Saving Seafood

Alaska seafood industry hopes to triple exports to China after trade mission

June 7, 2018 — Seafood is Alaska’s largest commodity, and China is the state’s largest trading partner. In 2017, the Alaska Office of International Trade reports Alaska exported about a billion dollars worth of seafood to China, a figure Governor Bill Walker would like to triple.

“Nothing happens quick,” said Walker. “But I think as a goal, as we grow our seafood market opportunity, that’s something we sit down with the seafood processor and say ‘How do we grow this opportunity for increased exports out of Alaska?’ ”

Although increasing seafood exports to $3 billion might seem ambitious, Jeff Welbourn, Sr. Dir of China Business for Trident Seafood Corp., says an evolving Chinese economy could make it possible.

“China has been a manufacturing, reprocessing sector,” said Welbourn. “We’re kind of excited because we see opportunity for higher value products coming into this market.”

Those higher value products include black cod, halibut and sockeye salmon. In the past, byproduct and headed and gutted fish sold to China included items like wild Alaskan pollock and pink salmon.

“All these products here for reprocessing to a consumer market has been the real prize,” said Welbourn. “And it could triple in size pretty easily.”

In recent years, Welbourn says the Chinese consumer has moved away from lesser products. Today, they’re demanding more transparency and higher quality– a value added, premium market, which the Alaska seafood industry is poised to serve.

Read the full story at KTUU

China to Cut Import Tariffs on More Than 200 Seafood Products on July 1, 2018

June 4, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — China will cut tariffs for more than 200 seafood imports as part of a move to lower tariffs for nearly 1,500 consumer goods, effective July 1, the Chinese Ministry for Finance announced last night.

On average, tariffs for all goods on the list were cut by 56 percent, according to the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council.

Tariff rates on major seafood imports, such as frozen pollock, cod fillets, sockeye salmon, and halibut, will drop from 10% to 7%. Frozen mussels, scallops and oysters will be 10% rather than 14%.  Fresh or chilled crab will be cut from 14% to 7% and fresh scallops, as an example, from 14% to 10%.

“Significantly reducing the import tariffs for daily consumer goods is conducive to expanding China’s opening-up and serves as a major measure and action of the country’s initiative to open its market,” the Ministry’s statement quoted an unnamed official of the commission as saying.

The average tariff rate for cultured and fished aquatic products and processed food such as mineral water will be cut from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent, according to a statement released after the meeting.

The announcement came less than 48 hours before U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross lands in Beijing for “wide-ranging talks aimed at addressing American frustrations with China’s $375 billion bilateral trade surplus with the United States,” according to a May 31 report in the New York Times.

Ross will be in China from June 2 to June 4, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Last Tuesday, President Trump threatened further tariffs on Chinese goods, noting that China’s average tariff on imports was more than three times as high as US tariffs and nearly double that of the European Union. Ross announced that the US would begin imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union at midnight on Thursday.

New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher noted that by cutting tariffs in more than 1,000 lightly traded categories, China could end up reducing its average tariff considerably without actually running the risk of a big surge in imports.

“The goods seeing cuts are not relevant to trade with the U.S.,” Derek Scissors, a trade specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank told Bradsher. “For China, it fits the goal of moving up the value chain — heavy subsidies for semiconductors and now less protection for textiles and consumer appliances.”

This story was originally published by Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

Trident works to bring wild Alaska seafood direct to Chinese consumers

May 30, 2018 — There’s a lot of Alaska-born seafood in China. Walk into any McDonald’s and pick up a fish sandwich and it’s all wild Alaska pollock.

Trident Seafoods has been selling fish in China for 20 years.

Still, the average Chinese consumer probably doesn’t recognize Trident’s three-pronged logo. That’s because they’ve been selling seafood primarily as a commodity in China, not in stores and markets.

But that might change soon. The company sent a team with Alaska Gov. Bill Walker’s trade mission to China and that team is working on a new strategy.

Trident isn’t new to China. They’ve got operations in the port cities of Dalian, Qingdao and Weihai.

What’s new is the way they want to promote and sell their fish here.

Jeff Welbourn is Senior Director of the Chinese Business Office for Trident Seafoods. On a bus trip across Beijing, Welbourn talks strategy for getting their products into some new markets.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

Chinese fish farm tests deep-sea waters with ‘world’s biggest’ salmon cage

May 8, 2018 — A Chinese fisheries company will soon launch a massive deep-sea salmon farming facility in the eastern province of Shandong to help meet the country’s growing appetite for seafood.

Shandong Wanzefeng Fishery, the operator, said a fully submersible net cage called Deep Blue No 1, the world’s biggest, was delivered to the shipyard of state-owned Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry on Friday, state-run Xinhua reported.

The 35-metre-high cage will be deployed in the Yellow Sea about 130 nautical miles east of Rizhao where the cold water is believed to be a suitable habitat for the fish.

Wang Yu, head of the Hubei Marine Engineering Equipment Research Institute, which designed the system, said the cage had a volume of 50,000 cubic metres and could generate a harvest of about 1,500 tonnes of salmon per season.

Read the full story at the South China Morning Post

 

US seafood not included in Chinese retaliatory trade tariffs

April 2, 2018 — Seafood is not on the list of 128 US products targeted by Chinese retaliatory tariffs.

On Monday China’s Ministry of Commerce (MoC) said it would be “suspending tariff concessions” on 128 US products, consisting mainly of US food and drink. Fresh and dried fruits, almonds, pistachios and wine will be subject to an additional 15% tariff. Eight other items, including frozen pork, will be subject to an additional 25% tariff.

The tariffs — announced in direct response to US tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, MoC said — are effective Monday and will impact $2 billion worth of US exports to China, said the ministry.

US seafood products will not be levied additional tariffs, however, Undercurrent News can confirm.

US soyabeans – which is used in Chinese aquatic feed production — are also absent from the list, which can be viewed here on the MoC website.

Last year, the US exported $1.3bn worth of seafood to China, making China the US’ largest seafood export market, according to National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

US seafood exports to China included $128.7 million worth of live and fresh lobster (HS code 030632) and $51.6m worth of frozen crab (HS code 030614), according to International Trade Center. This included $17.0m of frozen Dungeness crab (HS code 0306144030). None of these HS codes are included on the list.

Chinese tariffs on US seafood would mainly hurt fishing industries in New England, the US west coast and Alaska.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

How a trade war threat could squeeze ag

March 26, 2018 — HOW A TRADE WAR THREAT COULD SQUEEZE AG: Farmers and ranchers, and their representatives in Washington, have spent much of President Donald Trump’s 14 months in office warning that the agricultural industry would be collateral damage in a tit-for-tat trade war. It seems their fears have been confirmed, after China released a lengthy list of $3 billion worth of products it has set up for reciprocal tariffs — including pork, nuts, fresh and dried fruits, and wine, Pro Ag’s Catherine Boudreau and Helena Bottemiller Evich report this morning.

Groups rally in opposition to fisheries bill: Several dozen environmental groups wrote to House leaders Reps. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi last week opposing H.R. 200 (115), a measure that they say would weaken the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s conservation provisions “by creating loopholes, watering down legal standards, and decreasing accountability.”

NOAA plans cod quota increase: NOAA plans to greatly increase the quotas for cod and haddock catches to increase revenues for Northeastern fishermen, the Associated Press reports.

Read the full story at Politico

 

China is trying to rein in its vessels illegally depleting fish stocks in West Africa

March 15, 2018 — China is increasingly cracking down on vessels from its country that are engaged in illegal fishing activities in West Africa. It’s a move environmental groups say is indicative of increased intolerance towards illicit practices in high seas and an effort to improve its image globally.

Since 2016, the country has canceled subsidies worth €90 million ($111.6 million) for 264 vessels caught undertaking illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, according to non-profit Greenpeace. Three of the 78 companies that owned these vessels had their distant water fishing licenses revoked, while 15 company owners and captains were blacklisted.

In late February, the ministry of agriculture also halted the pelagic fishing license of Lian Run, a major Chinese company accused of systematic pillaging of West African fisheries on a huge scale. All of the company’s distant water fishing operations, involving about 30 vessels, were also stopped. Last year, two of the company’s trawlers—Lian Run 34 and 47—were caught operating off the coast of Guinea with illegal fishing nets and in possession of shark fins without the body, a practice prohibited under Guinean law.

China also halted the operations of Fuzhou Honglong fisheries companies, months after the company was caught in the Galapagos Marine Reserve transporting thousands of dead shark carcasses.

Read the full story at Quartz 

 

US suppliers in love with ‘seafood speed dating’

March 8, 2018 — The meeting Steve Costas had with a South Korean buyer at Food Export-Northeast’s 2017 “seafood speed dating” event, in Boston, Massachusetts, lasted just 20 minutes, scarcely more than a brief flirtation.

But less than a year later Marder Trawling, the New Bedford, Massachusetts-based supplier for which Costas is an account executive, wound up selling the Korean company a container filled with a mix of its wild-caught fish products.

Of course at seafood speed dating, there’s also the chance that the object of your affection will be swept away by another suitor.

“It’s always a friendly event and I believe there is a camaraderie amongst the suppliers even though you know in 30 minutes your customer or a potential customer will be meeting with a competitor who in most cases will be offering them the same species,” Costas told Undercurrent News.

Costas is back again in Boston, Massachusetts, this week along with representatives for no less than 17 seafood suppliers from the northeastern US, all hoping to move containers of fish and, fingers crossed, establish long-term relationships with one or more of the 15 buyers from no less than 13 countries also there.

South Korea will be represented again, as will China, Japan, Colombia, Spain and the United Arab Emirate to name a few. Almost all of the buyers are looking to acquire scallops and lobsters, though some also come from countries where dogfish, monkfish and skate are in demand, all products sold by Marder Trawling using its recently acquired dock in Chatham, Massachusetts.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than half of the oceans, study finds

February 23, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Scientists tag sharks to see where they roam in the high seas, but until now they couldn’t track the seas’ biggest eater: Humans. By using ships’ own emergency beacons, researchers got the first comprehensive snapshot of industrial fishing’s impacts around the globe. And it’s huge — bigger than scientists thought, according to a new study.

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the oceans with the world’s fishing fleet traveling more than 285 million miles a year — three times the distance between Earth and the sun, according to research in Thursday’s journal Science.

Five countries — China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — were responsible for 85 percent of high seas fishing.

“The most mind-blowing thing is just how global an enterprise this is,” said study co-author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. “It’s more like factories that are mass producing product for a global market and less like hunters that are stalking individual prey.”

China dominates global fishing. Of the 40 million hours that large ships fished in 2016, 17 million hours were by boats under a Chinese flag, according to another study co-author, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block.

The fishing patterns were gleaned from 22 billion automated ship safety signals beamed to satellites. Before this, scientists had to rely on a sampling of ships’ logs and observations, which were spotty.

Ships are obeying no-fishing zones and times, although they hover at the edges of marine-protected areas. Fishing tends to drop on holidays including Christmas, New Year’s and the Lunar New Year, researchers found.

“The maps of global fishing in this report are sobering,” Douglas McCauley, a University of California, Santa Barbara marine biologist who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CBS News

 

A Nearly Invisible Oil Spill Threatens Some of Asia’s Richest Fisheries

February 13, 2018 — ZHOUSHAN, China — A fiery collision that sank an Iranian tanker in the East China Sea a month ago has resulted in an environmental threat that experts say is unlike any before: An almost invisible type of petroleum has begun to contaminate some of the most important fishing grounds in Asia, from China to Japan and beyond.

It is the largest oil spill in decades, but the disaster has unfolded outside the glare of international attention that big spills have previously attracted. That is because of its remote location on the high seas and also the type of petroleum involved: condensate, a toxic, liquid byproduct of natural gas production.

Unlike the crude oil in better-known disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon, condensate does not clump into black globules that can be easily spotted or produce heart-wrenching images of animals mired in muck. There’s no visible slick that can be pumped out. Experts said the only real solution is to let it evaporate or dissolve. Absorbed into the water, it will remain toxic for a time, though it will also disperse more quickly into the ocean than crude oil.

Experts say there has never been so large a spill of condensate; up to 111,000 metric tons has poured into the ocean. It has almost certainly already invaded an ecosystem that includes some of the world’s most bountiful fisheries off Zhoushan, the archipelago that rises where the Yangtze River flows into the East China Sea.

The area produced five million tons of seafood of up to four dozen species for China alone last year, according to Greenpeace, including crab, squid, yellow croaker, mackerel and a local favorite, hairtail. If projections are correct, the toxins could soon make their way into equally abundant Japanese fisheries.

Exposure to condensate is extremely unhealthy to humans and potentially fatal. The effects of eating fish contaminated with it remain essentially untested, but experts strongly advise against doing so.

“This is an oil spill of a type we haven’t seen before,” said Paul Johnston, a scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter in England. “Working out the impact is actually a huge task — probably next to impossible.”

For China, the disaster has become a test of its ambitions as a global and regional steward of the seas, especially at a time when it is reinforcing its territorial claims, including disputed territories with Japan in these waters. Given its proximity, China has taken the lead in investigating the disaster and monitoring the spill, but it has faced some criticism for what some see as a slow and inadequate response thus far.

Officials in Beijing announced on Feb. 1 that samples of fish taken within four to five nautical miles of the sunken ship contained traces of petroleum hydrocarbons, suggesting possible condensate contamination; they pledged to expand the range of testing to 90 miles, and closely monitor fish coming into markets.

Read the full story at the New York Times