Saving Seafood

CAL’s Dean Pinkert calls on US shrimp buyers to investigate their Indian supply chains

April 4, 2024 — Dean Pinkert joined the Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.-based Corporate Accountability Lab, a non-governmental organization dedicated to advancing global human rights and environmental sustainability, as a special advisor in November 2021. He was one of the authors of “Hidden Harvest: Human Rights and Environmental Abuses in India’s Shrimp Industry,” a report released 20 March that presented evidence of labor issues at Indian shrimp hatcheries, farms, peeling sheds, and processing plants, as well as mangrove destruction and water contamination from shrimp farm effluent.

SeafoodSource:  Why did CAL decide to do such an in-depth investigation of India’s shrimp industry?

Pinkert: Forced labor is very close to the heart of CAL’s mission. We style ourselves as a human rights organization and also an organization that is interested in fostering a sustainable environment. So, when we became aware of the possibility that there were forced labor issues in India’s shrimp industry, we started to look very seriously into that.

I think that you also have to at least understand one piece of context, which is that the shrimp industries in other countries, [including] Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, have previously faced a lot of criticism from human rights groups and investigative activities focused on labor abuses, including forced labor, but India had not. When there’s forced labor or environmental abuses in an industry and it looks like CAL can add value because those issues haven’t been fully investigated by human rights groups in the past, CAL is going to jump in and do it.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Invasive Asian carp getting a new name, image makeover to draw more foodies, fishing fans

February 9, 2021 — Care for a plate of slimehead? How about some orange roughy?

It’s the same fish, but one sounds much more palatable than the other. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service gave the slimehead a rebranding in the late 1970s in an effort to make the underused fish more marketable.

Now, Illinois officials and their partners want to give the invasive Asian carp threatening the Great Lakes a similar makeover. The goal: To grow the fish’s image as a healthy, delicious, organic, sustainable food source — which will, in turn, get more fishermen removing more tons of the fish from Illinois rivers just outside of Lake Michigan.

Markets such as pet food, bait and fertilizer have expanded the use of invasive Asian carp in recent years. But “it’s been hard to get the human consumption part of this because of the four-letter word: carp,” said Kevin Irons, assistant chief of fisheries for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

A full-on media blitz is coming later this year to change that. The proposed new name for the fish is being kept tightly under wraps for a big rollout in June, prior to the Boston Seafood Show in mid-July. But other aspects of the “The Perfect Catch” campaign will point out that the invasive Asian carp species — silver, bighead, grass and black carp — are flaky, tasty, organic, sustainable, low in mercury and rich in protein and omega-3 fatty acids.

“To us in America, we think of carp as a bottom-feeding, muddy-tasting fish, which it is sometimes,” said Dirk Fucik, owner of Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet Shop in Chicago, who has had success with occasional serving of Asian carp to customers and is participating in the rebranding effort.

Read the full story at the Chicago Sun Times

Bumble Bee CEO Tharp sees bright retail future for tuna, but in pouches not cans

January 22, 2019 — Jan Tharp, the interim president and CEO of Bumble Bee Foods, sees tuna fish retail sales growing at a strong rate again but taking a different shape in the not-so-distant future, she told a packed room at the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Marketing Conference, in San Diego, California.

She was looking at charts of data from Information Resources Inc. (IRI), a Chicago, Illinois-based company that monitors retail sales trends. They showed total sales for seafood up 18%, from $9.8 billion in 2011 to $11.6bn in 2018, and the sale of tuna pouches up 12.3% in the past year.

The sale of seafood shelf-stable seafood was up only 2.9% in 2018, however. And household purchases of canned light tuna have dropped from 48.1% of tuna segment sales in 2014 to 39.3% in 2018, according to IRI.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News