Saving Seafood

Florida Congressman’s Billfish Legislation Would Take a Toll on Western Pacific Commercial Industry

August 6, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A freshman Florida Congressman’s bill is expected to have dire repercussions thousands of miles away in the Western Pacific — and to American consumers.

The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council said consumers may soon be deprived of sustainably harvested domestic marlin products if President Trump sign legislation to prohibit interstate commerce of billfish (not including swordfish) landed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The bill, introduced by Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., passed the House on June 26 and the Senate on July 30 and is now headed to the president.

“It is upsetting, in this era of tackling illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and the $12 billion U.S. seafood trade deficit, that highly monitored U.S. Pacific Island fishing and seafood communities may suffer hardship should this legislation become law,” Council Executive Director Kitty M. Simonds said in a press release.

Under current law, billfish caught by U.S. vessels that are landed in Hawaii or other U.S. Pacific Islands may be sold to markets on the U.S. mainland. More than 550,000 pounds of American-caught billfish landed in the Pacific Islands are annually marketed in the continental U.S. The billfish was worth approximately $830,000 in 2017 dockside value. When the dockside value is expanded through wholesale and retail markets, the estimated annual value is approximately $2.5 million.

The commercial harvest of Atlantic billfish has been prohibited in the United Sates since 1988 because several Atlantic billfish species are overfished and/or subject to overfishing (e.g., blue marlin, white marlin and East Atlantic sailfish). By contrast, Pacific and Western Pacific billfish populations are not overfished nor subject to overfishing, with the exception of striped marlin, due to international fishing, the Council said in the statement. A Billfish Certificate of Eligibility (COE) is required to accompany billfish to any dealer or processor who subsequently receives or possesses the billfish. The COE documents the vessel, homeport, port of offloading and date of offloading and ensures the fish is not from the Atlantic or foreign fisheries.

NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries Chris Oliver said in December 2017 he has “full confidence in these existing management processes to sustainably manage billfish populations.”

Congresswomen Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii; Madeleine Z. Bordallo, D-Guam; and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, R-American Samoa, in an Additional Views statement on H.R. 4528, said the legislation “will negatively impact the livelihoods of fishermen in Hawaii, Guam and the Pacific Insular Areas by closing off the only off-island market for U.S.-caught billfish.” Acknowledging that several Atlantic billfish species are subject to overfishing, the Congresswomen said, “We support needed-conservation efforts in the Atlantic, but do not believe that Pacific fisheries need to be targeted in order to achieve these goals.”

The Council and Pacific Island lawmakers also have the support of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

In a June 5 letter to the Council, Ross said, “We believe the legislation would not advance the conservation of billfish significantly, and would block a small amount of sustainably harvested domestic product from entering commerce on the U.S. mainland.”

However, Soto’s bill demonstrates the sportfishing industry’s influence in the Southeastern U.S. and furthers the divide between sport and commercial fishermen that has become prevalent in some regions of the country. The bill, titled the Billfish Conservation Act, was supported by primarily sportfishing interests including the American Sportfishing Association, Coastal Conservation Association, Center for Sportfishing Policy, and more.

“We’re grateful to have received overwhelming congressional and external support for our legislation to help protect sharks and billfish,” Soto said in a statement. “These creatures are fundamental to recreational fishing in parts of Florida, but they are often exploited by commercial fishing, that’s why we must do our part to protect them.”

NMFS estimates the United States imports more than 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the nation (www.fishwatch.gov/sustainable-seafood/the-global-picture), the Council said. According to NMFS data, the United States imported more than 6 billion pounds of seafood valued at more than $21.5 billion in 2017, which is more imported seafood than at any point in the nation’s history.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Something’s ‘Fishy’ On The Blockchain, But Can This Tech Reduce Seafood Fraud?

August 6, 2018 –Whitebait or halibut? Now, are you sure that the expensive “Wild-caught” Atlantic salmon you had for dinner last night was in fact the gourmet fish you thought it was? Or, was it just a cheaper farm-grown salmon – or perhaps not even salmon at all? This is not the shipping news, but you’ll get the picture pretty soon.

Moreover, can you be 100% sure the tasty white tuna sushi your local sushi bar serves is actually made from tuna – and not from escolar – also known as oil fish?

What is the big deal, you might ask. Well, escolar is quite notorious for its delicious, cheap and oily meat. Meat that causes intense stomach problems, in other words, nasty uncontrollable diarrhoea.

Now, how likely is it for a sushi restaurant to serve its hungry customers fish with such severe side effects? Or for that matter how common is fraud in general in the seafood industry? The whole scene will probably surprise the average person, if they have not already delved into some research about the topic. So, let us get down to the nub of it.

From 2010 to 2012, Oceana, one of the largest organizations focusing on studying oceans founded by a group of leading foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, conducted a study exploring fraud in the seafood industry. According to the research as much as one-third of seafood products in the United States (U.S.) were mislabelled. Shocked?

Read the full story at Forbes

DON CUDDY: Sector reopening’s benefit to New Bedford remains to be seen

August 6, 2018 — The news emerged on July 19 that NOAA approved a plan that may now permit some New Bedford fishermen to go back to work.

It has been eight months in the making since the National Marine Fisheries Service shut down Sector IX last November after Carlos Rafael was convicted for falsifying landings and jailed. His fishing operation was so large that the closure impacted a lot of people in the business, both afloat and ashore.

In March, fishermen with quota in Sector IX moved to join Sector VII, which also operates out of New Bedford, but that quota remained frozen while the people at NMFS worked to determine how to correct for the “overage” — how much and of what species — that resulted from the fish caught and mislabeled by Rafael’s boats.

So while this decision is a small step forward for the groundfish industry here, it is not yet time to set the church bells ringing since the majority of the inactive quota is owned by inactive fishermen. When the catch share system was introduced in 2010 it gave all permit holders a slice of the pie — the “pie” being a share of the TAC, or total allowable catch, for the annual fishing year, which for groundfish begins on May 1. Individual allocations were based on a permit holder’s catch history over a ten-year period from 1998 to 2008, I believe it was.

This effectively means that all of the cod, haddock and flounder swimming around on Georges Bank, more than one hundred miles offshore, have someone’s name on their back, similar to a herd of cattle. And like cattle, these fish can be leased, sold or traded. So this allowed some fishermen to retire, stay home every year, and lease their quota. Also, you are not required to have a boat to keep a permit.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fish fraud: What is Sea to Table’s real problem?

July 27, 2018 –An Associated Press investigation revealed in June that the New York-based seafood distributor Sea to Table was mislabeling product origins and misleading its customers. The company and its owner Sean Dimin defended the errors as accidental — a result of mix-ups, miscommunications and honest mistakes as well as information falsified farther down the chain of supply. Dimin pledged to address the claims quickly and terminate relationships with suppliers that had mislabeled their seafood.

This week AP reports on four former Sea to Table employees who say they raised concerns about mislabeling and other deceptive marketing practices long before the AP investigation, but they were ignored or silenced.

Sea to Table’s model is to deliver local, traceable, high-quality seafood. This is a manageable business model. Community supported fisheries, direct marketers and small fish shops around the country deliver these promises daily.

But the model is not yet scalable, and that is precisely what Sea to Table’s ex-workers point out. They allege that Dimin turned a blind eye to these flaws as he tried to keep pace with the company’s growth.

Despite the bad press and significant losses after the June report — Dimin told the AP Sea to Table had lost more than 50 percent of its revenue and conducted layoffs to keep operating — the company reportedly predicts its sales will jump from $13 million last year to $70 million in 2020.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Researchers map hot spots of transfer of fish catch at sea

July 26, 2018 — It could be considered the global CSI for high seas fisheries. In two new groundbreaking studies, researchers from Dalhousie University, Global Fishing Watch and SkyTruth have applied cutting-edge technology to map exactly where fishing boats may be transferring their catch to cargo vessels at sea.

Known as transshipment, the practice increases the efficiency of fishing by eliminating trips back to port for fishing vessels. However, as it often occurs out of sight and over the horizon, it creates major challenges, including enabling illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

“Because catches from different boats are mixed up during transshipment, we often have no idea what was caught legally and what wasn’t,” said Kristina Boerder, a Ph.D. student in Dalhousie University’s Department of Biology and lead author on the Science Advances paper, published this week.

Transshipment can also facilitate human rights abuses and has been implicated in other crimes such as weapons and drug trafficking. It often occurs in the high seas, beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction, and where policy-makers and enforcement agencies may be slow to act against an issue they cannot see. By applying machine learning techniques to vessel tracking data, researchers are bringing unprecedented transparency to the practice.

“So far, this practise was out of sight out of mind, but now that we can track it using satellites, we can begin to know where our  truly comes from,” says Dr. Boris Worm, a Marine Biology Professor in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Science, and co-author of the Science Advances paper.

Read the full story from the Global Fishing Watch at PHYS

 

Study develops new method for identifying risk of forced labor in seafood supply chains

July 26, 2018 –A recent study, published 25 July, has developed a method to identify areas with high risks of forced labor throughout the seafood supply chain.

Published in Science Advances, the study – over the course of five years – developed a framework with five separate components that can allow companies to “efficiently and effectively assess” the risk of forced labor in supply chains. The framework utilizes existing data on supply chains as well as some of the same traceability technologies used in food safety to track worker conditions.

“The seafood sector has among the world’s most complex supply chains and utilizes sophisticated technology to track food safety conditions,” said Dr. Katrina Nakamura, lead author of the study and co-founder of the Sustainability Incubator. “We wondered if the technology could also be used to collect data on working conditions. Our report shows the idea bears out. Companies in our study could see, for the first time, where conditions met minimum principles, were unknown, or were inadequate.”

Using data collected from UN institutions, NGOs, and seafood companies with interviews of workers on fishing vessels and in processing plants in Asia, the study developed a metric to identify working conditions in supply chains. Then, 18 seafood companies used the data to screen 118 products within the framework developed, which has been dubbed the “Labor Safe Screen” (LSS).

“Our findings also demonstrate that human rights due diligence may be added to fishing fleets and certification programs for seafood sustainability,” Dr. Nakamura said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Sea To Table defends actions but ex-employees raise concerns

July 26, 2018 –A national seafood distributor is defending its reputation amid plummeting sales after the Associated Press found it was not living up to a guarantee that all catch was local, wild, sustainable and traceable.

Sea To Table owner Sean Dimin said most problems identified by the AP were honest mistakes or the result of miscommunication, and some supporters came to his defense. But four former employees said they raised concerns about mislabeling, the blending of imports and deceptive marketing practices years ago, and were ignored or silenced.

In a global seafood industry that is notoriously corrupt, conscientious consumers are increasingly paying top dollar for seafood they can feel good about. The New York-based company attracted clients such as celebrity chef Rick Bayless, meal kit maker HelloFresh, restaurants and universities, promising all fish could be traced to a U.S. dock and sometimes the fisherman who caught it.

Among other things, the AP found Sea To Table was sometimes working with wholesalers that also rely on imports, providing incorrect dock and boat names, selling farmed shellfish, and offering species that were out of season or illegal to catch. The AP also tracked businesses in Sea To Table’s supply chain to labor abuses involving migrant fishermen in foreign waters and destruction of marine life.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Spokesman-Review

NMFS ends New Bedford groundfishing ban

July 23, 2018 — Nearly eight months after NMFS announced the decision to shut down Northeast Fishing Sector IX following the criminal trial of quota-skirting kingpin Carlos “the Codfather” Rafael, the agency lifted the ban that has kept at least 80 fishermen off the water and out of work.

NMFS announced the end of the ban on Thursday, approving lease-only operation plans for Sector IX and allocated quota for Sector VII.

When little headway was being made in lifting the ban this spring, 55 vessels in Sector IX, including four owned by Rafael, moved to be included in Sector VII for the 2018-19 fishing season in order to lease their quota and recoup losses from missed fishing time.

The process was slow moving, with quota remaining frozen while NMFS officials and the New England Fishery Management Council worked to review and approve a new operating plan.

NMFS’ final rule on the situation — published and opened for comment on Friday, July 20 — “determines the quota overages that Northeast Fishery Sector IX is responsible for paying back, allocates annual catch entitlements to Northeast Fishery Sectors VII and IX for the 2018 fishing year, approves a new lease-only operations plan for Northeast Fishery Sector IX, and approves a substantive amendment to Northeast Fishery Sector VII operations plan,” according to the Federal Register.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

NOAA lifts New Bedford groundfish ban

July 23, 2018 — New Bedford’s groundfishing fleet began to emerge from the criminal shadow of Carlos Rafael on Thursday when NOAA Fisheries announced the approval of new operational plans for two fishing sectors that have been shut down for the past eight months.

They’re not fishing yet. But there is light on the horizon.

NOAA Fisheries, in an interim final rule published Thursday morning in the Federal Register, approved plans to transform Northeast Fishing Sector IX to a lease-only operation for 2018. Meanwhile, all of Northeast Fishing Sector VII’s 56 vessels remain inactive and those vessels and permits owned by Rafael will remain unable to fish until they are sold to independent third parties, NOAA Fisheries said.

“To become active, the sector board would have to allow a vessel to harvest sector annual catch entitlement consistent with normal sector operations, and notify (NOAA Fisheries) of the vessel change in status” the rule stated. “In contrast to the vessels owned by Mr. Rafael, these vessels do not need to be sold in order to be active in the groundfish industry.”

In both cases, NOAA Fisheries said, the agency approved plans developed by the individual fishing sectors in consultation with federal fisheries regulators.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

NEW BEDFORD STANDARD-TIMES: Lifting federal ban on groundfishing a good first step toward rebuilding industry

July 23, 2018 — New Bedford fishermen last week received the news they had been waiting to hear for eight months. Federal regulators lifted their ban against Sectors VII and IX — two groundfishing groups tied to Carlos Rafael.

The ban, which had been in place since Nov. 20 of last year, prevented 17 boats and roughly 80 fishermen from going out to sea. And it caused a ripple effect that was felt around the seaport.

Fuel suppliers, fish processors, boat engine mechanics and all the other support industries that work with the fishing fleet were hurt. By one estimate, some 240 jobs were lost to the ban.

So Thursday’s announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was welcome news.

“It’s finally happening,” said U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, who had long pressed for a timely resolution.

“We’re happy,” he said. “It’s something that we’ve been doing everything in our power to encourage.”

At The Standard-Times, we think NOAA’s action — albeit too long in coming — was a good first step. But we’re not ready to uncork the champagne yet.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford-Standard Times