Saving Seafood

Japan Copes with the Disappearing Eel

January 3, 2017 — One hot evening last July, I visited the Michelin-starred unagi, or eel, restaurant Nodaiwa, which sits in a quiet basement beneath Tokyo’s glamorous Ginza shopping district. Next door is the world’s most famous sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, which was the subject of a documentary from 2012 called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The restaurant is now so famous that a sign, written in English, sits outside its entrance, asking visitors not to take photographs.

In recent years, less benign developments have forced Nodaiwa to place a sign at its entrance as well. Whenever I visit, I count myself lucky to find the following message written on it, in Japanese: “Today we have natural Japanese eel.”

The restaurant started serving grilled eel out of a timber farmhouse, near the famous Tsukiji Fish Market, about two hundred years ago. And through five generations of continuous operation such a sign was unnecessary, even laughable, given the abundance of Japan’s native species of freshwater eel. But, in 2013, Japan’s government added Anguilla japonica to its official Red List of endangered fish, after researchers found that wild unagi populations had declined by about ninety per cent in the course of just three decades.

At Tsukiji, wholesale prices for farm-raised unagi imported from China immediately surged to a record high of around forty U.S. dollars per kilogram, and remained there for much of 2013. Prices for the wild-caught, “natural Japanese” eels served at upscale restaurants like Nodaiwa climbed even higher, by as much as fifty or sixty per cent.

But the government had been late to recognize the extent of the problem, which had already taken a toll on many famous restaurants specializing in kabayaki, a signature unagi preparation. In March, 2012, a year before the species was declared endangered, the beloved unagi restaurant Suekawa closed its doors, after sixty-five years of business, and it was followed a month later by the popular restaurant Yoshikawa. Then, in May of 2012, one of Japan’s best-loved kabayakirestaurants, called Benkei, closed its doors after more than six decades of serving eel in Tokyo’s historic “lower city.” The restaurants that survived were buying eels for ten times the price that they’d paid just eight years earlier, according to one vender at Tsukiji Fish Market. The family restaurant chain Hanaya decided to pull eel dishes from its summer menu.

Read the full story at the New Yorker

Major seafood companies come together to crackdown on illegal fishing, improve industry transparency

December 20th, 2016 — Eight big fishing companies, which combined catch more than 40 times Australia’s total seafood production, have signed a joint agreement to crack down on illegal fishing, improve traceability and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

The companies also said they would address antibiotic use in aquaculture and plastic pollution.

Meeting in Sweden recently, the companies agreed to use more cutting edge technology, including DNA barcoding and satellite surveillance to monitor the volume and types of fish species they catch.

The companies account for 15 per cent of the total global catch.

Australian company Austral Fisheries, which is 50 per cent owned by signatory Maruha Nichiro Corporation, believes the agreement marks a major milestone for the global industry.

General manager of environment and policy, Martin Exel said consumers around the world have pushed the companies to act.

“Secondly, there is a genuine desire to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. There’s a real awakening in the seafood industry akin to the canary in the coal mine, where we see climate change impacts on a daily basis.”

The conversation among the companies was led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which researched the most influential companies to bring to the table.

A lack of financial disclosure from Russian and Chinese companies meant they were not a part of the initial agreement, according to Mr. Exel.

Read the full story at the Australian Broadcasting Company

How Antibiotic-Tainted Seafood From China Ends Up on Your Table

December 16, 2016 — From the air, the Pearl River Delta in southern China’s Guangdong province resembles a mass of human cells under a microscope. Hundreds of thousands of tiny rectangular blocks, all of them shades of green, are clustered between cities and waterways. Livestock pens are scattered among the thousands of seafood farms that form the heart of the country’s aquaculture industry, the largest in the world.

Beside one of those fish farms near Zhaoqing, on a muggy day in June, a farmhand wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat hoses down the cement floor of a piggery where white and roan hogs sniff and snort. The dirty water from the pens flows into a metal pipe, which empties directly into a pond shared by dozens of geese. As the yellowish-brown water splashes from the pipe, tilapia flap and jump, hungry for an afternoon feeding.

Chinese agriculture has thrived for thousands of years on this kind of recycling—the nutrients that fatten the pigs and geese also feed the fish. But the introduction of antibiotics into animal feed has transformed ecological efficiency into a threat to global public health.

At another farm, in Jiangmen, a farmer scatters a scoop of grain to rouse her slumbering swine, penned on the edge of a pond with 20,000 Mandarin fish. The feed contains three kinds of antibiotics, including colistin, which in humans is considered an antibiotic of last resort. Colistin is banned for swine use in the U.S., but until November, when the Chinese government finally clamped down, it was used extensively in animal feed in China. Vials and containers for nine other antibiotics lie around the 20-sow piggery—on shelves, in shopping bags, and atop trash piles. Seven of those drugs have been deemed critically important for human medicine by the World Health Organization.

The overuse of antibiotics has transformed what had been a hypothetical menace into a clear and present one: superbugs, bacteria that are highly resistant to antibiotics. By British government estimates, about 700,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections worldwide. If trends continue, that number is expected to soar to 10 million a year globally by 2050—more people than currently die from cancer.

In November 2015 scientists reported the discovery of a colistin-resistant gene in China that can turn a dozen or more types of bacteria into superbugs. Since then the gene has been found in patients, food, and environmental samples in more than 20 countries, including at least four patients in the U.S. Food, it now appears, can be a crucial vector. “People eating their shrimp cocktails and paella may be getting more than they bargained for,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology and an infectious diseases physician at New York University Langone Medical Center who chairs President Barack Obama’s advisory panel for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “The penetration of antibiotics through the food chain is a big problem.”

Research has found that as much as 90 percent of the antibiotics administered to pigs pass undegraded through their urine and feces. This has a direct impact on farmed seafood. The waste from the pigpens at the Jiangmen farm flowing into the ponds, for example, exposes the fish to almost the same doses of medicine the livestock get—and that’s in addition to the antibiotics added to the water to prevent and treat aquatic disease outbreaks. The fish pond drains into a canal connected to the West River, which eventually empties into the Pearl River estuary, on which sit Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau. The estuary receives 193 metric tons (213 tons) of antibiotics a year, Chinese scientists estimated in 2013.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

In California, Squid Is Big Business. But Good Luck Eating Local Calamari

December 1, 2016 — The following is excerpted from an NPR story published today, written by Clarissa Wei:

More than 80 percent of U.S. squid landings are exported — most of it to China. The rare percentage of that catch that stays domestically goes to Asian fresh fish markets or is used as bait.

Ironically, the lion’s share of the squid consumed in the United States is imported.

“It has to do with the American desire for a larger squid,” explains Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association. “A lot of squid that is shipped overseas stays overseas because they prefer it. They eat it over there. Our consumers typically prefer a larger squid, and so there’s just a ton of squid imported into this country that comes in at a far lower price.”

In the U.S., the squid that ends up on our dinner table is typically Patagonian squid from the Falkland Islands or Humboldt squid — a jumbo cephalopod fished predominantly in Mexico and Peru.

California market squid isn’t usually desired because of its smaller size.

“Our squid is a learning curve,” Pleschner-Steele says. “If you overcook it, it can taste like a rubber band. But in my opinion, if you do it right, it tastes more like abalone than any other squid. It’s nutty, sweet and delicate.”

All Californian fish processors are capable of dealing with squid, Pleschner-Steele says. However, it’s not a money-making operation because people aren’t willing to pay for it.

“It has to be on request,” she says. “We simply can’t compete with the cost of other imported squid. ”

Supporting the local squid industry is much more than just helping the local economy – it’s helpful from a sustainability angle as well.

Even with squid being sent on a round-trip journey across the world, the California market squid fishery has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the industry.

“California squid fishing fleets are one of the most energy efficient in the world because [they’re] so close to port,” Pleschner-Steele says. “Our boats can produce a ton of proteins for about six gallons of diesel fuel. … Efficiency is key.”

Further efficiency, she says, could be achieved if consumers would be keen to fork over $1.50 a pound more for California-caught and processed squid.

But the “truth is that Americans aren’t willing to pay for it,” she says. “If people were willing to pay the price, we can definitely feed the demand.”

Read the full story at NPR

China’s top fisheries official lashes out at ‘Cold War’ criticism of international fisheries expansion

November 23, 2016 — China’s most senior fisheries official, Yu Kangzhen, has lambasted his foreign counterparts for taking a ‘Cold War’ view of China’s international fishing ambitions.

Established fishing nations are seeking to “blockade” the development of Chinese fishing vessels overseas, Yu, the vice minister for agriculture with responsibility for fisheries, told a gathering of diplomats and officials attending the annual fishery expo in Qingdao.

China accounts for 17 percent of catches in international waters “and this is our rightful share,” Yu told his guests. In unusually blunt language, Yu told critics to “look fairly” at China’s long-distance fishing development and stop “looking through tinted glasses” while criticizing Chinese fishing in international waters.

Fishery officials in both developed and developing nations have disparaged the opaque nature of Chinese data on fish landings as well as China’s track record of secretive access deals with poorer countries.

“We produce 6.6 million tons of aquatic products in a year but only 1.8 percent of that comes from long-distance fishing,” Yu said.

China’s overseas trawlers are “old” and need modernizing, Yu said. China is a “big fishing country but not a strong fishery country,” he said.

Nonetheless, China will increase the scale of its operations in international waters, he told the assembled officials, including Canadian fishery officials and Iceland’s and Ireland’s ambassadors to China.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Can North Carolina’s Local Seafood Movement Help Save its Fishermen?

November 16, 2016 — North Carolina’s commercial fishermen—who work primarily in independent, small-scale operations—landed 66 million pounds of fish last year, but rather than ending up on North Carolina plates, the majority was whisked out of state to markets where it could fetch a higher price.

“I think more New Yorkers eat North Carolina seafood than North Carolinians,” says Ann Simpson, who grew up in a small town on the coast and currently directs North Carolina Catch, a partnership of smaller organizations working to strengthen the state’s local seafood economy.

To fill the void created by the export of its catch, North Carolina—like most states—ships in seafood from abroad. Today, around 90 percent of the seafood Americans eat has been imported from places like China, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Ecuador, and the average fish travels more than 5,400 miles between the landing dock and point of sale.

“People come to the coast looking for fresh seafood, and for the most part, they’re getting seafood from halfway around the world, which they’re eating in a local setting,” says Noelle Boucquey, assistant professor of environmental studies at Eckerd College, who studied North Carolina’s fisheries while at Duke University. Patronize a vendor at the Outer Banks Seafood Festival in Nags Head, and you’ll face the same conundrum.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Reactions to Trump victory trickle in from seafood industry

November 11th, 2016 — Seafood companies and industry groups have begun to issue statements and responses to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

Trump has said little about the seafood industry directly, but he has expressed favor for policies that reduce environmental barriers preventing the further development American industry, which may lead to changes in the management of U.S. fisheries. Trump has also taken a strong stand against free-trade agreements, and if he acts on pledges to scuttle the Trans-Pacific Partnership framework, add tariffs on Chinese imports and renegotiate or withdraw from the North America Free Trade Agreement, it will likely have an significant effect on the global seafood trade.

The National Fisheries Institute, the trade group representing the American seafood industry, released an official statement on Wednesday, 9 November, though spokesman Gavin Gibbons.

“NFI is prepared to work with incoming President Trump and his administration on all aspects of seafood,” it said. “From trade to fisheries and nutrition, seafood is an important component of a variety of vital sectors. NFI is ready to serve as a resource as this new administration begins to learn the complexities and significance of seafood.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source 

South Korea Cracks Down on Illegal Chinese Fishing, with Violent Results

November 7, 2016 — Earlier this week, the Korea Coast Guard (KCG) reported that it opened fire on a Chinese fishing vessel fishing illegally in Korean waters near Incheon. The incident marked the first time the KCG fired its deck-mounted machine guns to compel non-compliant Chinese fishing vessels to stop and occurred after Korean officials vowed more forceful measures against illegal Chinese fishing in Korean waters.

According to the report, the episode took place during a standoff between the KCG and about 30 Chinese fishing boats operating near the Yellow Sea border with North Korea — an area of frequent encounters between Korean authorities and Chinese fishermen. After repeated warnings by the KCG for the Chinese vessels to stop, the Chinese vessels reportedly attempted to ram the KCG vessel, prompting the KCG to fire their machine gun into the air. The warning shots proved ineffective, so additional machine guns bursts were employed near the bow of the Chinese vessel. Two Chinese trawlers were seized in the clash and no one was hurt.

The incident comes on the heels of an earlier encounter near Socheong Island in October in which a small KCG patrol vessel was rammed and sank by a large Chinese fishing vessel as the Chinese vessel resisted arrest. Lee Joo-seong, head of the KCG’s central region, called the action by the Chinese vessel “attempted murder” and vowed stern action against the Chinese fishermen responsible. Reaction was swift from Korean lawmakers as well, with Rep. Woo Sang-ho, the floor leader of the opposition Minjoo Party of Korea, saying: “The violent, illegal activities by Chinese fishing boats are beyond a tolerable level. I would say they are not fishermen but pirates.”

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the KCG “should not have been operating in that part of the sea” because it was a “violation of the their joint fishing agreement.” He was referring to the 2001 Korea-China Fisheries Agreement. One notable feature of the agreement is that it provides for joint patrols of fishing vessels in a Transitional Zone (TZ) on each side of the Provisional Waters Zone (PMZ) in the Yellow Sea — an area of positive collaboration between the two countries.

Read the full story at The Rand Corporation

Tilapia has a terrible reputation. Does it deserve it?

October 24th, 2016 — When it comes to fish, no species brings out the haters like tilapia.

Read up on it, and you’ll find tilapia described with words like “muddy” and “earthy”; there are entire forum threads devoted to its inferiority. This very newspaper, back in 2007, called it “the fish that chefs love to hate.”

Should we really be so hard on this fast-growing freshwater fish?

In the world of food, there aren’t too many propositions that get universal agreement, but here’s one: Our oceans are overfished. If we’re going to continue to eat fish, and to feed it to the people scheduled to join us on this planet in the coming years, we have to farm it. And if we’re going to farm fish, an adaptable, hardy fish like tilapia is an excellent candidate.

Yet a combination of rumors and credible reports works against it. Perhaps you’ve heard that tilapia are raised in cesspools and live on poop? Even the USDA says there is — or, at least, used to be — some truth in that. The agency’s 2009 report on Chinese imports notes that “Fish are often raised in ponds where they feed on waste from poultry and livestock.”

Before we meet that fact with a chorus of “ewww,” it’s worth noting that turning feces into fish would be the agricultural equivalent of spinning straw into gold. Although there are important safety concerns in that kind of system, if you can manage those risks, you’ve got one of the most sustainable foods going. It’s a downright Rumplestiltskinnian miracle, and we should root for it, not against it.

The question is whether that still happens. To find out, I went to the source: Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which rates seafood choices based on whether they have been responsibly fished or farmed. Seafood Watch lists tilapia from nine different sources. Four (from Peru, Canada, Ecuador and the United States) are rated “Best Choices,” another four (from China, Taiwan, Mexico and Indonesia) are “Good Alternatives,” and only one (from Colombia) is rated “Avoid.” I asked Ryan Bigelow, the Seafood Watch program’s engagement manager, to give me a rundown on the sustainability issues.

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

Satellite Tracking Spots Suspicious Activity from 12 Chinese Fishing Vessels in Peruvian Waters

October 17th, 2016 — At least a dozen Chinese vessels have illegally fished inside Peru’s national waters between January 2015 and September 2016, according to data analyzed by the satellite tracking platform Global Fishing Watch. This data suggests that over the course of the last year, Hong Pu5, Shung Feng 002 and several other vessels entered Peruvian waters at least once to fish in violation of international law.

Global Fishing Watch — a joint initiative of Oceana, SkyTruth and Google — uses navigation technology known as the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to track the movements of nearly 40,000 commercial fishing vessels around the world. AIS transmits a vessel’s identity, type, location, course and speed. Global Fishing Watch’s algorithm uses this information to identify fishing patterns, which helps fisheries officials and enforcement agencies spot potential criminal activity.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), illegal fishing in Peru is responsible for $360 million in losses each year. Peru is something of a “paradise” for pirate fishing, said Juan Carlos Sueiro, Oceana Peru’s fisheries director.

While neighbors Colombia, Chile and Ecuador have ratified a new FAO treaty aimed at curbing the trade in illegal fish in port cities, Peru has dragged its heels. As a result, Sueiro said, Chinese and other foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing can freely dock, refuel, buy food and offload their catch in Peru.

Read the full story at Oceana