Saving Seafood

NGOs condemn EU Parliament’s decision to ‘overfish Atlantic waters’

October 29, 2018 — The European Parliament has voted to approve the multiannual plan for management of north-east Atlantic waters, despite the plan’s allowance for unsustainable fishing, said Oceana, ClientEarth and Seas at Risk.

The Western Waters, an area that stretches from Portugal to France, Ireland and the UK, is a heavily-used fishery for cod, haddock, plaice, sole and Norway lobster. In 2017, the area yielded 368,000 metric tons of produce, with a combined first sale value of roughly €1.4 billion.

However, current estimates suggest that as much as 41% of the region’s stocks are overfished. Environmental NGOs have been putting pressure on the EU Parliament to reduce catch quotas in the region as part of the 2013 commitment in the common fisheries policy (CFP) to end overfishing in European waters by 2020 at the latest.

The latest vote has agreed to allow fishing at levels above the scientifically-advised maximum sustainable yield, a move that many NGOs have condemned as being adverse to the objectives laid out in the CFP.

“The Parliament has agreed fishing mortality ranges that, at their upper limit, can exceed the fishing rates above scientifically advised sustainable levels,” said Andrea Ripol, fisheries policy offer at Seas At Risk. “This means that stocks will not be restored to healthy levels, bringing negative socioeconomic impacts in the longer term.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

An act of cod: Alaska-based fleet gets a gift from Board of Fish

October 24, 2018 — Alaska’s inshore cod fishery got a significant upgrade at the state’s Board of Fisheries meeting on Friday, Oct. 19.

The board voted 6 to 1 to increase the fleet’s allocation from 6.4 percent of the total Bering Sea cod quota to 8 percent with an annual increase of 1 percent until it tops out at 15. The Under Sixty Cod Harvesters, a trade group that represents about half of the statewater fleet, had been lobbying to get up to 10 percent and were pleasantly surprised with the 15 percent allocation.

The fishery of pot-cod boats under 60 feet started in 2012 with 1.2 percent of the total Bering Sea cod share. Proponents of the increase argued that the Alaska Constitution mandates development of the state’s resources, prioritizing fisheries with low-impact gear.

“We applaud this board for recognizing how important these open-access statewater fishing opportunities are for our community-based fishermen, and for the young fishermen coming up in the industry,” says Todd Hoppe, president of the Under Sixty Cod Harvesters.

Opponents of the increase largely represent stakeholders in the federal fishery, from which the quota will be siphoned to expand the statewater quota. That includes the freezer-longliner fleet, which has about 50 percent of the quota, and the catcher vessels, which have 21.5 percent.

The move comes at an especially tough time for these historic stakeholders in Bering Sea cod.

“There’s very little recruitment showing up in the stock, and a big chunk of that stock is moving to the north,” says Brent Paine, executive director of the United Catcher Boats, a trade group that represents about 50 trawlers, ranging from about 80 to 130 feet.

Paine expects the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to cut the TAC by 20 percent this year, on top of about 16 percent last year.

“So you get that reduction combined with this statewater increase, and now it’s starting to hurt the federal participants,” Paine says. “It’s tough to get a fair shot [at a state meeting]for federal participants because we’re second-class citizens. The statewater fleet walks into the Board of Fish and says, ‘We’re Alaskans; this is an entry-level fishery… Give us the fish.’ And that’s what happens.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Grouper, snapper, cod? Mislabeling is rampant in the seafood industry

October 22, 2018 — Recent investigations and studies have shown mislabeling – sometimes due to error but often the result of outright fraud – is rampant in the seafood industry, showing up both in the marketplace and on restaurant menus.

One study of retailers found seafood like grouper, cod and snapper may be mislabeled up to 87 percent of the time, swapped out for less desirable and cheaper varieties. For example, only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper were actually red snapper.

CBS News’ Meg Oliver spoke to Vinny Millbourn, who hails from a long line of fishermen. The fishmonger at Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Company in Brooklyn, New York, specializes in local, domestic and traceable species. His storefront acts as a fish market, raw bar and restaurant.

“It’s a very big problem and the issue is once it’s prepared, there’s really no way to check it other than DNA testing which a lot of companies are now doing,” Millbourn said. “So I have a have a network of small boat fisherman and wharfs all over the country that are shipping to me daily through the air or by truck. And we are processing every single day to bring in high-quality fresh seafood.”

Millbourn not only knows where his fish come from he can tell a tale about each one. That personal connection is hard to find, but is a good sign. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, and less than one percent is tested by the government.

Read the full story at CBS News

Ups and downs for Alaska cod and pollock

October 19, 2018 — Quotas for next year’s groundfish fisheries reflect ups and downs for Alaska’s key species — pollock and cod — and the stocks appear to be heading north to colder waters.

The bulk of Alaska’s landings come from waters federal waters. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council reviews stock assessments for groundfish each October, sets preliminary catches for the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, and updates them as new data become available.

If the proposals get the go-ahead in December, the Bering Sea pollock TAC will increase slightly to nearly 1.4 million metric tons, or over 3 billion pounds of pollock.

For Pacific cod, the Bering Sea TAC could be reduced to 350 million pounds, a drop of 64 million pounds from this year.

The cod numbers might change as a result of big differences between the 2017 and 2018 survey results in southeastern and northern waters, where large numbers of fish appear to be migrating. Over the year, the cod biomass dropped 21 percent in the southern region but increased 95 percent in the northern area.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Largest Pacific cod catchers look to hook investor for fleet renewal, not sell up

October 12, 2018 — Clipper Seafoods and Blue North Fisheries’ shareholders are looking for an investor in a combined business to help finance a renewal of the fleet, but not for anyone to take a majority stake, sources familiar with their thinking told Undercurrent News.

The owners of Clipper and Blue North, the two largest US Pacific cod longline companies, are looking for an investor to come in and take a significant share of a combined company, “even up to 49.9%”, as one put it, but they’re not interested in getting out of the business. Part of the reason for seeking investment is fleet renewal, sources told Undercurrent.

In late August, Undercurrent reported the two had brought in Zachary Scott, a Seattle, Washington-based mergers and acquisitions advisory firm, to advise on a possible sale. Sources said a full sale could be a possible outcome, depending on the price, but it is not the preference of the shareholders, who want to stay involved.

Zachary Scott, which did not respond to a request for comment from Undercurrent, has sent an information memorandum on the combined companies to over 30 trade and investor players, sources said.

Dave Little, the main shareholder in Clipper, and Michael and Patrick Burns, who control Blue North, all pioneers of the longline fishery in Alaska, did not respond to a request for comment from Undercurrent.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Global Bottom-Trawling Footprint ‘Substantially Overestimated’, According to New Research

October 10, 2018 — About a quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean comes from bottom trawling, a method that involves towing a net along the seabed on continental shelves and slopes to catch shrimp, cod, rockfish, sole and other kinds of bottom-dwelling fish and shellfish. The technique impacts these seafloor ecosystems because other marine life and habitats can be unintentionally killed or disturbed as nets pass across the seafloor.

Scientists agree that extensive bottom trawling can negatively affect marine ecosystems, but the central question — how much of the total area, or footprint, is trawled worldwide — has been hard to nail down.

A new analysis that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Australasia shows that only 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. Most trawl fishing happens in this depth range along continental shelves and slopes in the world’s oceans. The study focused on this depth range, covering an area of about 7.8 million square kilometers of ocean.

The paper, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brought together 57 scientists based in 22 countries, with expertise in mapping fishing activity from satellite monitoring and fishing logbook data. It shows that the footprint of bottom-trawl fishing on continental shelves and slopes across the world’s oceans often has been substantially overestimated.

Read the full story at Eco Magazine

 

Bering Sea Pacific cod move north as survey sees fewer fish in east

October 10, 2018 — As was the case recently with pollock in Alaska’s southeastern Bering Sea, US government scientists found a surprising result when they surveyed Pacific cod stocks this summer: a large number of fish apparently moved north.

Staff at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Center are in the process of developing stock assessments that the North Pacific Fishery Management Council will use in making allowable biological catch (ABC) and total allowable catch (TAC) levels for Pacific cod in the Bering Sea for 2019.

However, one key input that will figure into the model that NOAA is making to estimate the Pacific cod biomass — the results of the 2018 southeastern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey — has declined significantly.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Fishing regulators approve measures to conserve Atlantic herring

September 26, 2018 — New England fishing regulators on Tuesday approved two measures aimed at conserving the dwindling Atlantic herring stock.

The New England Fishery Management Council approved a rule that “establishes a long-term policy that will guide the council in setting catch limits into the future” at a meeting in Plymouth.

Such an option will result in more herring being left in the water “to serve as forage and be part of the overall ecosystem,” according to the council. Under that proposal, catch limits can be adjusted based on new information.

Additionally, the council approved a measure aimed at preventing midwater trawlers from fishing too close to shore for herring. The boats are banned from fishing within 12 miles of shore, an area stretching from the Canadian border through Rhode Island, that includes areas east and southeast of Cape Cod, according to the council.

Recent surveys have found that the Atlantic herring population in the Gulf of Maine is at risk of collapse. The fish provide a crucial source of food to species that include cod, striped bass, and humpback whales.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

USTR cuts cod, pollock fillets from final China tariffs list

September 18, 2018 — The US Trade Representative (USTR) has excluded frozen fillets of Alaska pollock and cod from its final list of products to be hit with 10% tariffs.

According to a statement from the USTR, the tariffs will come into play on Sept. 24 at 10%, and then go to 25% on Jan. 1, 2019.

The proposed list (which you can see here), published on July 10, at the direction of US president Donald Trump, included the following customs codes, all of which have been omitted from the final list, which you can see in full here.

This will mean that cod and pollock from Alaskan fishing companies which is sold to China and brought back to the US as fillets will not be hit with the tariffs.

The tariffs still apply to around $200 billion-worth of Chinese products, the USTR said.

Still on the list is fillets of salmon, while other salmon products are also on the list.

Imported under the HS code 0304.81.50 and described “Other frozen salmon fillets”, fillets are of farm-raised salmon and wild salmon, such as sockeye and pink salmon. This will impact Alaska’s wild salmon fishery.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Five Wild Days Aboard a New England Squid Boat

September 12, 2018 — Corey Harris wasn’t concerned about the storm. The captain of Rhonda Denise, a 77-foot commercial trawler, he’d been stuck in port all week, as two nor’easters, in early March, slammed the New England coast back-to-back. Now a third brewed offshore. But Harris saw an opportunity. “We’ll thread the needle between the storms,” he told me over the phone. We’d catch as much squid as possible, then haul ass back to port before the next system hit. Bring seasickness. medicine, he added. “It’ll be rough—but worth it.”

On the Thursday of our departure, the Port of Galilee, in Point Judith, Rhode Island, was full of boats but empty of people. If you’ve eaten calamari at a seafood shack or a little red-sauce joint, odds are it crossed the dock here in Point Judith. In 2016, the village’s 119 vessels landed 22.6 million pounds of squid, valued at $28.6 million—its best haul to date. It’s the 15th-highest-earning seaport in the country and first in squid on the Atlantic seaboard. By all measures, it’s the calamari capital of the East Coast. And with ongoing downturns in cod, flounder, and haddock, scores of commercial fishermen, not only here but also up and down the New England shore, now depend on squid to stay afloat in a notoriously unpredictable industry.

Harris met me in the parking lot. Among the local fishermen, he’s one of “the few young guys worth a shit,” a longtime captain told me. He’s also something of an anomaly. The salutatorian of his high school, in Babylon, New York, he dropped out of his university’s pre-dental program, in 2007, to work on trawlers, drawn to fishing for reasons that he can’t quite explain. Soft-spoken and ambitious, with a tight red beard, he started as a deckhand on Rhonda Denise, made captain by age 22, and became a co-owner a few years later. Now, at 31, he’s still 20 years younger than the majority of guys on the dock. “The storms have kept most boats in,” he told me. “There’s no fish on the market. Prices will be high.” There was no need to worry about the weather, he added—as long as we made it back by Monday.

Read the full story at Men’s Journal