Saving Seafood

How Maine came to play a central role in an international eel smuggling scheme

May 23, 2017 — Years after officials launched an investigation into baby eel poaching on the East Coast, the first of several men to plead guilty to participating in the wildlife trafficking ring was sentenced last week in a federal courtroom in Maine.

Michael Bryant, 40, a former Baileyville resident who now lives in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, is one of more than a dozen men who the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says poached thousands of pounds of the baby eels, also known as elvers or “glass” eels, from 2011 through 2014. Since 2011, elvers on average have fetched around $1,500 per pound for fishermen, and netted more than $4 million total for the 12 convicted poachers who have pleaded guilty to federal charges in South Carolina, Virginia and Maine.

Maine found itself at the center of a criminal enterprise that illegally netted elvers along the Atlantic seaboard, where most states ban their harvesting, and then shipped the eels overseas to feed East Asia’s voracious seafood appetite, according to investigators.

Bryant and other poachers benefitted from a combination of environmental, economic and regulatory factors earlier this decade that created an unexpected boon for elver fishermen in Maine, where the vast majority of the country’s legal elver harvest occurs. Maine, one of only two states with legal elver fisheries, has approximately 1,000 licensed elver fishermen who over the past seven years have caught 81,000 pounds of elvers valued at more than $126 million. South Carolina, the other state, issues only 10 licenses each year and has much smaller harvests.

Last October, Bryant was one of seven men who pleaded guilty in federal court in Maine to trafficking in poached elvers. According court documents, Bryant did not have a fishing license but caught 207 pounds of elvers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia over four consecutive springs, from 2011 through 2014. He sold them to unscrupulous dealers or middlemen, with roughly half his catch being funneled through Maine, for an average of $1,600 per pound, netting a total of $331,084, according to authorities.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

New tuna measures target IUU, bycatch

May 19, 2017 — New conservation measures from the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation aim to reduce incidental capture of sharks and marine turtles and reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

Two of the new measures are the first to affect longline vessels, since longline fishing accounted for 12 percent of the tuna catch globally in 2015, according to ISSF.

The new measures go into effect on 1 January, 2018.

ISSF-participating seafood suppliers include Thai Union, Bumble Bee Seafoods, Chicken of the Sea and Starkist.

“With about 75 percent of the world’s canned tuna processing capacity conforming to multiple ISSF measures for sustainability best practices, and with major tuna companies being transparently audited against those measures, we have a real opportunity to make changes on and off the water,” ISSF President Susan Jackson said.

Moving forward, tuna companies that do business with large-scale longline vessels must conduct transactions only with long-liners whose at-sea transshipment activities are 100 percent monitored by human observers, either onboard the main vessel or onboard the transshipment vessel.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

Even in faraway US, Indonesian seafood enforcer wins acclaim

May 15, 2017 — A high school dropout turned seafood entrepreneur is leading Indonesia’s crackdown on illegal fishing, winning plaudits from conservationists and awards as far away as Washington despite her explosive methods.

A favorite tactic is seizing foreign fishing vessels and then blowing up the empty boats into smithereens to send a message to her country’s neighbors.

Susi Pudjiastuti, honored this week in Washington for her ecological work, has led the charge in destroying hundreds of fishing vessels in the past two years as the Indonesian government’s minister for maritime affairs and fisheries. Her efforts haven’t eliminated a problem that has plagued the archipelago nation for decades, she said, but they have boosted fish stocks and curbed smuggling.

Catches of anchovies, king prawns and yellow fin tuna are up, helping local fishermen and reducing food prices, Pudjiastuti said.

“What we actually earn also is respect,” Pudjiastuti said in the American capital, where she joined other recipients of the annual Peter Benchley Ocean Awards — named for the author of “Jaws.” She was cited for her efforts in protecting Indonesia’s marine ecosystem, and tackling poachers and organized crime.

“They cannot just do anything anymore,” Pudjiastuti added. Whereas 10,000 foreign vessels used to fish in Indonesian waters “like in their own country,” she said the new reality was clear: “Not anymore.”

For China and others in the region, sensitive politics also are at play. Indonesia’s uncompromising approach has irked neighbors whose boats have been caught up in the dragnet for operating in seas plagued by territorial disputes. The campaign may partly reflect Indonesia’s desire to show it is in control of its vast territory of 17,000 islands.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New York Times

2017 SeaWeb Sustainability Summit taking place 5 to 7 June in Seattle

May 4, 2017 — The 2017 SeaWeb Seafood Summit, the international seafood sustainability conference, will take pace in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. from 5 to 7 June.

The summit aims to connect the industry’s environmental, social, and economic stakeholders and give them a forum for productive dialogue, partnerships, and solutions, according to a press release from Diversified Communications, which produces the summit in partnership with The Ocean Foundation [Editor’s note: SeafoodSource is owned by Diversified Communications].

The site of this year’s summit will be the Westin Seattle. The program includes a main keynote and daily plenary presentations as well as six breakout sessions, with topics ranging from traceability and transparency to business and management, aquaculture, IUU, and FIPs.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Harsher penalties for lobstermen who cheat get legislative support

May 4, 2017 — A legislative committee voted unanimously Wednesday to toughen penalties on lobstermen who fish too many traps or use “sunken trawls,” as part of an industry-supported effort to crack down on lawbreakers.

“I do think this is going to get people’s attention and will hopefully make people realize that it doesn’t pay to cheat,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

Lawmakers are considering a suite of requests from the Maine Department of Marine Resources for more enforcement tools and tougher sanctions against violators in an industry worth more than $500 million last year.

A bill unanimously endorsed by the Marine Resources Committee, L.D. 575, would allow DMR’s commissioner to order longer license suspensions for lobstermen who violate the laws on the first offense and, in several cases, permanently revoke the licenses of repeat offenders.

For instance, violators caught fishing more than the legal limit of 800 traps or fishing “sunken trawls” without marker buoys would face a minimum three-year suspension – up from the current one year – and could lose their licenses for up to 10 years. Removing or “scrubbing” the eggs from female lobsters would result in a minimum four-year license suspension, and “molesting” other fishermen’s traps could result in a suspension from two to six years. The current maximum for molesting gear is three years.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

To help stop illegal fishing, ban practice of transshipment on high seas, researchers say

May 2, 2017 — New research concludes that a total ban on the practice of transshipment on the high seas is necessary to help stop illegal fishing and reduce the human trafficking and labor rights abuses that often accompany unlawful fishing activities.

“Transshipping enables fishing vessels to remain at sea for extended periods of time,” Washington D.C.-based oceans conservancy NGO Oceana explains. “Fishing vessels and refrigerated cargo vessels rendezvous at sea in order to transfer seafood, fuel or supplies. While this transshipping practice can be legal in many cases, it also can facilitate the laundering of illegally caught fish, especially on the high seas and in waters surrounding developing and small island nations with insufficient resources to police their waters.”

As detailed in a report released last month, Oceana found that close to 40 percent of suspected instances of transshipping occur on the high seas — areas outside of any national jurisdiction, which make up about two-thirds of Earth’s oceans. Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, the high-seas regions of the Barents Sea, the national waters of Guinea-Bissau, and just outside the national waters of Argentina and Peru are reportedly the world’s chief transshipping hotspots.

Oceana’s report was based on an analysis of data collected by West Virginia-based environmental monitoring NGO SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, a partnership between Google, Oceana, and SkyTruth, which documented more than 5,000 “likely” cases of illegal transshipment and over 86,000 “potential” cases between 2012 and 2016.

In a paper published in the journal Marine Policy last month, a team of researchers make the case that a global ban on the practice of transshipment on the high seas is necessary in order to curb illegal fishing and human rights abuses in the global fishing industry.

“This practice often occurs on the high seas and beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction, allowing ships fishing illegally to evade most monitoring and enforcement measures, offload their cargo, and resume fishing without returning to port,” Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University (NYU) and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

Read the full story at Mongabay.com

Environmentalists Can’t Help Defend Fishing Rules

April 20, 2017 — Three environmental groups cannot join the U.S. government to defend against a challenge to an Obama administration rule requiring seafood companies to report the origin of the fish they sell, a federal judge ruled.

The National Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and Oceana asked the court on March 7 to join the government in defending a suit from a group of fishing companies challenging the seafood traceability rule, which requires companies to disclose on a government form the vessel or collection point of origin for their fish.

The companies say the rule will make seafood more expensive. The environmentalists say it is critical to protecting fish populations from illegal fishing. The environmentalists made specific arguments in support of the rule, telling U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that reversal would affect their daily lives.

Rachel Golden Kroner, in a declaration supporting Oceana, said that if the companies invalidate the seafood traceability rule she would be at greater risk of buying illegally fished seafood, preventing her from making “sustainable seafood choices.”

Todd Steiner, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said that without the rule he would have a harder time studying at-risk populations.

But on Monday Mehta shot down their chance to make their case in court, saying the groups had not shown that overturning the rule would harm them enough to give them standing in the case.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Banning Transshipment at-Sea Necessary to Curb Illegal Fishing, Researchers Conclude

April 18, 2017 — Banning transshipment at-sea—the transfer of fish and supplies from one vessel to another in open waters—is necessary to diminish illegal fishing, a team of researchers has concluded after an analysis of existing maritime regulations.

“This practice often occurs on the high seas and beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction, allowing ships fishing illegally to evade most monitoring and enforcement measures, offload their cargo, and resume fishing without returning to port,” explains Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies and one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s one way that illegal fish are laundered into the seafood market.”

“More significantly, transshipment at-sea can facilitate trafficking and exploitation of workers who are trapped and abused on fishing vessels because there is simply no authority present to protect those being exploited,” adds Chris Ewell, an NYU undergraduate at the time of the study and the paper’s lead author.

The paper, which appears in the journal Marine Policy, may be downloaded here.

In their study, the researchers focused on the regulation of transshipment, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines as the “act of transferring the catch from one fishing vessel to either another fishing vessel or to a vessel used solely for the carriage of cargo.”

Read the full story at NYU

MASSACHUSETTS: Poached fish served up by Gloucester food pantry

April 11, 2017 — About a half-dozen times a year, the folks at The Open Door in Gloucester receive a phone call — or even a knock on their Emerson Avenue door — to see if they’re interested in some donations of fresh seafood.

The offers don’t arrive from entrepreneurial fishermen or someone looking to unload a bunch of seafood off the books.

The offers come from the Environmental Police. And the answer is almost uniformly yes.

“Generally, they call, but sometimes they just show up,” said Julie LaFontaine, The Open Door’s executive director. “Our mission is to alleviate the impact of hunger in our community, so when we have the opportunity of receiving free food — especially something as healthy and beneficial as locally caught, fresh seafood, we take it and then we distribute it through our food pantry.”

The Environmental Police have made a practice of donating seized seafood — or seafood unable to be returned to the water — to social service agencies, such as food pantries, shelters, veterans organizations and the like.

“It something that we’ve been doing since before I even came on the force and something that we do all the time, distributing this fresh seafood in communities up and down the coast,” said Environmental Police Maj. Patrick Moran, who is in his 33rd year on the force. “Mostly, it’s donations of fresh fin fish.”

But not always.

In late March, the Environmental Police donated dozens of lobsters to the Veterans Transition House in New Bedford, which serves homeless and at-risk veterans and their families in the southeastern region of the state.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Officials cracking down on poaching of a slippery, squiggly and valuable commodity — baby eels

April 10, 2017 — A massive, years-long undercover operation has led to arrests and guilty pleas up and down the East Coast of poachers and traffickers who dealt in a slippery, squiggly and valuable commodity: baby eels.

William Sheldon, who runs one of the biggest and oldest eel businesses in Maine, might be forced to give up his truck with the license plate “EELWGN.” In federal court in Virginia this month, a Brooklyn seafood dealer named Tommy Zhou became the eleventh person to plead guilty to eel trafficking as part of the sweeping federal investigation known as “Operation Broken Glass.” Zhou declined to comment.

“I’m kind of chuckling now as more and more faces show up in the paper,” said Tim Sheehan, who runs a seafood company so far north in Maine it’s nearly in Canada. “We could be the last dealer standing.”

Maine is home to the only major legal market in the United States for baby eels, known as glass eels or elvers. (There is also a small market in South Carolina.) But sky-high prices for the little wrigglers has led to widespread poaching, as elvers caught farther south are smuggled north. Tracking illegal eels is a challenge.

“Fishermen can sell eels to dealers who can then sell eel to anybody,” said Toni Kerns, director of the Interstate Fisheries Management Program, a part of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The commission is a coastal-state compact that sets eel regulations.

Read the full story at The Washington Post