Saving Seafood

The Global Push to Share Ocean Data

October 26, 2020 — It’s often said that we know more about deep space than the deep sea. Marine scientists are working to change that. In recent years, technologies to sense, interpret and model the ocean have become more powerful, widespread and cheaper to install and use. Smart buoys bristling with sensors bob in the water and gather data on temperature, salinity, light and noise. Sensitive listening devices towed behind ships scan surrounding waters for life. And samples from good old-fashioned buckets and bottles thrown over the side of research vessels still play an important role in examining water.

As a result of all this activity, marine scientists are swimming in data. Much of it is collected by national oceanographic services or research groups scattered across the world. The quality of this data varies, and so do the ways it is gathered, stored, organised and formatted. All of which presents a problem. Given the ocean is a shared resource, and one that is growing in importance for a number of environmental, social and economic reasons, it would be better if all of these overlapping, conflicting and incompatible data streams could be organised – or at the very least, better coordinated and made more accessible.

“In the past, the gathering of marine data was quite territorial, with people collecting data within different sectors and sometimes being quite possessive,” says Clare Postlethwaite, an oceanographer who coordinates the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) in the UK. “Now there’s a big push to get data into a single place for users to find.”

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

Working group of nations go after China’s flags of convenience

October 22, 2020 — Fisheries officials from the European Union, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States have met to discuss cooperation on limiting the use of flags of convenience by distant-water fishery companies involved in illegal fishing.

The online meeting, which took place 15 October, follows a report by the advocacy group Environmental Justice Foundation criticizing the process whereby fishing companies buy flags from flag states, which are then unwilling or unable to monitor the activity of problem trawlers. The report, “Off the Hook: How Flags of Convenience Let Illegal Fishing Go Unpunished,” details the damage that flags of convenience cause to fisheries and how they are used to conduct illegal fishing. In the report, EJF calls for sanctions to end the practice and more transparency surrounding the registration of fishing vessels.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

WTO: EU can impose billions of dollars in tariffs on US goods, including seafood

October 19, 2020 — The European Union can impose tariffs of up to USD 4 billion (EUR 3.4 billion) on imported products from the United States as a countermeasure for illegal subsidies given to American aircraft-maker Boeing, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has ruled.

The decision, made on 13 October, builds upon the WTO’s earlier finding that recognized the Boeing subsidies were illegal.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Why Fishing Could Sink Britain’s Brexit Deal With Europe

October 7, 2020 — Twenty or so small boats, slung with orange floats and lobster pots and bearing banners reading “SAVE BRITAIN’S FISH” and “COASTAL COMMUNITIES COUNT,” chugged out of the harbor into the bay. The flotilla set off rockets and flares, and orange and white smoke billowed out over the English Channel. The unusual episode—part protest, part distress call—was replicated in port towns across Britain in April 2018. “You get pushed that far, you’ve got to do something,” Dave Pitman, 65, a third-generation trawlerman who took part in the demonstration, said in an interview this August.

At issue was the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), a European Union agreement that gives European boats access to British waters and which, critics claim, has decimated the U.K.’s fishing industry. The country remains in the CFP while it negotiates its exit from the EU, which Fishing for Leave spokesman Arron Banks said in a statement at the time gives Europe the opportunity “to cull what’s left of the UK fleet.” He added, “Brexit creates a golden opportunity to regain 70 per cent of the UK’s fisheries resources and rejuvenate a multi-billion pound industry for the nation.”

Read the full story at Foreign Policy

EU Eyes Tariffs Against the U.S., Putting Economy at Risk

October 1, 2020 — The transatlantic trade conflict isn’t showing signs of winding down any time soon, and a ruling from the World Trade Organization means that a fresh round of retaliatory tariffs could jeopardize the nascent economic recoveries in both the U.S. and the European Union.

The WTO gave the EU authorization to impose tariffs on $4 billion of U.S. exports over illegal government aid provided to Boeing Co., according to two people familiar with the decision. The EU previously said it would act on the levies immediately to counteract $7.5 billion of tariffs Washington placed on European goods in a separate case involving Toulouse, France-based Airbus SE.

The judgment comes at a delicate moment, with the U.S. presidential election just over a month away and as the U.S. and the EU struggle to recover from coronavirus-induced recessions. The EU tariffs will target coal producers, farmers and fisheries, in addition to aircraft makers, all politically important industries for President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress.

Read the full story at Forbes

US Trade Commission hears testimony on CETA’s impact on US lobster exports

October 1, 2020 — The U.S. International Trade Commission heard testimony Thursday, 1 October, on the effect the trade agreement between Canada and the European Union has had on America’s lobster industry.

The Canada-E.U. pact, known as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), has had a detrimental effect on U.S. lobstermen and exporters since it took effect three years ago, according to Robert DeHaan, the vice president for government affairs for the National Fisheries Institute. DeHaan said the deal meant U.S. exporters faced 8 percent tariffs on live lobsters and up to 20 percent on value-added products while their Canadian counterparts paid no levies on the same products, providing them with a significant competitive advantage.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Maine lobstermen to harvest $50 million windfall

September 18, 2020 — A wave of government money is heading toward local fishermen hurt by trade wars and COVID-19, and officials say it will arrive sometime in November.

The Trump administration announced on September 9 that Maine lobstermen will receive $50 million because they’ve been hurt by the 25 percent tariffs China slapped on lobster in July 2018. The program pays 50 cents for every pound of lobster landed in 2019, up to $250,000 per person.

“I’m happy the boats got their relief, but the timing is suspect,” said Travis Fifield, Stonington lobster dealer, in an interview. Only fishermen, and no one else in the supply chain, will get part of that $50 million, Fifield said.

The announcement follows the European Union’s decision in late August to drop its tariff on U.S. lobsters for five years. Local seafood dealers have said that will help the lobster industry.

Another $20 million in federal money will be distributed to a broad swath of Maine’s fishing industry, including lobstermen, processors, aquaculturists and dealers. Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Commissioner Patrick Kelliher said in a memo he hopes the checks are mailed in November. That money, which comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was authorized by Congress under the CARES Act in the spring. To get the money, people have to show they’ve suffered a 35 percent drop in income because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read the full story at the Penobscot Bay Press

Move to increase EU’s seafood supply-chain transparency welcomed by environmental groups

September 14, 2020 — The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment (ENVI) has voted in favor of steps that would bring more transparency to E.U. fisheries activities and traceability to seafood supply chains.

ENVI’s proposed amendments to the fisheries control regulation include:

  • Vessel tracking and catch reporting to be required for all E.U. vessels.
  • The use of cameras on part of the fleet to ensure full and verifiable documentation of seafood catches.
  • Migrating the current paper-based seafood traceability systems into a digital format.
  • Information on fisheries monitoring and control efforts to be made public.
  • Making the sanctioning system more effective and considerate of environmental rules in all member states.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Brexit without an EU-UK fisheries agreement would bring great risk, campaigners warn

September 11, 2020 — Allowing the United Kingdom and the European Union to part ways at the end of this year without an agreement on fisheries in place post-Brexit would open the door to overfishing and pose a serious risk to many fish stocks and marine ecosystems, campaign groups have warned.

On 8 September, the E.U. and U.K. began a new round of post-Brexit trade deal negotiations, with fisheries and fishing rights again expected to take center stage as one of the main obstacles to a broader deal.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Has Boris forgotten our fishing history?

September 10, 2020 — Why, then, does fishing stir people up? It’s not jobs or money. According to Commons Library research, the UK fishing industry employs about 24,000 people and earns around £1.4bn per annum. As a proportion of Britain’s £2.1 trillion 2019 GDP, that’s small change. And with 27,000 employees in the UK alone, Amazon provides more jobs today than the entire British fishing sector.

The BBC recently had a go, suggesting that ‘supporters of Brexit’ see fishing as ‘a symbol of sovereignty that will now be regained’. But it goes deeper than abstract ideas of control. The environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth argues that if we’re to find national identity anywhere, it’s in the relationship we have with our landscape we inhabit. And for the inhabitants of the British Isles, no matter which wave of migration brought us here since this landmass was settled in about 900,000BC, that identity has been bound up with the sea.

Wherever you live in the British Isles, it’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the sea. We have around 19,500 miles of coastline: more than Brazil. The sea has sustained and shaped Britain for thousands of years.

The usual angle on this story is about commerce and colonisation. In its pomp, the might of the British Empire was inseparable from its maritime culture. This fact, and Britain’s decline from imperial grandeur, underpinned the recent controversy over singing “Rule Britannia” at the Proms . But so far the culture war has largely ignored those working-class men who plied the same waves not to conquer or trade, but to catch fish.

Fishing has been part of British culture since time immemorial, but especially on the North Sea coast. The monks of Wyke Hull were granted a special licence to fish in the Humber by King Henry II in the 12th century. Then in the 19th century, when the arrival of railways opened up new inland markets for fresh fish, a wave of migration to the area made Hull a fishing boom town. Often-illiterate fishermen set sail in ‘fishing smacks’, light sail-powered vessels of around 50 feet with a crew of around four men, to trawl for deep-sea fish as far afield as the Faroes and Iceland.

Read the full story at UnHerd