Saving Seafood

China’s Appetite Pushes Fisheries to the Brink

May 1, 2017 — Once upon a time, the seas teemed with mackerel, squid and sardines, and life was good. But now, on opposite sides of the globe, sun-creased fishermen lament as they reel in their nearly empty nets.

“Your net would be so full of fish, you could barely heave it onto the boat,” said Mamadou So, 52, a fisherman in Senegal, gesturing to the meager assortment of tiny fish flapping in his wooden canoe.

A world away in eastern China, Zhu Delong, 75, also shook his head as his net dredged up a disappointing array of pinkie-size shrimp and fledgling yellow croakers. “When I was a kid, you could cast a line out your back door and hook huge yellow croakers,” he said. “Now the sea is empty.”

Overfishing is depleting oceans across the globe, with 90 percent of the world’s fisheries fully exploited or facing collapse, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. From Russian king crab fishermen in the west Bering Sea to Mexican ships that poach red snapper off the coast of Florida, unsustainable fishing practices threaten the well-being of millions of people in the developing world who depend on the sea for income and food, experts say.

But China, with its enormous population, growing wealth to buy seafood and the world’s largest fleet of deep-sea fishing vessels, is having an outsize impact on the globe’s oceans.

Having depleted the seas close to home, Chinese fishermen are sailing farther to exploit the waters of other countries, their journeys often subsidized by a government more concerned with domestic unemployment and food security than the health of the world’s oceans and the countries that depend on them.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Elver landings rising slowly, but price stays low

April 18, 2017 — A little more than three weeks into the 10-week fishing season, Maine elver dealers have reported buying about 30 percent of the total annual 9,616-pound landings quota allocated to the state’s fishery.

As of 6 p.m. on Sunday, according to figures the Department of Marine Resources described as “extremely preliminary,” dealers had purchased a total of 2,828.908 pounds of elvers and reportedly paid harvesters a total of $4,057,115 — an average price of $1,434 per pound.

That price may be misleading, though. On Patriots Day morning, an elver dealer in Ellsworth was paying $1,150 per pound and advising the fishermen who sell to him to hold on to their eels for a few days in hopes the price would rise.

At this time last year, dealers in the Ellsworth area were offering harvesters $1,300 per pound, with the low price reportedly a reflection of a weak market in Asia.

For the past two seasons, Maine harvesters have landed fewer elvers than allowed under their quota: 5,259 pounds in 2015 and 9,400 pounds last year. In 2015, the average price of elvers was just under $2,172 per pound and, at times, the price has soared above $2,400 per pound.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Lobster exports to China boom

March 24, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — A trade war with China may be somewhere on the horizon, but the Maine lobster industry is hoping that the horizon is a distant one.

According to the figures published by the National Marine Fisheries Service, in 2016 China imported more than $108 million worth of lobsters from the United States. That’s a reported 14-fold jump from 2010, when lobster imports were about $7.4 million.

More than 80 percent of U.S. lobster imported to China comes from Maine.

The price of lobster was high last year, but so was demand. Published trade figures show that, in 2015, China imported about 13 million pounds of lobster from the United States. Last year, imports of American lobster topped 14 million pounds.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Trains 15,000 Shrimp and Tilapia Farmers Asia, South Pacific

March 7, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership wrapped up a major aquaculture training program in Indonesia, Thailand, and China that instructed thousands of shrimp and tilapia farmers with modern training designed to improve the industry in these regions.

Organizers initially expected the project to attract 12,500 farmers. But by the December 31, 2016 finishing date, more than 15,000 farmers in all three countries had participated in the training.

“This project has exceeded expectations because of the hard work of many committed partners to deliver improvements based on a detailed, local understanding of what farmers want,” said Anton Immink, SFP’s Aquaculture Director. “We recognize there is still a long way to go for many of these farmers, but we encourage others to actively engage in the improvements needed.”

The program, funded with the support of Walmart Foundation and IDH – the Sustainable Trade Initiative – has led to improvements in environmental and disease management across shrimp and tilapia farms in all three countries.

Ir. Rizal, head of the aquaculture unit of the Provincial Office of Marine and Fishery Affairs in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, said, “This training helped us improve the knowledge of traditional farmers in West Kalimantan to practice better farming. With better farming we hope that farmers can improve their shrimp and fish harvest.”

Training topics included: Better aquaculture practices; better post-harvest practices; better business management; group formation and management; value of zonal management; Code of Good Practice in Aquaculture; ecological farming, health management, and market outlook.

Sally Ananya, Director of The Food School, one of the partners in Thailand, said “The focus on smaller-scale producers and the specific inclusion of women in the training has been particularly valuable, as the contribution of these groups is often overlooked in projects aiming at improvements in shrimp farming.”

For some farmers, including Chareon Yongstar of Thailand, the training served as an eye-opener.

“I have learned so many practical best practices that I can apply at my farms,” he said. “But more importantly, the experience has raised more questions and made me realize how much more I don’t know. I hope there is a continuation of this program.”

SFP will continue to work closely with the international buyers to understand how these producers fit into existing supplies or how some of them can continue the improvements they have started to become part of the international supply chain.

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

Surging seafood prices in China reveal tightening supply

March 6, 2017 — A crackdown on smuggling and tighter international supply are two of the reasons for a surge in seafood prices in China last year.

A statement from the country’s fisheries bureau at China’s Agriculture Ministry also credits high pork prices (driving consumers to alternative proteins) as well as floods in several key domestic freshwater production regions for the rise in prices. China is in the midst of one of its cyclical pork price rises, while “coordinated exercises against smuggling” in 2016 has tightened the grey channel, according to the ministry.

According to a survey of 80 seafood wholesale markets around China by the Agriculture Ministry, there was a recovery in prices, with average seafood prices up 5.3 percent year-on-year in 2016. There was a surge in carp prices of 11 percent as lower-income consumers switched from pork. But the biggest boost was for seawater species, which rose by 7.3 percent in price compared to a 2.7 percent year-on-year rise for freshwater species.

Of 49 species monitored, 29 rose in price last year, of which eight species rose by more than 10 percent in price. Prices for another four species were flat year-on-year, while prices for another 16 species were flat year-on-year.

There was a modest increase in the volume sold, reaching 9.36 million tons, an increase of 1.05 percent on 2015. The value of product sold, however, increased by 3.69 percent year-on-year to CNY 185.8 billion (USD 27 billion, EUR 25.6 billion).

There is clear evidence of the rising importance of imports and seawater species. Prices for seawater species rose fastest (10.5 percent) in the first quarter of 2016 – the period which coincides with Chinese New Year. Prices grew fastest in the third quarter (5.61 percent year on year) for freshwater species, but grew only 0.63 percent in the first quarter, typically the high point of consumption due to Chinese New Year.

Meanwhile there’s been a sharp rise in prices for seawater crustaceans (9.4 percent) and shellfish (8.4 percent), as well as fish (6.13 percent).

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Value of Maine lobster exports to China on pace to triple for 2016

January 30, 2017 — Live lobster exports to China are on pace to triple in value in 2016, despite the incursion of some new lobster suppliers to the growing Asian market.

Final figures for 2016 won’t be known until February, but through November, the value of live lobster shipments from Maine to China climbed to $27.5 million, nearly tripling from the $10.2 million reported in November 2015. That’s roughly half the total export of live lobsters from Maine to date, excluding Canada, where many Maine lobsters are processed and then imported back into Maine for distribution.

And those figures don’t include the traditional year-end surge leading up the Chinese New Year on Jan. 28, when Chinese celebrants have been serving up lobster from Maine, Massachusetts and Canada in ever-increasing numbers.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

New study examines how China maintains large catches and what it means for fishery management elsewhere

January 19, 2017 — China, the world’s largest seafood producer, has done something extraordinary. For the past 20 years, despite minimal management and some of the most intense industrial fishing in the world, it has maintained large catches of key species in its most productive waters.

That same kind of intense, lightly managed industrial fishing has collapsed other fisheries, such as Newfoundland’s cod fishery in the 1990s. China’s ability to sustain its catches has puzzled scientists, some of whom have even questioned the accuracy of the country’s catch reports.

A new study from UC Santa Barbara, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests another explanation: By reducing the population of predatory fish, China has increased populations of preyed-upon species.

“If you fish down the large predatory fish, then you can catch more small prey fish, because they are no longer being eaten before you get to them,” explained lead author Cody Szuwalski, a fisheries scientist in UCSB’s Sustainable Fisheries Group. The group is a collaboration of the campus’s Marine Science Institute and Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

Read the full story at Phys.org

The global chain that produces your fish

January 16, 2017 — PARIS — That smoked salmon you bought for the New Year’s festivities has a story to tell.

The salmon may have been raised in Scotland — but it probably began life as roe in Norway.

Harvested at a coastal farm, the fish may have been sent to Poland to be smoked.

It may even have travelled halfway around the world to China to be sliced.

It eventually arrived, wrapped in that tempting package, in your supermarket.

Globalisation has changed the world in many ways, but fish farming is one of the starkest examples of its benefits and hidden costs.

The nexus of the world fish-farming trade is China — the biggest exporter of fish products, the biggest producer of farmed fish and a major importer as well.

With battalions of lost-cost workers, linked to markets by a network of ocean-going refrigerated ships, China is the go-to place for labour-intensive fish processing.

In just a few clicks on Alibaba, the Chinese online trading hub, you can buy three tonnes of Norwegian filleted mackerel shipped from the port city of Qingdao for delivery within 45 days.

“There is a significant amount of bulk frozen fish sent to China just for filleting,” said a source from an association of importers in an EU country.

“The temperature of the fish is brought up to enable the filleting but the fish are not completely defrosted.”

The practice has helped transform the Chinese coastal provinces of Liaoning and Shandong into global centres for fish processing.

Read the full story at Yahoo

Lobster prices high as catch drops and China imports climb

January 11, 2017 — Lobster lovers are used to adjusting to high prices, but this winter, they’re shelling out even more for the cherished crustaceans because of a lack of catch off of New England and Canada and heavy exports to China.

Winter is typically a slow season for U.S. lobster fishermen and an active one off Atlantic Canada. But catch is slow in both countries this year, in part because of bad weather, industry sources said.

And the winter months are also an important time for exports to lobster-crazy China, which celebrates its New Year holiday Jan. 28. It’s increasingly popular to celebrate the Chinese New Year with American lobster. That’s causing demand at a time when supply is low.

American consumers who were paying $9 to $11 per pound for a live lobster in September — already higher than the previous year — are now sometimes paying upward of $13 per pound. There are enough lobsters to go around, but China’s demand is likely to only grow, said Bill Bruns, operations manager at The Lobster Company of Arundel, Maine.

“They are building infrastructure to meet more demand,” Bruns said, who added that China’s middle class “hasn’t stopped growing, and they keep eating.”

American lobster exports to China have topped 12 million pounds and $85 million in value for three years in a row. The country imported a fraction of that amount as recently as 2010, when it imported less than a million pounds of the crustaceans.

Meanwhile, prices charged by wholesalers in the U.S. are rising, too. The wholesale price of a 1 ¼-pound live hard shell lobster rose about a dollar in the New England market from December to January, when it was $7.75 per pound, according to Urner Barry commodities publishing service.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Times

Air China bans shark fin cargo, reflecting dramatic shift in attitudes

January 9, 2017 — BEIJING — Air China has become the first airline in mainland China to ban shark fin cargo, marking a dramatic shift in attitudes toward trade in endangered wildlife here and throwing a lifeline to shark populations threatened with imminent extinction.

The news, released late Friday, came just a week after China announced plans to ban its domestic ivory trade, a landmark decision of vital importance in ending an epidemic of elephant poaching in Africa.

It marks the country’s gradual transformation from being the biggest source of the problem — as the largest market in illegal wildlife products — to becoming a major part of the solution.

“Scientists estimate that fins from up to 73 million sharks a year are used for shark’s fin soup, with much of the trade in shark fin destined for China,” said Alex Hofford, a wildlife activist from the conservation group WildAid in Hong Kong, which applauded Air China for taking “an ethical stance” to help protect sharks and oceans. “It’s a bold move, and this is likely to have a huge and lasting impact on shark populations and marine ecosystems worldwide.”

Hofford said the decision by China’s national flag carrier “puts FedEx to shame” — the U.S. multinational courier company has resisted repeated calls to take a similar step, despite a petition signed by 300,000 people, and an appeal from a coalition of animal welfare conservation groups who expressed concerns that its service could be used to carry fins of endangered shark species. That would be a violation of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Read the full story at the Washington Post