September 1, 2020 — The National Restaurant Association is launching a nationwide consumer advertising campaign to encourage diners to come back to eat at restaurants, as they continue to feel significant financial impact from dining room closures due to COVID-19.
The multimedia Restaurant Revival campaign taps into the sights and sounds associated with dining out and asks diners, “Doesn’t dining out sound good?” the NRA said in a press release.
August 31, 2020 — The following was released by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council:
Meeting materials, including committee agendas and overviews, decision documents, and presentations are now available for the the September 14-17, 2020 meeting of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place in Charleston, South Carolina. Due to ongoing concerns about COVID-19 and public safety, the Council meeting will be held via webinar.
The Council meeting will be available via webinar each day as it occurs. Registration is required and can be completed in advance by visiting the Council’s website at: https://safmc.net/september-2020-council-meeting-details/.
A formal public comment session will be held on Wednesday, September 16th beginning at 4:00 PM. An online comment form is also now available.
August 31, 2020 — The pandemic has kept us all closely tethered to home for the past five months, so it was nice for us here at FishOn to go over the bridge and up the line last Wednesday to cover an actual in-person event. No Zoom. No webinar. Just journalism in the great outdoors of Wakefield.
We covered the last public hearing conducted by the New England Fishery Management Council on the ever-contentious Amendment 23 — the measure to set future monitoring levels for sector-based groundfish vessels in the Northeast fishery.
The council, which is expected to take final action on the measure at its September meeting, did a good job of hosting the public hearing meeting under a tent in the parking lot of the Sheraton Four Points hotel.
Folks were masked and properly socially distanced. Capacity was 50 and about 20 fishing stakeholders attended the meeting, so there was plenty of room. Under the tent, it felt like junior high school detention (or so we understand) where they separate all the troublemakers as far apart as possible.
“It was a pretty big effort,” said Tom Nies, the council’s executive director said about a half hour before the scheduled start of the hearing. “The hotel was helpful. But we’re still working on some details.”
August 28, 2020 — Hundreds of seafood processing workers come to Petersburg every year, creating a high-risk scenario for COVID transmission. Workers at the town’s two processing giants – OBI Seafoods and Trident Seafoods – live on a closed campus. But there are also Petersburg residents who work at the plants. So the local COVID testing program aims to identify and isolate positive cases before they can transmit from town into one of the plants.
At the beginning of the summer, seafood companies went to great lengths to safely fly the seasonal workforce to Alaskan towns like Petersburg. It took careful planning and millions of dollars to test and quarantine the workers.
“It could decimate the economy of the community and also impact the fisheries. We saw that in meat packing situations down south,” said Liz Bacom, manager of infection prevention at the Petersburg Medical Center. “And so they were very aggressive with getting a plan where they tested their seasonal workforce in Seattle before they came up here, and they were automatically quarantined for 14 days.”
As a result, two positive cases – one worker for Trident and one with Ocean Beauty Icicle Seafoods – were detected and isolated this summer.
August 28, 2020 — Maine’s lobster industry last week got a bit of a break—two breaks, actually—with developments from Washington.
First, on August 19, Federal District Judge James Boasberg refused to shut down the lobster fishery as many feared he would. Environmentalists had asked him to do so while the National Marine Fisheries Service comes up with new rules to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
Two days after the judge’s ruling, the Trump administration announced it had made a mini-trade deal with the European Union to remove tariffs on lobsters for the next five years.
“We’re on a roll,” said David Sullivan, representative for the Maine Lobstering Union, in a phone interview.
Paul Anderson, executive director of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, said in an email those two developments were good news for lobstermen. They haven’t had much lately. The COVID-19 pandemic depressed lobster prices by shutting down restaurants, casinos and cruise ships.
“The overall market conditions for lobster are still in flux,” Anderson said. “But we’re still fishing, the shedders are now in the condition that they can be shipped, and domestic consumption and local processing are happening. The price is still low, but it ticked up a bit in Stonington this week.”
August 28, 2020 — The New England Fishery Management Council returned to a semblance of normalcy on Wednesday, holding its first in-person, public meeting of any kind since the COVID-19 pandemic struck about five months ago.
In some ways, the public hearing on Amendment 23 — the measure to set monitoring levels for Northeast sector-based groundfish vessels — was unexplored terrain.
The ninth and final public hearing on the measure was the first al fresco meeting in the history of the council. Capacity was limited to 50, but there was more than enough space. About 20 attendees joined a handful of council staff under the tent in the parking lot of the Sheraton Four Points hotel, next to Route 128.
August 28, 2020 — Americans are eating more seafood and cooking it more often at home, thanks in part to a nationwide campaign rolled out in early April.
The rapid-response Eat Seafood America! campaign, led by Seafood Nutrition Partnership and the Seafood4Health Coalition, was launched to help Americans stay healthy during the COVID-19 public health crisis as well as help boost the U.S. seafood economy, SNP said in a press release.
August 28, 2020 — Georgia has become the latest state in the U.S. to gain approval from NOAA for its plan to allocate its CARES Act funds to relevant seafood industry interests in the state.
The funds are part of a USD 300 million (EUR 252 million) pot of funds allocated to 20 states in May. Each state received a separate portion of the money, with Georgia receiving just over USD 1.9 million (EUR 1.59 million) – among the lowest amounts awarded.
August 27, 2020 — Three hard-hit local communities — the fishing industry, hospitality workers, and the food insecure — have been connected by a pilot program that is providing free sustainable seafood meals to people in need.
Fish to Families is a partnership between the nonprofit San Diego Fishermen’s Working Group and chef Phillip Esteban and the team behind Open Gym, which runs Craft Meals Catering and has several upcoming projects on the docket including White Rice, a Filipino rice bowl food stall in Liberty Public Market, a culinary shop and bookstore called Wordsmith, and WellFed, a Filipino restaurant in National City.
The group, which has already been cooking and distributing thousands of meals via its OneforOne program and a through José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, is collaborating on Fish to Families with I Love to Glean for produce and NOAA Fisheries and California Sea Grant, which are providing educational materials.
More than 2,400 meals have been distributed so far through the Third Avenue Charitable Organization, through homeless outreach programs and other services for seniors and families including Barrio Logan’s Good Neighbor Project, Downtown Senior Centers Luther Tower, and Olivewood Gardens.
August 27, 2020 — The Trump administration is committed to starting an aid program to help the struggling lobster industry, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Wednesday, but the funds to do so will come from the coronavirus stimulus package, not the aid used to bail out farmers after President Trump’s trade war with China.
The lobster industry, like many others during the coronavirus outbreak, has seen losses as markets on cruise ships and restaurants evaporate. But the industry’s real trouble began in 2018 when China retaliated against U.S. trade policies with tariffs that rose as high as 35 percent.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) missed the Aug. 24 deadline set out in an order from Trump that directs the agency to establish an aid program similar to the nearly $30 billion bailout established for farmers last year.
Instead, Perdue said lobstermen and women will soon be able to apply for aid through the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP), a $19 billion program established for farmers in April in response to COVID-19.
“We are working on and the president is aware we are working on our big CFAP 2 program of which lobster would be included as directed by the memorandum so we’ll be releasing those details shortly,” Perdue said in response to a question from The Hill.