Saving Seafood

Judge Upholds Rule Allowing More Hawaii Bigeye Tuna Fishing

December 27, 2015 — HONOLULU (AP) — A federal judge has ruled longline fishermen in Hawaii may continue catching more bigeye tuna, or ahi, than the maximum set by international regulators.

U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi on Wednesday issued the ruling rejecting environmental groups’ claims that the extra fishing is illegal.

The opinion came just in time for the year-end holidays when Hawaii consumers crowd stores to buy ahi sashimi for Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. A ruling adverse to the fishermen had the potential to shut down or curtail the Hawaii fishery for the rest of the calendar year.

Michael Tosatto, the Pacific Islands regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said Thursday the agency is happy the judge found the rules lawful.

“I think we’re just pleased that the fishery remains on a stable footing without the need for further action,” Tosatto said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CNS News

Global Supermarkets Selling Shrimp Peeled by Slaves

December 13, 2015 — SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand (AP) — Every morning at 2 a.m., they heard a kick on the door and a threat: Get up or get beaten. For the next 16 hours, No. 31 and his wife stood in the factory that owned them with their aching hands in ice water. They ripped the guts, heads, tails and shells off shrimp bound for overseas markets, including grocery stores and all-you-can-eat buffets across the United States.

After being sold to the Gig Peeling Factory, they were at the mercy of their Thai bosses, trapped with nearly 100 other Burmese migrants. Children worked alongside them, including a girl so tiny she had to stand on a stool to reach the peeling table. Some had been there for months, even years, getting little or no pay. Always, someone was watching.

No names were ever used, only numbers given by their boss — Tin Nyo Win was No. 31.

Pervasive human trafficking has helped turn Thailand into one of the world’s biggest shrimp providers. Despite repeated promises by businesses and government to clean up the country’s $7 billion seafood export industry, an Associated Press investigation has found shrimp peeled by modern-day slaves is reaching the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The problem is fueled by corruption and complicity among police and authorities. Arrests and prosecutions are rare. Raids can end up sending migrants without proper paperwork to jail, while owners go unpunished.

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More than 2,000 trapped fishermen have been freed this year as a result of an ongoing Associated Press investigative series into slavery in the Thai seafood industry. The reports also have led to a dozen arrests, millions of dollars’ worth of seizures and proposals for new federal laws.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

Overfishing is Getting Filleted by Markets

December 9, 2015 — Overfishing is a serious threat to the nearly 200 million people who depend on the world’s oceans for sustenance. After all, nearly one in five people around the world consume fish as their primary source of protein and overfishing has deleterious cascade effects on other marine ecosystems.

Illegal and excessive fishing are to a degree inevitable because oceans, rivers and many lakes are publicly administered. This gives fishermen an incentive to take from them as much as is legally possible. Yet, market-based resource management is offering a concrete solution to this “tragedy of the commons” and has already begun alleviating strains on U.S. fish stocks.

The U.S. economy is intertwined with the fate of the high seas. By conservative estimates, commercial and recreational fishing alone account for 1.3 million jobs and nearly $60 billion in economic activity. Overfishing has pernicious effects on Americans’ livelihoods: commercial anglers can lose out on up to 80 percent of potential revenue when local fish species see drastic population decline, as was the case in New England when cod, flounder, and halibut populations were unexpectedly low in 2009.

With market-based resource management, data from September 2015 show that the total number of wild stocks placed on the “overfishing” watch list has fallen to its all-time lowest level since 1997. Since the 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, annual catch limits (ACLs) have allowed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to reduce the number of overfished U.S. stocks by nearly 75 percent since 2007 alone (from 41 in 2007 to only 10 in 2014). ACLs create total tonnage allotments based on a series of population growth factors specific to certain fish species.

Read the full story at Economics 21

 

Wellfleet, Mass. shellfisherman charged with illegal sales to restaurants

December 2, 2015 — WELLFLEET, Mass. — A Wellfleet man had his state commercial shellfishing license suspended and was charged with 45 violations of state shellfishing regulations after he allegedly was caught selling oysters to at least two Outer Cape restaurants without having a wholesale license.

The evidence also indicates that David Paine, 57, may not have complied with regulations that protect the public from infections from the bacteria Vibrio parahaemolyticus.

Paine was arraigned in Orleans District Court on Monday on violations of state shellfishing regulations between July 2014 and June of this year. His girlfriend, Kristi Johns, 41, who is a co-owner of Paine’s aquaculture grant, was arraigned Oct. 26 on four counts of violating fisheries regulations in arranging for sales of the oysters to The Whitman House in Truro.

Neither Paine nor Johns could be reached for comment. The phone number listed to them has been disconnected.

According to a report by Massachusetts Environmental Police Officer Daniel McGonagle contained in court documents, Paine sold oysters directly to The Whitman House and The Lost Dog Pub in Orleans. McGonagle wrote in his report that on June 22, he and Environmental Police Sgt. Kevin Clayton were notified of a possible oyster violation by a state Department of Public Health inspector who was investigating The Whitman House for allegedly selling striped bass before the season opened and marketing it as pollock.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Statement by U.S. Commissioner Russell F. Smith III at the Conclusion of the 2015 Annual ICCAT Meeting

December 3, 2015 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries: 

This year’s International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) meeting was characterized by an unprecedented level of engagement from a broad range of parties that joined together to promote the sustainable management in ICCAT fisheries. This collaboration is critical to the effective work of ICCAT, and we hope that these relationships will continue to be fostered and strengthened in the future.

Negotiations on amendments to the 1969 ICCAT Convention were advanced to a near-final stage. The amended Convention will reflect modern principles, such as the precautionary and ecosystem approaches to fisheries management, clarify the Commission’s management authority, particularly for sharks, and improve the governance of the Commission.

In keeping with another major U.S. priority, the electronic system for tracking bluefin tuna catch and trade is near completion and is anticipated to be ready for full implementation in the spring of 2016. This should help address and prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and help improve management of the stock by providing ready access to data about catch and trade.

Agreement was reached on the development of harvest control rules and management strategy evaluation as important tools to support future decision-making. This measure details the process by which alternative biological reference points (i.e., threshold and limit biomass levels, and the target fishing mortality rate) will be identified and tested by the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS). North Atlantic albacore will be the first stock; a management objective has been defined and the development of harvest control rules will continue in 2016. The Commission will provide specific input in three areas for individual stocks: (1) management objectives; (2) acceptable levels of probability (e.g., of achieving targets or avoiding limits); and (3) timeframes for ending overfishing and/or rebuilding.

We are disappointed that the Commission did not do more to address overfishing of bigeye tuna despite the clear advice from the SCRS, which called for a reduction in the total allowable catch (TAC) and in the fishing mortality on the smallest juvenile bigeye tuna that are caught in the Gulf of Guinea. Tropical tunas support important U.S. commercial and recreational fisheries. With this in mind, we sought a more comprehensive approach to rebuild the stock with greater certainty, including a lower TAC as well as a longer and larger time/area closure to protect juveniles. Although these positions were rejected by the major players in the fishery, we will continue to manage bigeye tuna responsibly within the United States.

Atlantic-wide TAC levels for overfished stocks of blue marlin and white marlin will remain in effect until new scientific advice is available in 2018. We had hoped to include provisions to require the use of circle hooks to minimize post-release mortality, and related scientific research, but these efforts were rejected.

With respect to sharks, a new measure requires the release of porbeagle sharks encountered alive in ICCAT fisheries and, if catches of porbeagle increase beyond 2014 levels in the future, additional actions will be considered. The United States again proposed to prohibit shark finning at sea and to require sharks that are landed to have fins naturally attached. The number of co-sponsors for this proposal increased substantially, from 12 in 2014 to 30 in 2015, now more than a majority of all ICCAT parties. Despite this groundswell of support, a few parties declared their staunch opposition to this measure, and it was not adopted.

ICCAT invested a significant amount of time and effort to review the compliance of its 50 Contracting Parties with existing obligations, evaluating various reporting requirements as well as conservation and management measures. There was demonstrated improvement in ICCAT parties’ reporting of catch data and other information this year, but there is further work to do to ensure that all parties are in full compliance with all reporting obligations. The United States will continue to push ICCAT and its parties to be forward leaning and to prioritize the implementation of a robust and transparent compliance process.

Read the statement from NOAA online

 

Can the net transform the world’s fishing industries?

November 30, 2015 — Local fishing communities in Indonesia are beset by a multitude of connected challenges, from illegal fishing to declining fish populations to their own personal safety in the country’s turbulent seas.

But a New York based telecoms company called Tone believes mobile network technology can solve these problems by getting fishermen in remote communities connected to the Internet through an initiative called mFish. Scaled up, they believe their model could address the problem of unsustainable and illegal fishing globally, as well as being applied in many other contexts.

“What we’re trying to do is bridge the digital divide,” says Tone’s Chief Marketing Officer Roald Van Wyk. “People assume technology equals connectivity, but a smartphone is no use if you can’t afford the data.” According to Tone, mobile broadband penetration in the developing world is still just 21%, indicating a huge untapped market which they’re hoping to help bring online.

Tone’s business model is to work with local partners to deliver a range of affordable data plans in countries where far fewer people are locked into long term contracts with mobile carriers – what’s known as ‘unbundling.’ The idea is that consumers get access to various content packages via channels on the Tone platform, some of which are co-branded with local companies to make them affordable. Tone will reinvest 20% of profits into social and environmental initiatives through its foundation.

Read the full story at The Guardian

 

To catch a fishing thief, SkyTruth uses data from the air, land and sea

November 24, 2015 — No one knows how much illegal fishing goes on in the oceans. They’re too vast to patrol. But a small nonprofit is helping governments track down seafood pirates by using powerful software, digital maps and publicly available data.

That nonprofit, SkyTruth, is led by a 52-year-old geologist named John Amos. It has fewer than a dozen employees and operates out of rural Shepherdstown, West Virginia – population: 2,140. Yet last spring, SkyTruth used its data to help the government of the Pacific island nation Palau track down a Taiwanese fishing ship whose holds were filled with illegally caught tuna and shark fins.

“Busting the bad guys is sexy,” says Amos, but he has bigger things in mind. In partnership with Google and Oceana, an international conservation and advocacy group, SkyTruth is building Global Fishing Watch, a website that allows the public to track fishing activities and outlaws and enable seafood purveyors to assure that the fish they are buying comes from sustainable fisheries. It also plans to provide data to researchers.

Meantime, SkyTruth does pathbreaking work around oil spills, mountaintop coal mining and hydraulic fracturing – for example, tracking pollution from unconventional oil and gas drilling, and using crowdsourcing to track the growth of fracking.

SkyTruth was among the nonprofits and companies showcased 18 November at Wired in the Wild: Can technology save the planet?, a daylong conference in Washington DC organized by World Wildlife Fund to highlight ways in which technology can support conservation. Participants heard about deploying drones to survey wildlife, attaching sensors to rhinos to help identify poachers and using submersibles to take marine biologists deep below the surface of the oceans to study coral.

Read the full story at The Guardian

 

Nestle admits Thai seafood suppliers abuse workers, promises to pursue solutions aggressively

November 23, 2015 — WASHINGTON (AP) — Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA’s supply chains.

The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestle SA itself, which in an act of self-policing announced the conclusions of its yearlong internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.

Nestle SA, among the biggest food companies in the world, launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports from news outlets and nongovernmental organizations tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their shrimp, prawns and Purina brand pet foods. Its findings echo those of The Associated Press in reports this year on slavery in the seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen.

The laborers come from Thailand’s much poorer neighbors Myanmar and Cambodia. Brokers illegally charge them fees to get jobs, trapping them into working on fishing vessels and at ports, mills and seafood farms in Thailand to pay back more money than they can ever earn.

“Sometimes, the net is too heavy and workers get pulled into the water and just disappear. When someone dies, he gets thrown into the water,” one Burmese worker told the nonprofit organization Verite commissioned by Nestle.

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

Voices of Alaska: Unified effort in Congress protects Alaska’s seafood powerhouse

November 20, 2015 — Alaska is our nation’s seafood powerhouse. With nine of our country’s top twenty fishing ports by volume, we understand the vital role our seafood industry has played in our communities in the past, how important it is now, and how central the industry will be in the future. Protecting and enhancing Alaska’s fisheries is one of the top priorities of our delegation.

That’s why we were particularly pleased to have passed bipartisan legislation to help protect and enhance our fishing industry. H.R. 477, the Illegal, Unregulated and Underreported (IUU) Fishing Enforcement Act of 2015, increases enforcement capabilities for U.S. authorities to combat illegal fishing and protect fisheries off the coast of Alaska, and around the world. It was signed into law on November 5, 2015.

At issue is how illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, or “pirate” fishing, is hurting our economy, our fishing communities, our healthy seafood stocks, and our sustainable oceans.

Our country’s fishermen have long been subject to sustainable management-based rules and regulations to ensure the long-term vitality of our species; pirate fishermen are not. These rogue vessels raid our oceans wherever, whenever, and however they please. Globally, legal fishing operations lose an estimated $10 to $23 billion a year to pirate fishing. Here at home, the Alaska King Crab fishery alone is estimated to have lost more than $550 million in the past 14 years.

Read the full opinion piece at Peninsula Clarion

 

President Obama signs new IUU fishing law

November 8, 2015 — Pirate fishing legislation signed into law by President Obama on Nov. 5 opens access to better protection for domestic fishermen from illegal competition from illegally harvested fish entering U.S. ports and markets.

A statement issued from the White House said that the United States will now join in a global effort to ratify and implement the Port State Measures Agreement, which will prevent vessels carrying fish caught illegally from entering American ports, keep illegal product out of domestic markets and demonstrate America’s continued leadership in the global fight against IUU fishing.

Of the 25 countries needed for the treaty to enter into force, more than half have signed and the U.S. will continue to work closely with its partners around the world to finalize this treaty, the statement said.

President Obama signed H.R. 774, the Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Enforcement Act of 2015, in the wake of congressional approval of the legislation several years in the making.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Oct. 23 hailed the U.S. Senate’s unanimous approval of the bill, saying that he would continue to urge them to join the Port State Measures Agreement as well. 
”And because we know that no single nation can possibly police the entire sea, we’ll also begin to implement Sea Scout, an initiative I announced earlier this month at the Our Ocean conference in Chile,” he said.

“Sea Scout is aimed at enhancing global coordination, information sharing, and ultimately enforcement on IUU fishing from pole to pole and across the equator, to help ensure that no patch of it is beyond the law.”

Read the full story at The Cordova Times