Saving Seafood

Aquaculture drives aquatic food yields to new high

June 30, 2022 — The production of wild and farm-raised fish, shellfish and algae reached record levels in 2020, and future increases could be vital to fighting world hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Wednesday.

Driven by sustained growth in aquaculture,  and aquatic farming together hauled in 214 million tonnes, the UN agency said in a report.

The total first-sale value of 2020 production topped $400 million, with $265 million coming from aquaculture, a sector poised for further expansion.

These trend lines are good news for a world facing price hikes and  due to the war in Ukraine, disrupted supply chains, and inflation.

Read the full story from Phys.org

 

Seafood biz braces for losses of jobs, fish due to sanctions

March 31, 2022 — The worldwide seafood industry is steeling itself for price hikes, supply disruptions and potential job losses as new rounds of economic sanctions on Russia make key species such as cod and crab harder to come by.

The latest round of U.S. attempts to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine includes bans on imports of seafood, alcohol and diamonds. The U.S. is also stripping “most favored nation status” from Russia. Nations around the world are taking similar steps.

Russia is one of the largest producers of seafood in the world, and was the fifth-largest producer of wild-caught fish, according to a 2020 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Russia is not one of the biggest exporters of seafood to the U.S., but it’s a world leader in exports of cod (the preference for fish and chips in the U.S.). It’s also a major supplier of crabs and Alaska pollock, widely used in fast-food sandwiches and processed products like fish sticks.

The impact is likely to be felt globally, as well as in places with working waterfronts. One of those is Maine, where more than $50 million in seafood products from Russia passed through Portland in 2021, according to federal statistics.

Read the full story at AP News

Somalia plans to streamline fishing permits to fight IUU

July 28, 2021 — Somalia, plagued with persistent incidents of piracy and rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, is aiming to tighten its fishing licensing regime in order to end loopholes that result in illegal activity.

Amid claims of deep-rooted corruption within Somalia’s fishing industry, the country’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR), under the leadership of Minister Abdillahi Bidhan Warsame, plans to eliminate uncertainty brought about by each federal state in the country issuing separate fishing permits that other federal states do not recognize – creating loopholes for IUU fishing operators to thrive along the Somalia’s 3,330-kilometer coastline.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

From Maine’s warming waters, kelp emerges as a potentially lucrative cash crop

June 28, 2021 — One bright, brisk morning last month, Colleen Francke steered her skiff a mile off the coast of Falmouth and cut the gas. A few white buoys bobbed in straight lines on the water. Francke reached down and hoisted a rope.

She has been lobstering for a decade and a half, she says, but as climate change warms local waters and forces lobsters northward, she’s been finding it harder to envision a future in that industry.

So, for the last two years, she’s been developing a new source of income. Heaving the rope aloft, she showed off her bounty: ribbons of brown, curly sugar kelp, raised on her 10-acre undersea farm.

Kelp, a seaweed more often thought of as a nuisance by fishermen, is emerging as a potentially lucrative crop, hailed for its many uses as a miracle food to an ingredient in bioplastics to a revolutionary way to feed beef cattle. And Maine officials, confronting a likely decline of the state’s iconic lobster fishing industry in coming decades, are now looking to kelp farming as a possible economic and environmental savior.

The state is working with local institutions to support training and grants for entrepreneurs such as Francke willing to move into kelp farming or other aquaculture ventures. It also labeled kelp a “natural climate solution” in its recently-released Climate Action plan. The goal, officials say, is to dramatically expand kelp farming as part of a reinvention of Maine’s seafood industry — and imagining a future in which kelp from Maine is held in something akin to the esteem that Maine lobster is now.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Aquaculture advocates want to bring more Oregon-grown fish from farm to table

June 22, 2021 — While the word “farm” might conjure visions of corn planted in neat rows, Luke Fitzpatrick’s acreage looks, feels and functions more like wetlands. Chirps and squawks emanate from the ponds covering his patch of land just a short drive from Salem.

Fitzpatrick called out avian creatures by name as he maneuvered an off-road vehicle around the farm on a sunny Thursday this spring. Stilt sandpiper. Cinnamon teal. Western meadowlark, Oregon’s state bird.

He pulled to a stop, got out and dipped into a duck blind filled with decoy mallards and rolling desk chairs to gaze out over his crop growing beneath the glassy surface of the water.

“I’m tied to the land,” he said. “I love it out here.”

Fitzpatrick is a fish farmer. He raises and sells warm-water species like bass, bluegill, crappie and catfish through a practice called aquaculture. It’s basically just farming in water, and it’s used to grow a variety of finfish, shellfish and aquatic plants.

Aquaculture has become a much bigger part of the global food system in recent years. The world now produces more seafood on farms than it catches wild, by volume, and the fish farming industry is still growing rapidly.

Read the full story at OPB

Hook to plate: how blockchain tech could turn the tide for sustainable fishing

June 9, 2021 — In recent weeks, a new $50m (£35m) hybrid vessel set sail from Mauritius and headed out into the Southern Ocean where the crew will spend three months longline fishing for the Patagonian toothfish. By the time the fish are brought back, processed and sent to customers, consumers will know where and when that specific fish was caught, which boat landed it, who processed it and which certifications have been met. The technology enabling this is blockchain.

“From the day it’s landed to when it ends up on someone’s plate, blockchain gives toothfish traceability right from the start,” says Steve Paku, captain of the Cape Arkona. “People can just scan the barcode and the whole story is right there in front of them.”

Blockchain is just one way that fisheries are trying to ensure better traceability from hook to plate but it is garnering a lot of interest. Blockchain cannot be tampered with and the data can be accessed by everyone along the supply chain, from certification schemes to the final consumer. Because it is digital, decentralised and updated in real time, a blockchain tag contains valuable information that a physical label never could. In combination with DNA testing to prove the specific species of fish, blockchain could play a role in reducing fraud in the seafood industry.

This also matters from a conservation perspective. More than a third of fish populations are overfished, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO). Guaranteeing where and how a fish has been caught can help ensure that the catch has been made in an area with sustainable fish populations. It can also help tackle the problem of bycatch. In degrading marine ecosystems, bycatch is detrimental to biodiversity and puts additional, unnecessary strain on marine wildlife. Young fish get caught up in nets with too small a mesh, turtles and dolphins can get entangled in gillnets, and seabirds, including endangered albatross, get injured by hooks unless deterrents are put in place.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Sharing Information on Fisheries Activities Across International Boundaries Has Benefits

May 13, 2021 — According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), one-third of fish stocks are overfished while another 60% cannot sustain increases in fishing, a problem exacerbated by illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. It doesn’t have to be this way, and a recent study suggests that States can better detect and curtail IUU fishing through improved sharing of fisheries information.

One reason overfishing is such a persistent problem is that fishing vessels frequently operate across international boundaries, and many governments lack the technological, operational, and institutional capacity they need to collect, analyze, and share information about what’s happening in their waters.

The benefits of information sharing

The study, by the UK-based Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), found that sharing fisheries data—including which vessels are operating where and how—can make the involved States both more aware of and more able to combat IUU fishing. This finding holds even when only one government shares such information, unreciprocated.

Such cooperation could be enormously helpful, for example, when a vessel flagged to one country fishes in another’s waters and then offloads the catch in the port of a third State. The benefits grow as countries increase the amount of information shared.

Read the full story at Pew Charitable Trusts

How COVID-19 Affects the Fishing Industry

April 19, 2021 — The global seafood market is a huge industry that employs millions of people. Valued at $159 billion in 2019, it will grow to almost $200 billion by 2027. The system is a network of formal and informal producers and distributors, retailers and consumers. In low-income countries, the fishing industry is especially important as a way to reduce poverty. Developing countries employ 97% of the people, directly and indirectly, working in the fishing industry. About 90% of the fishing workforce are small-scale fishermen. By exporting seafood, low-income countries can boost their economies through the oceanic sector. The fishing industry also helps to increase nutrition and food security for the impoverished. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has devastated the fishing industry, just as it has most other industries.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Fisheries

The pandemic has disrupted supply chains and lowered demand, reducing profits in the industry. Lockdowns and curfews have also reduced catch sizes, which in turn means that fisherfolk make less per day of work. What they do not sell often goes to waste as cold storage is expensive and not widely available to small-scale fishermen. The most affected groups are small and medium-scale fisheries, especially in rural areas, as they lack the resources that large-scale fisheries have to be able to transition and adapt during COVID-19. Furthermore, they do not have the safety net of social protection programs that large-scale fisheries may have.

Many developing countries with large fishing sectors have been struggling to offset the effects of COVID-19. In Thailand and India, migrant fish workers were met with lockdowns and nowhere to sell their products. Traders in India and Myanmar reported a 15% drop in fish prices post-lockdowns. In China, a shift to frozen and processed seafood left fresh-catch fishers floundering.

Read the full story at Borgen Magazine

Report finds gaps in RFMOs’ measures targeting eradication of tuna IUU

March 26, 2021 — The global fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated tuna-fishing activities has been slowed by significant gaps in the implementation of proposed counter-measures by five tuna regional fishery management organizations (RFMOs), according to a new report by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation.

The report found the implementation of key elements, such as the requirement for advance notice of port entry, denial of port entry or use, minimum inspections levels, and minimum standards for training of inspectors, has been inadequate.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

JULIE KUCHEPATOV: Northern Lights: The women behind our seafood

March 8, 2021 — Fifty percent of people involved in global seafood production are women. But you may not know it because few women occupy leadership positions in the sector and seldom participate in critical discussions and decision-making about precious fisheries resources.

Seafood and Gender Equality was founded in 2020 to address a critical need for gender equality in the seafood sector, build women’s empowerment, and encourage the industry to evolve into a more diverse, inclusive and equitable career choice for people of all genders. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, gender equality means that the different behavior, aspirations, and needs of women and men are considered, valued and favored equally.

Women play a significant role in U.S. fisheries and can be found fishing from Alaska’s Bristol Bay to the Gulf of Maine, and they are particularly concentrated in pre- and post-harvest activities. Women in U.S. fisheries have been celebrated by organizations, such as the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute in its Strong at Sea campaign and in online publications like MarthaStewart.com.

While there is much to celebrate, the information on how many women make a career in this industry and how they participate is spotty, difficult to find, and not updated regularly. But we know that men continue to dominate.

“Knowing how women participate directly in fishing and within fishing families and communities is critical to predicting and understanding responses to fishery changes — from individuals, to families, all the way up to communities,” said Marysia Szymkowiak, lead author of a recent NOAA study on women’s participation in global fisheries.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman