Saving Seafood

Warming Waters, Moving Fish: How Climate Change Is Reshaping Iceland

December 2, 2019 — Before it became a “Game of Thrones” location, before Justin Bieber stalked the trails of Fjadrargljufur, and before hordes of tourists descended upon this small island nation, there were the fish.

“Fish,” said Gisli Palsson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland, “made us rich.” The money Iceland earned from commercial fishing helped the island, which is about the size of Kentucky, become independent from Denmark in 1944.

But warming waters associated with climate change are causing some fish to seek cooler waters elsewhere, beyond the reach of Icelandic fishermen. Ocean temperatures around Iceland have increased between 1.8 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years. For the past two seasons, Icelanders have not been able to harvest capelin, a type of smelt, as their numbers plummeted. The warmer waters mean that as some fish leave, causing financial disruption, other fish species arrive, triggering geopolitical conflicts.

Worldwide, research shows the oceans are simmering. Since the middle of last century, the oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. To beat the heat, fish are moving toward cooler waters nearer the planet’s two poles.

Read the full story from The New York Times at The Seattle Times

Iceland allocates $1.4m for improved aquaculture management

September 18, 2019 — Iceland’s government has allocated a total of ISK 750 million (around $6m) for the improvement of aquaculture management and control.

This includes ISK 600m for the Marine Research Institute (MRI)’s new research vessel, on which a total of ISK 900m has been spent.

It also includes ISK 150m in place of the funding the MRI used to receive from the “Fisheries Project Fund”, but which has been on the wane for several years now.

“This year’s draft budget is about to change this arrangement and ensure that the institute has fixed income so that the MRI will no longer be subject to volatile income sources with associated uncertainty for its core activities,” said the government.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Icelandic fishing fleet’s annual earnings soar as catches rise

August 26, 2019 — Almost 1.26 million metric tons (MT) of fisheries products were caught by the Icelandic fishing fleet last year, an increase of 6.7 percent or 79,025 MT, and the total first-sale value of that catch rose 15.6 percent to almost ISK 128 billion (USD 1 billion, EUR 924.7 million), according to figures gathered by Statistics Iceland.

The largest contributor to these increases was the demersal sector, which saw its catch increase by 12 percent in volume, or 51,341 MT, to 480,224 MT. The value of these landings climbed 17.9 percent to ISK 90.8 billion (USD 726.4 million, EUR 656 million).

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Iceland to vote on changes to aquaculture policy

June 19, 2019 — The Icelandic parliament is set to vote on proposed amendments to the country’s aquaculture act, coinciding with a major public effort to curb the use of open cages in salmon farming nations, reports Visir.

The US outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, in collaboration with the wild salmon stocks fund and the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, has received 140,000 signatures for its challenge to open pen salmon farming in Iceland, Norway, Scotland, and Ireland.

The signatures are set to be handed to parliament ahead of the vote on the bill proposed by the minister of fisheries and aquaculture. A second debate on the bill was postponed on June 13.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

UK strikes Brexit deal with two of its biggest seafood partners

March 21, 2019 — The United Kingdom has reached a temporary agreement with Norway and Iceland that allows trade to continue unchanged should it leave the European Union without a deal in place.

Through the new arrangements, which mimic those already in place with E.U. member states, zero tariffs remain on established quotas on seafood and agricultural products. A basis for negotiating a permanent agreement was also established.

The agreement is now subject to final legal checks and is expected to be formally signed next week.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

9 countries and the EU protected the Arctic Ocean before the ice melts

October 12, 2018 —  It’s easy to miss the truly historic nature of the moment.

Last week, nine countries—the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, China, Japan, Iceland, South Korea, and the European Union (which includes 28 member states)—signed a treaty to hold off on commercial fishing in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years while scientists study the potential impacts on wildlife in the far north. It was an extraordinary act of conservation—the rare case where major governments around the world proceeded with caution before racing into a new frontier to haul up sea life with boats and nets. They set aside 1.1 million square miles of ocean, an area larger than the Mediterranean Sea.

But to really grasp the significance of this milestone, consider why such a step was even possible, and what that says about our world today. For more than 100,000 years the central Arctic Ocean has been so thoroughly covered in ice that the very idea of fishing would have seemed ludicrous.

That remained true as recently as 20 years ago. But as human fossil-fuel emissions warmed the globe, the top of the world has melted faster than almost everywhere else. Now, in some years, up to 40 percent of the central Arctic Ocean—the area outside each surrounding nation’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—is open water in summer. That hasn’t yet been enough to make fishing attractive. But it is enough that boats may be lured in soon.

So, for perhaps the first time in human history, the nations of the world set aside and protected fishing habitat that, for the moment, does not even yet exist. The foresight is certainly something to applaud. But it’s hard to escape the fact that the international accord is a tacit acknowledgment—including by the United States, which is moving to back out of the Paris climate accords—that we are headed, quite literally, into uncharted waters.

“The Arctic is in a transient state—it’s not stable,” Rafe Pomerance, a former State Department official who once worked on Arctic issues and now chairs a network of Arctic scientists from nongovernmental organizations and serves on the polar research board of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Climate Change May Spark Global ‘Fish Wars’

June 15, 2018 –Warming seas are driving commercial seafood poleward into waters controlled by other countries, setting up international conflicts.

Atlantic mackerel, a fatty schooling fish, for years has been caught by fleets in parts of Europe and sold around the world—where it gets pickled, grilled, smoked, and fried. It is among the United Kingdom’s key exports.

But a decade ago, warming temperatures began driving this popular fish north, into seas controlled by Iceland. Almost overnight, this seafood gold began shredding relations between some of the world’s most stable governments. It led to unsustainable fishing, trade embargoes, and boat blockades. It even helped convince Iceland to drop its bid to join the EU. And that was among friendly nations.

Welcome to the climate-change food threat you may not have considered.

In many parts of the world overfishing is already draining the ocean of important sea life. But a paper published today in the journal Science suggests potentially explosive ocean fish wars are likely to simmer across the world as warming temperatures drive commercial fish species poleward into territories controlled by other nations, setting up conflicts with sometimes hostile neighbors that are suddenly forced to share. That could lead to far fewer fish, economic declines and, in some areas, serious threats to food security.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Atlantic Capes installs massive IQF scallop tunnel in $5m plant upgrade

May 23, 2018 — Atlantic Capes Fisheries (ACF), one of the largest scallop firms on the US East Coast, has completed the primary phase of a $5 million investment in a plant in Fall River, Massachusetts, the company’s CEO told Undercurrent News.

The investment at ACF’s IQF Custom Packing plant includes an individual quick frozen (IQF) tunnel which is the largest of its kind in the US scallop sector, from Iceland’s Skaginn3X.

Also, ACF has installed a Skaggin3X slurry ice and delivery system, a new Hayssen Bagger, and new scallop grader in the plant.

Before the end of the year, ACF plans to complete the next phase of the IQF Custom Packing upgrade, Danny Cohen, ACF’s CEO, told Undercurrent.

This will see more value-added packing equipment, two truck loading bays, an expanded production office and automatic box making equipment added to the plant.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

One Square Mile in Massachusetts: Tail-to-Scales, Using The Whole Fish In New Bedford

February 12, 2018 — Every day on New Bedford’s docks, fish processing plants toss thousands of pounds of fish scraps — or “trash” — into buckets, and sell them to pet food makers for pennies-on-the-pound.

New Bedford officials are looking for ways to turn that “trash” into something more valuable. As part of our One Square Mile: New Bedford series, Rhode Island Public Radio’s Lynn Arditi has the story.

Larry and Loretta are my neighbor’s cats. And they love their canned cat food. To understand why just read the ingredients on the label. Ocean white fish. Fish broth. Tuna. Those ingredients are actually fish by-products. Fish guts. Fish  livers. Fish intestines. Fish skins. They’re what fish processors like Bergie’s Seafood in call “trash.”

Inside Bergie’s process plant one January morning, a conveyor belt moved  freshly caught grey sole to the filet tables.

“The skeletons are going to go the lobstermen,’’ David Stanley, vice president of operations, explained. “Now, the meat is gonna to us the consumer….All the trimmings all go down for cat food and animal pet food and things to that nature.”

Those “trimmings” include fish heads, skin and any of the innards not sold for human consumption.

On this day, the filet machines were turned off;the catch was smaller so the workers were doing all the deboning by hand. A worker coming off a shift break paused to sharpen his knife.

The next stop: a table lit from underneath. “See these lights right here?” Stanely said. “This is called a candling table. Every piece of fish here goes across the candling table.”

A half-dozen women wearing hair nets and rubber gloves lay the filets, one by one, on the candling table and examine them. The light underneath the table illuminates the flesh, allowing them to remove any impurities.

The processing plant usually produces anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 pounds a day of “chowder” or trash, Celestino Cacaj, a Bergie’s supervisor, said. “We have all the trash from the fish after we clean them we sell to the customer who make pet food,’’ he said. “They pay some money for that so we keep it for them. We try to make a little money. ”

They make a little money. But could they make more?

Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio 

 

Recreational cod fishing to stay shut down in Gulf of Maine

February 2, 2018 — Fishing managers are recommending that cod remain off limits to recreational fishermen in the Gulf of Maine.

Cod were once harvested in colossal numbers from New England waters, but the population has collapsed in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere. The New England Fishery Management Council is calling on the federal government to maintain a year-round ban on possession of Gulf of Maine cod by recreational fishermen.

Commercial fishermen are still allowed to catch cod in the Gulf of Maine, though quotas for the fish are so low that many try to avoid the fish altogether. Cod are widely used to make fish and chips.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Greenwich Time