, according to a leading marketing consultant in Shanghai.
Robin Wang, the CEO of SMH International, a seafood-focused marketing agency with offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong with clients including the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute, told SeafoodSource the move will negatively impact the broader food market in China.