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COVID-19 Took A Bite Out of US Seafood Industry

December 1, 2020 — The US seafood industry faced massive declines in the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and will need targeted federal assistance to recover, a new study shows.

“Seafood is part of the narrative that I would say doesn’t get as much attention as something like agriculture,” says Halley Froehlich, aquaculture and fisheries professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

“And that certainly appears to be the case when we’re looking at something like the CARES Act, the federal funding source specifically passed to provide economic relief in the US,” she says.

That is, in large part, due to the fact that policymakers lack sufficient real-time data to see how the seafood industry has fared in the time of lockdowns and social distancing, says lead author Easton White, an ecologist at the University of Vermont.

“One difficulty is that a lot of this data isn’t released until months and years later,” White says. From the boat to the table, data is generated that must be gathered and processed before it gets released, he says.

The pandemic is a rapidly evolving situation and the seafood industry can’t afford to wait. So, to get a big-picture look at the early effects of COVID-19 on US fisheries and seafood consumption, the researchers synthesized multiple sources from across the seafood supply chain, including some unconventional real-time data sets.

Read the full story at Futurity

Study questions just how much seafood the US actually imports

June 25, 2019 — A recently published study has called into question a cornerstone policy argument for segments of the American seafood industry.

For years, government officials, aquaculture proponents, industry experts, and even environmentalists have consistently cited that 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. comes from foreign markets. However, three researchers say that oft-repeated statistic is misleading, and that the actual figure is closer to 65 percent.

The issue Jessica Gephart, Halley Froehlich and Trevor Branch have with the 90 percent figure is that it creates an assumption all imports contain only foreign caught fish.

“Although this may seem logical, it is not always the case; large quantities of seafood landed in the United States are exported for processing and shipped back into the United States,” they wrote in an opinion piece for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

They also note that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s calculations estimate imported products only account for 70 percent of U.S.-consumed seafood.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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