Saving Seafood

Cod Fishing Catches Plummet in Waters off New England

March 24, 2017 — ROCKPORT, Maine — The cod isn’t so sacred in New England anymore.

The fish-and-chips staple was once a critical piece of New England’s fishing industry, but catch is plummeting to all-time lows in the region. The decline of the fishery has made the U.S. reliant on foreign cod, and cod fish fillets and steaks purchased in American supermarkets and restaurants are now typically caught by Norway, Russia or Iceland in the north Atlantic.

In Maine, which is home to the country’s second-largest Atlantic cod fishery, the dwindling catch has many wondering if cod fishing is a thing of the past.

“It’s going to be more and more difficult for people to make this work,” said Maggie Raymond, executive director of the Associated Fisheries of Maine.

State records say 2016 was historically bad for cod fishing in Maine. Fishermen brought less than 170,000 pounds (77,110 kilograms) of the fish to land in the state last year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News & World Report

Fishing resumes after Iceland strike ends, but damage has been done

February 23, 2017 — Heavy fishing has been reported in the cod and capelin grounds off of Iceland following the end of a labor strike that lasted more than two months.

A close vote in the early morning hours of Saturday, 18 February, resulted in several fishermen’s unions coming to an agreement with Fisheries Iceland, which represents the country’s commercial sector. The deal, which tackled a number of issues but particularly focused on falling pay for fishermen, was approved with 52.4 percent of the vote, with 53.7 percent of voters participating, according to the Iceland Review.

Iceland’s fleet wasted little time setting sail, with some boats leaving port Saturday evening and the remainder heading out on Sunday, 19 February. Fishing was excellent for HB Grandi, with both its Venus and Vikingur quickly catching their holds full of capelin, the company said. But HB Grandi, which controls 18 percent of Iceland’s capelin quota, only has a few days to catch as much of its 33,423-metric-ton quota before the season ends. Garðar Svavarsson, manager of HB Grandi’s pelagic division, said it would be tight.

“It’s clear that we are going to have our hands full for the next few weeks to catch the company’s quotas, but we’re confident that we can do it,’” he said in a blog post on the company website.

Svavarsson said the strike had hurt some markets, but that roe prices in Japan were currently high and that most of its product would be sourced for that market.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Survey names top five best-managed fisheries

January 23, 2017 — A survey of 28 countries, including the 20 countries that catch the most fish globally, found New Zealand, the United States, Iceland, Norway and Russia had the five best-managed fisheries.

The study was completed by Michael Melnychuck, a research scientist at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, and three co-authors, and was published by Washington’s National Academy of Sciences.

The study found the three most important characteristics of a thriving fishery were the scientific assessment of the stock, limiting fishing pressure, and enforcing regulations.

Seafood New Zealand Chief Executive Tim Pankhurst said the study confirms his belief that New Zealand’s fisheries are properly managed.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Fishing ban in international Arctic waters remains elusive

December 5th, 2016 — More than a year ago, five Arctic nations signed a declaration pledging to keep their fishing fleets out of the international waters in the Arctic Ocean, an area increasingly ripe for exploitation as summer sea ice diminishes — and perhaps increasingly vulnerable with so little known about its ecology.

Now a group of diplomats is still trying to hammer out a binding agreement to protect waters of the central Arctic Ocean. The effort has expanded to nine nations and the European Union.

A meeting last week in the Faroe Islands, about halfway between Iceland and Norway, failed to produce the deal that some had expected to be in place by now, well before any commercial fishing vessels head north into international Arctic waters. Another session will be held early next year, probably in Iceland.

All parties are sticking by the goal of protecting the Arctic Ocean, said the U.S. State Department official who is managing the negotiations.

“All delegations reaffirmed their commitment to prevent unregulated commercial high-seas fishing in the central Arctic Ocean as well as a commitment to promote the conservation and sustainable use of living marine resources and to safeguard healthy marine ecosystems in the central Arctic Ocean,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Balton said in a “chairman’s statement” that was released at the end of the session.

There was “good progress in resolving differences of view on a number of the main issues under discussion,” Balton’s diplomatic statement said, and there is reason to believe that a binding agreement will be produced soon. “There was a general belief that these discussions have the possibility of concluding successfully in the near future,” his statement said.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News 

China’s top fisheries official lashes out at ‘Cold War’ criticism of international fisheries expansion

November 23, 2016 — China’s most senior fisheries official, Yu Kangzhen, has lambasted his foreign counterparts for taking a ‘Cold War’ view of China’s international fishing ambitions.

Established fishing nations are seeking to “blockade” the development of Chinese fishing vessels overseas, Yu, the vice minister for agriculture with responsibility for fisheries, told a gathering of diplomats and officials attending the annual fishery expo in Qingdao.

China accounts for 17 percent of catches in international waters “and this is our rightful share,” Yu told his guests. In unusually blunt language, Yu told critics to “look fairly” at China’s long-distance fishing development and stop “looking through tinted glasses” while criticizing Chinese fishing in international waters.

Fishery officials in both developed and developing nations have disparaged the opaque nature of Chinese data on fish landings as well as China’s track record of secretive access deals with poorer countries.

“We produce 6.6 million tons of aquatic products in a year but only 1.8 percent of that comes from long-distance fishing,” Yu said.

China’s overseas trawlers are “old” and need modernizing, Yu said. China is a “big fishing country but not a strong fishery country,” he said.

Nonetheless, China will increase the scale of its operations in international waters, he told the assembled officials, including Canadian fishery officials and Iceland’s and Ireland’s ambassadors to China.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Economic impacts of climate change on global fisheries could be worse than we thought

October 17, 2016 — Marine fisheries have been estimated to support the livelihoods of 10 to 12 percent of the world’s population and generate an average of $100 billion in revenue every year. But global fisheries are facing a number of challenges: changes in markets, demographics, and over-exploitation will significantly impact global fisheries in the near future, while climate change is expected to pose a major challenge over the longer term.

A study published last month in the journal Scientific Reports explores the potential economic impacts of climate change as it affects the amount and composition of fish in marine fisheries and leads to decreased catches. Previous research has shown that global warming will cause changes in ocean temperatures, sea ice extent, salinity, and oxygen levels, among other impacts, that are likely to lead to significant shifts in the distribution range and productivity of marine species, the study notes.

“Warmer temperatures may also lead to decreases in maximum body sizes of marine fishes,” write the authors of the study, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC). These changes will be regionally specific, as predicted species distributional shifts and changes in ocean productivity due to climate change are expected to result in increases in maximum catch potential in high latitudinal regions but decreases in the tropics. The researchers add that “These changes have large implications for people who depend on fish for food and income, and thus the contribution of fisheries to the global economy.”

In all, the UBC researchers found that global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion in annual revenue by 2050 if climate change continues unchecked — a 10 percent decrease, which is 35 percent more than has been previously estimated.

Countries that are most dependent on fisheries to feed their populations will experience the biggest impacts, according to the study. The largest average decrease in maximum catch potential will occur in small island countries like Tuvalu, which is expected to see a 79 percent drop in annual catches in its waters, and Kiribati, which is projected to see a 70 percent decrease.

“Developing countries most dependent on fisheries for food and revenue will be hardest hit,” Vicky Lam, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “It is necessary to implement better marine resource management plans to increase stock resilience to climate change.”

On the other hand, some developed countries, such as Greenland and Iceland, could see revenue increases as fish move into cooler waters.

Read the full story at Mongabay

The Deal to Share the North American Fish and Chips Supply

September 22, 2016 — There’s a looming fish and chips crisis in the United States.

The number of cod, the fish most used in the popular pub dish, is in decline in the waters off New England, and it seems overfishing and warming ocean temperatures as a result of climate change are to blame.

The U.S. and Canada have come to a deal on how to divide what remains of the North American cod supply in parts of the Atlantic Ocean. The Associated Press has the breakdown:

The countries have agreed to set the total allowable catch at 730 metric tons next year. The U.S. will be allowed to take 146 metric tons and Canada will get the rest…

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Ocean Warming Is Already Affecting Arctic Fish And Birds

September 13, 2016 — Up until a few years ago, mackerel were unknown in Greenland’s cold waters. The small oily fish typically spawned west of the British Isles and then migrated toward the northeast along the Norwegian current to feed for the summer. But in 2007, they began to show up in large numbers in the Irminger Current around Iceland. On the ocean highway, where they once turned right, they now turned left.

By 2011, the mackerel had found their way into Greenlandic waters, prompting the launch of a new fishery. Three years later, the mackerel fishery made up 23 percent of Greenland’s export earning, an “extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation,” Teunis Jansen, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release.

The mackerel aren’t the only species being affected by warmer oceans. Soaring temperatures have pushed entire groups of species toward the poles, caused increases in disease in plants and animals and changed weather patterns, according to a report launched this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Marine species are moving northward at a rate roughly five times faster than the migration of land animals.

The report, released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, highlights the impacts of ocean warming on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals. Eighty scientists from a dozen countries worked on the report, considered to be the most comprehensive collection of research on the planet’s warming oceans.

Truly Staggering

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” said Dan Laffoley, an IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors.

The world’s oceans have acted as a buffer against climate change. A “staggering 93 percent” of the heat produced by human activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, Laffoley said. If the heat had entered the atmosphere instead of the oceans, the Earth would have warmed not by the 1C (1.8F) we have already experienced, but by 36C (64.8F). “Up to now, the ocean has shielded us from the worst impacts of climate change,” the report’s authors write.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

MASSACHUSETTS: UMass Dartmouth, Iceland sign partnership to maintain fishery

August 9, 2016 — DARTMOUTH, Mass. — UMass Dartmouth has established a new partnership with the Republic of Iceland intended to advance marine science and marine-related biotech research and commercialization, the university announced Monday.

Representatives of Iceland visited SouthCoast in 2015 to display and demonstrate some of the products Iceland is making utilizing the parts of fish that might typically be discarded in New England.

The result is 95 percent utilization of cod, said the announcement. Cod are abundant in Icelandic and Norwegian waters.

According to Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), the products being manufactured can be something as familiar as cod fish oil to leather pocketbooks made with fish skin.

He said the method is similar to the old expression about Russia, “that they used to process everything in the pig except the squeal.”

Utilization of fish waste in New Bedford to make fish meal was curtailed decades ago after complaints about odor; Rothschild said today’s technology almost eliminates that.

UMass Dartmouth spokesman John Hoey said that the collaborations with Iceland, including faculty and student exchanges, will be mainly with the College of Engineering, concentrating on biofuels for example, and SMAST, the School for Marine Science and Technology, which is more oriented toward fisheries management and surveys.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Boston Globe: Potential EU Ban On American Lobsters Is Ill-Considered

May 12, 2016 — The following is an excerpt from an editorial published today by the Boston Globe:

Planning the menu for a state dinner is never a picnic, but the White House could make an easy call on Friday when President Obama welcomes the leaders of Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — serve lobster. Simple, too: Just bring water to a rolling boil, cook, and serve with melted butter.

As the black-tied dignitaries strap on their White House-monogrammed bibs, they could also dig into what should be a key issue for the US-Nordic Leaders Summit: Sweden’s effort to ban the importation of live lobsters to the 28 European Union nations under new invasive species regulations. An EU panel will consider the issue next month and the dispute could eventually go to the World Trade Organization.

Scientists in the US and Canada say the danger is as hypothetical as it is exaggerated. Pols and lobstermen go further, branding the Swedish research as, simply, cooked: “protectionism masquerading as science,” several lawmakers say. Secretary of State John Kerry was asked to formally protest. Talk about bringing things to a rolling boil.

But before curbing the kudzu-like proliferation of IKEA products or circumscribing the movement of free-range Volvos, let us consider the lobster trade: The EU imports about $200 million worth of the crustacean per year from the US and Canada, about 13,000 metric tons. All told, the EU imports one-fifth of all exported US lobsters.

For lobsters, the science on the hazard is inconclusive. But say, for the sake of argument, that Homarus americanus does prove invasive. Should Italians or Greeks along the warm waters of the Mediterranean be barred from importing live North American lobsters because they pose a threat to Swedish waters? EU regulations provide for regional measures, short of an outright ban to all member states, so it should never come to that.

Read the full editorial at the Boston Globe